Journal of Marketing Management Special Issue Call for Papers

Celebrity Convergence & Transformation

Guest Editors: Dr Paul Hewer, University of Strathclyde; Professor Douglas Brownlie, University of Stirling; Dr Finola Kerrigan, King’s College London.

Deadline for Submission: 17 March 2014

This special issue seeks to invigorate the turn to identity work as market practice through mobilising interpenetrating discourses of celebrity, media brands and convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006). We invite papers which seek to push and contest contemporary understandings of celebrity within marketing beyond the staple repertoire of celebrity endorsement and brand positioning (Erdogan, 1999; Keller, 2008). We encourage papers which problematize celebrity and its various technologies of glamour and affect, to theorize celebrities as market making and shaping devices. For as Marketing Week no less recently proclaimed: "The old model of celebrity endorsement is dead." (Chahal, 2013).

The media spectacle of celebrity and its seductive performativity makes for compulsion, captivation and fascination. Celebrity culture materializes and reorganizes mediatized markets and populates the lifeworld with social objects of adoration and worship, energizing the libidinal economy. When it comes to making capital out of culture, the cultural figure of the celebrity media brand is a vital constituent in the on-going reinvention of global capitalism (Lash & Lury, 2007): think Warhol (Kerrigan, Brownlie, Hewer & Daza-LeTouze, 2011); think Nigella (Brownlie & Hewer, 2009; 2011); think Angelina Jolie, Aishwarya Rai, Lady Gaga, Oprah, Sammi Cheng or Gatsby, all media commodities among other commodities in the media environment.

Celebrity culture fashions and refashions news. As market actors (Araujo et al., 2010; Geiger & Finch, 2009) celebrities remediatize markets and market practices through identity politics and the social media platforms of convergence and participation they enliven. For as Kermit the Frog extolled: "What’s so amazing that keeps us Star gazing. What do we think we might see?". Mole (2008) in writing of the formation of Lord Byron’s branded persona speaks of such celebrity apparatus as cultural work, where the (brand) name, becomes a "guarantor of certain marketable qualities and connotations" (2008, p.351): a commercial and cultural asset in other words, through which markets and market practice are remade and transformed. We invite contributions which share our fascination with unpacking celebrity and its multiple forms of appeal and attraction.[Read More at the full Call for Papers]

For the full Call for Papers and details about how to submit visit the journal CFP webpage:

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rjmm20&page=paper

For more details about the Journal of Marketing Management visit the main journal webpage:

http://www.tandfonline.co.uk/rjmm

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