Myriam’s ‘adverteasing’: on the performative power of marketing promises

Abstract

In most publications, ‘performativity’ has become synonymous with terms like ‘impact’, ‘effect’ and ‘transformation’. As a result, recent contributions tend to focus on what various marketing ideas and frameworks are supposed to do to real markets, without caring much for the linguistic properties of these concepts. This article aims at questioning this bias by studying the linguistic and practical circumstances under which marketing knowledge and discourse can become performative. It proposes to do so through a detailed study of Myriam, a highly famous French teaser advertisement where a pretty young woman in a bikini standing on a beach promises: ‘On September 2, I remove the top’, and then, on September 2, now topless, declares: ‘On September 4, I remove the bottom’. The careful analysis of this case shows that the performativity of marketing concepts and messages rests on a prodigious combination of words and objects, co-creation schemes and curiosity.

Keywords:

• teasing
• advertising
• marketing
• performativity
• performation
• promises

Notes

¹ Barnesian performativity is a performativity in which ‘an aspect of economics is used in economic practice, its use has effects, and among those effects is to alter economic processes so as to make them more like their depiction by economics’ (MacKenzie, 2006, p. 41).

² This article is a performativity-oriented analysis of a case presented in a previous article (Cochoy, 2011a) and book focussing on curiosity (Cochoy, 2011b). A first version of this article was presented at the APROS conference, Re-covering organizations, Hitotshubashi University, Tokyo, 15–17 February 2013.

³ By ‘felicity conditions’, the pragmatist tradition designates the external prerequisites needed for a speech act to be performed (for instance, an order has a better chance of being obeyed if the one who utters it is entitled to do so and believes that the action should be done, and if the receiver has the ability and obligation to follow the order).

⁴ Since then, contrasted evolutions have occurred: gender concerns grew in marketing as well as in society, even if the provocations of advertisers never stopped but rather proliferated and sometimes went even further: see the more and more explicit representation of sexual situations supported in the next decades by the ads of even the most prestigious companies; for instance Christian Dior’s ‘porno-chic’ (Manceau & Tissier-Desbordes, 2006).

⁵ According to Kenneth Arrow (1963), ‘moral hazard’ in economics designates the opportunistic behaviour that involves taking advantage of the incompleteness of contracts (e.g., taking more risks after subscribing to an insurance scheme).

⁶ See http://lescopainsd-abord.over-blog.com/article-1981-le-strip-teasing-culte-de-myriam-par-didile-81840421.html; http://www.davidbarthe.fr/demain-jenleve-le-bas-en-version-realite-augmentee; etc.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Franck Cochoy

Franck Cochoy is Professor of sociology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and member of the CERTOP-CNRS, France. His research is focused on the different mediations that frame the relation between supply and demand and the performativity of marketing and market devices. His most recent publications in English appeared in Theory, Culture and Society, Marketing Theory and the Journal of Cultural Economy and Organization. With Martin Giraudeau and Liz McFall, he recently edited The Limits of Performativity: Politics of the Modern Economy, Abingdon, Routledge (reprint as book of a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy).