For more information about Royal Holloway, please see this promotional video. To see a promotional video for the MA Consumption, Markets & Culture see here. To see a promotional video for the Royal Holloway School of Management, click here.

For more information about the Royal Holloway MA Marketing and MA Consumption, Culture & Marketing and the application process see here.

To get an understanding of the unique values that underly the MA Marketing and MA Consumption, Culture & Marketing programme please read these blog posts: Value of Scholarly Values, Importance of Reading and Morris Holbrook and Business Interest in Education.

Tuesday, 18 October 2011

X Factor



I've been telling my students about my favourite TV show of the minute, X Factor, and why it tells us much about current priorities in marketing. The X Factor brand has solved the two key problems of contemporary marketing: 1) how to generate consumer engagement, that is, how to get consumers passionate about the brand so that they want to do stuff with it, and 2) how to generate revenue streams out of that engagement via digital platforms. So the show seems to be fading a bit, 2,00o,000 viewers down on last year and counting- no surprise really, with Simon Cowell absent from the UK version the show just doesn't have quite the liminal resonance it did with Shaman Simon running the process. But for now it remains by far the biggest show on commercial TV in the UK, commanding some £250,000 for a 30 second advertising spot. Here is a link to a pre-print draft of a paper myself, Professor Steven Brown and Dr Amy Tiwsakul have put together explaining how the X Factor brand achieves its unique consumer engagement (by tappinginto our latent need for liminal ritual, as it happens) http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/chris-hackley(bb78fbaf-7641-4f8f-87c0-57dc1b4db16f)/publications.html

and here are some links to the way UK newspapers tried to interpret our research- with varying results (and a D minus to the Sun sub-editor- we never mentioned sacrifice, and there's no institution called London University) ):

The Mirror

http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/tv/2011/10/12/x-factor-uses-cruelty-of-rejection-to-appeal-to-audiences-academics-claim-115875-23484149/

The Sun

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/x_factor/3869326/Simon-Cowells-the-TV-shaman.html

Financial Times (you need to scroll down the page to get this one)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f43ebf70-ef34-11e0-918b-00144feab49a.html#axzz1b98iLt6O

Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2011/oct/13/simon-cowell-high-priest-x-factor

Advertising Age

http://adage.com/article/global-news/understanding-x-factor-simon-cowell-arch-shaman/230402/
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