Tribal Marketing: a Latin Deconstruction of a Northern Construction

This paper presents an alternative, 'Latin', characterization of postmodernity. Here the urge is not to celebrate freedom from social constraints, but to re-establish social embeddedness. The citizen of postmodernity is less interested in the objects of consumption than in the social links and identities that come from them. This Latin view holds that people like to gather tohether in tribes and such social, proximate communities are more affective and influential on people's behaviour than either marketing institutions or other 'formal' cultural authorities. There is also an element of resistance and reappropriation to the acts of being, gathering and experiencing together. This view of the shared experience of tribes sets it apart from both Northern notions of one-to-one relationship and atomistic markets. On this Latin view, the effective marketing of the postmodern era is not to accept and exploit consumers in their contemporary individualization, as Northern approaches might. Rather the future of marketing is in offering a renewed sense of community. Marketing becomes tribal marketing. In a marketing profession vigorously courting redefinition, tribal marketing is by no means just another "flash in the pan". Now that consumer segmenting has been recognised as little more than wishful thinking, tribal marketing is ready to step into the spot light with a host of new concepts and tools. Will tribal marketing provide a breakthrough and succeed in distilling meaning from the changing patterns of consumer clusters, or will our post-modern consumer societies continue to confond, surprise and baffle marketers ? — 3 — Introduction: A Latin View The Latin view that represents the focal point for this paper makes salient a number of aspects of Relationship Marketing overlooked or neglected in Northern approaches. Our previous investigation (Cova, 1997a) of the so-called Latin School of Marketing (or Societing) provides a basis for a critical approach to a number of areas of Relationship Marketing. The common perspective of the members of the Latin School can be traced out in the following simple manifesto which is clearly embedded in the Mediterranean everyday way of living:-people like to gather together in tribes even-and especially-in the age of individualism;-everyday practices are made of re-appropriation, diversion and distortion of the dominant system of meanings and not only of mere participation to this system. Thus, the Latin approach disputes some of the underlying assumptions of Relationship Marketing. It resists the idea of unvaryingly placing the company at a pole of the …