Right now we have several assignments in school concerning international marketing and it’s interesting. But what’s more interesting is that the teachers stopped updating their lectures circa 1979 and it’s quite amusing listening to theories about how the world is becoming one target audience with examples like “they play football in Indonesia now.” As their views were shaped while they were still building the Berlin wall, they make no difference between cultural globalisation and economic globalisation and I think that this is where the real problem lies, the economical is a fact and has been dealt with, the cultural is an ongoing discourse.
Standardised marketing is relevant from a postcolonial and a postmodern perspective, but what we’re taught is solely based on the idea that it’s cost effective to do one advert for the world rather than a hundred different for individual countries. Our teachers base their points on TV adverts (as the 70’s said it would be the one medium to rule them all) because it means adaptation of the campaigns only when it comes to media planning. They would be of the opinion that to reach all teenagers in the world, all you have to do is run an ad between music films on MTV. “They’re of the same culture.” Sorted.
Or not, postmodernity brought with it the concept they build their limited theories on, but it also brought with it a complexity that is not in any way cost effective. And it never really explained anything as much as it reacted to things. Broadly we can probably agree on that the problem with the standardised/adaptation debate is that there’s no theory to relate to, and certainly not a postmodern theory. The cultural transgression of borders is manifested with Mexican food available in music festivals and exchange students with backpacks, not in a definable global youth culture. Postmodernism can’t define the cultures it’s creating, merely state that new cultures inevitably will be created. Marketing has to look for new theories to define modern target audiences.
The other week, I came across an article on PSFK regarding the Tate Triennal and its theme Altermodernism, a new paradigm created by its curator Nicolas Bourriau that is trying to catch what comes after postmodernism. The manifest on the Turner Prize website is written to confuse, but there’s still important points made:
The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.
Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.
Borriau explains it as art with a global language, developed form postmodernism’s idea of origin-specific and identity based art, and a development of culture reacting to the world as one place from an unspecific place. As he defines altermodernism as something that tries to catch what is going on in the world right now, something that tries to make sense of “a maze” it’s not the platform to build any marketing concepts on, but it takes a step forward in trying to explore what is happening rather than explaining what will happen/has happened.
Laura Cumming at The Observer doubts that this will be a new movement (and is probably very right) but explains the theory of altermodernism with a parallel to the semantic web.
You might take the worldwide web as a model and think in terms of hyperlinks, continuous updates and cultural hybrids.
The web is also where we see a global culture develop today, not on TV. The internet has few borders, except for the censorship in some countries and it’s built and developed by its users and is therefor a constant development of culture and communication reflecting needs. Seeing how culture develops online, where borders are blurry, can possibly tell us something about how culture will develop offline.