Speaker: Prof Dr Chris Baumann, Macquarie University
Title: Elvis Presley as a necro-marketing phenomenon - an attempt at an explanation
Date: Thursday, 14 March 2024
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Venue: Allan Barton Forum, Level 2, CBE Building 26C
Toni Eagar is the host of this visit
ABSTRACT
There is a myriad of investigations into the life and works of Elvis Presley from music, entertainment and cultural perspectives. Yet surprisingly, there is no scholarly attempt to explain the entertainer’s impact over five decades on a global scale from a marketing perspective, and little scholarly analysis of the concept of necro-marketing. We develop insights into consumer comments of 13,000 Elvis Presley YouTube videos via sentiment and lexical analyses. Key themes emerging from that investigation provide the consumer perspective as the first lens of this research. Theory emerging from the analysis will present a proposed framework to explain a fan co-created Elvis brand that may have applicability to other celebrities. That new framework will provide theoretical implications for necro-marketing/branding.
BIO
Dr Chris Baumann is a Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and a Visiting Professor at Seoul National University (SNU) in Korea and Osaka University in Japan. His research is on competitiveness, where he co-introduced brand competitiveness and competitive productivity, as well as on customer loyalty (share of wallet) and cross-cultural and strategic management (East Asian wisdom). His work on services marketing has a focus on managing the frontlines (resilience, ethnicity preferences). In music and online marketing, he focuses on the role of necro-marketing. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Brand Management, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Journal of Strategic Marketing and International Journal of Hospitality Management, among others. Chris has won outstanding paper, reviewer, and teaching awards and serves on the review board of FT50 and other top-ranked journals.