Once upon a market dreary: the prescient marketing principles of Edgar Allan Poe

ABSTRACT

An American icon, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is famed for his fiendish tales of fear and trembling, and premature burial. He is less well known as a businessperson, let alone a marketing thought leader. Poe, though, was not only an entrepreneurially inclined self-promoter of genius, but he practised prescient marketing principles that are pertinent to present circumstances. In a world where dark tourism, dead celebrities and disinterred brands loom large, Poe’s principal principles – perversity, poetry, plagiary, plasticity – are prior portents of marketing precepts. Written in an appropriately literary style, this paper shows that dead men do foretell tales. Of markets dreary.

KEYWORDS:

• Macabre marketing
• undead ideas
• literary theory
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Poe’s Ps

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In fairness to literary elitists, they do have a point. Although Dan Brown’s bestsellers have benefitted the tourist trade in Barcelona, Paris, Florence and Rome, among others, few corporations in the hospitality sector look to The Shining for inspiration. Amazon is unlikely to draw much comfort from The Store, James Patterson’s recent conspiracy thriller about an irredeemably evil e-tailing entity that targets its customers in more ways than one. And when it comes to retail mall management, J.G. Ballard’s riot-torn Kingdom Come is rarely read as a best practice guidebook, much less issued to new employees on arrival.

2. Close reading is an analytic procedure pioneered by Edgar Allan Poe (Ljungquist, 1994) and formalised by the so-called ‘New Critics’ in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As the name implies, close reading involves detailed scrutiny of the literary text under consideration. It ignores authorial intention, cultural context, literary history or any other extraneous matter and focusses instead on the poem or story itself, the words on the page. Most of the literary analyses published by marketing scholars either adhere to, or employ variants of, the close reading method. Psychoanalytically-led, Patsiaouras, Fitchett, and Davies (2016) is a notable exception.

3. Perhaps the drollest description of the Ryanair encounter was written by Douglas Coupland (2016), the Canadian novelist-cum-cultural commentator who often expatiates on the mores of late-capitalist consumer society (Generation X, Microserfs, ‘McJobs’, etc.). Tied up in a meeting in Berlin, and having missed the last Lufthansa flight to London, he asks himself, ‘Who else flies to London? The answer: Ryanair. But wait. I’ve never flown with them, and aren’t they the ones where people fly standing up so they can get more people on the plane?’ (287). Later on, after a bit of a boarding debacle, he amusingly muses, ‘Once inside, I’m actually oddly disappointed that the seats aren’t arranged in vertical sarcophagus mode, that would have been cool’ (288). Don’t tell Michael.

4. Although Poe was never reluctant to expropriate others’ ideas – ‘The Raven’ borrowed from Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge and its rhyme scheme was snaffled from Elizabeth Barrett Browning – the Longfellow War was Poe’s own imp of the perverse. Jealous perhaps of Longfellow’s popular success, Edgar not only accused the eminent Harvardian of ‘literary piracy’ but continued the premeditated attack in a series of public comments and rejoinders with a Longfellow aficionado called ‘Outis’. Outis, of course, was himself. Frogpondians, incidentally, referred a frog pond on Boston Common back then.

5. As with the sinking of the Titanic (Brown et al., 2013), countless conspiracy theories surround Poe’s untimely death (Ackroyd, 2009). It has been variously attributed to heart disease, delirium tremens, alcoholic poisoning, nervous prostration, brain congestion, brain lesion, brain tumour, meningeal inflammation, hypothermia, epilepsy, apoplexy and syphilis (Meyers, 1992). Hypoglycemia and homicide have also been posited (as in Matthew Pearl’s melodramatic novel, The Poe Shadow).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Brown

Stephen Brown is engaged in an on-going study of the origins and evolution of ‘authorpreneurship’.

Pauric McGowan

Dr Pauric McGowan is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business Development at the Ulster University Business School. He has, for over two decades worked with and researched owner-managers of entrepreneurial firms in pursuit of their ambitions for growth. He is a Distinguished Business Fellow of the Ulster University in recognition of his work at the interface between the business practitioner community and the University. He is also a Fellow of the Marketing Institute of Ireland, a Fellow of the Higher Education Association and a Fellow of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, (ISBE).