Marketing meets Da Vinci and Stephen Meets Dan in The Marketing Code

Citation

Belk, R. (2007), "Marketing meets Da Vinci and Stephen Meets Dan in The Marketing Code", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 41 No. 1/2, pp. 225-227. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090560710718201

Those familiar with Stephen Brown's previous work know that he is marketing's literary laureate, combining as he does the devilishness of an Irish raconteur and the cleverness of a scholarly trickster. But with this book he has created an entirely new genre: the marketing mystery thriller. Taking off from The Da Vinci Code, Stephen Brown crafts a novel that shows where Dan Brown got it wrong. The secret of the Holy Grail is not about a chalice or the body of Mary Magdalene; it is about marketing! If Dan Brown was sacrilegious about Christian beliefs and Bible stories, Stephen Brown is every bit as sacrilegious about marketing's sacred tenets, including our holy of holies, the marketing concept. Instead of hewing to marketing catechism, The Marketing Code sees marketing as being all about prestidigitation, stage magic, and misdirection. This is not a condemnation however. As one of the book's intriguing, if thinly developed, characters explains in chapter 30, “Marketing men misdirect consumers to a better world, an impossible world, a world that people want to believe in and belong to.” True to the author's books on post‐modern marketing, this is a PoMo world not unlike the unicorn‐laden woods in Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland at the End of the Universe.

There is nevertheless a dark side to the protectors of these marketing secrets. As in The Da Vinci Code, multiple murders, mutilations, and conspiracies move the plot of The Marketing Code. A series of clues leads the central character, a young marketing professor, on a chase that culminates in the professor's imminent ritual torture and execution. As a line in the book suggests, sometimes you have to kill to make a killing.

The two code novels share some of the same locations, but the marketing volume moves through more diverse habitats including Las Vegas, Northwestern University, Northern Ireland, and Hustler Business School (HBS), named after Larry Flynt's own literary effort. The school is planning an executive education center in a revamped former Victorian prison, complete with breakout rooms. HBS itself is a glass‐walled architectural fancy modeled after the RMS Titanic and built in the former Belfast shipyard that launched the ill‐fated ship. There the lead character, Simon Magill, meets a love interest named May Day who promptly shags Simon, leads him to the farcically and improbably named head of a paramilitary organization, King Billy, and directs him to a female Philip Kotler named Kate Phillips. Management consultants are dubbed the Kotler Nostra. Simon stays in the Malmaison Hotel in Belfast. And HBS turns out to be fond of acronyms like vastly overpaid college administrators, legislators, and supervisors (VOCALS) and dull, routine university management stuff (DRUMS). As such clever word play and absurdity suggest there is an abundance of wit and comedy interwoven with the mystery here. And as many of us have grown to expect in Stephen Brown's writings, there is ample punning, satire, allusion, alliteration, and double entendre in The Marketing Code. Who would not love the consulting firm partners Chang and Eng? Could Simon have been blessed with better parents than Adam Magill and Eve O'Grady who once ministered to the churchgoers in the community of Eden? And who would not be frightened by thugs named Mickey the Minger McGuire and Dragobert the Drag Queen Quinn?

Not only does Stephen Brown draw amply on Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, he even appropriates Dan Brown as an alleged brother and a character in The Marketing Code. Although the mega‐marketing of The Da Vinci Code has been analyzed in a recent chapter by Kent Drummond (in Stephen Brown's edited volume, Consuming Books), the literary license of fiction allows a more eviscerating critique in the present book. The Marketing Code is compelling enough to almost make this reviewer forgive its portrayal of a pedantic “ageing tenured professor with a ponytail.”

So how should we regard Brown's foray into fiction? In an author's note at the end of the book, he calls it “a marketing text written as a novel.” He also acknowledges that several of the academic ideas discussed in the book draw on his own research and publications. While these are often interesting ideas and the premise that the marketing concept is flawed is certainly correct, the book is better regarded as wonderfully entertaining fiction rather than as pedagogy. Students and scholars of marketing will find it delightful, regardless of their prior familiarity with Dan Brown's famous book. It is a well‐written mystery that will keep readers turning pages even if they are not familiar with marketing academia. But those with some academic and local knowledge will smile and chuckle more often at some of the book's discipline‐related and place‐based allusions and wit. Hopefully it will inspire other marketing academics to also use the freedom of fiction to more fully express ourselves. We have a few poets in our midst. Chances are there are a few more novelists and feature filmmakers waiting in the wings as well.

There have been a number of novels written recently that focus on various aspects of marketing and consumption, including Alex Shakar's Savage Girl, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, and Don DeLillo's White Noise. But none of these are written by an insider – a marketing academic. As a result, Stephen Brown is able to give us the quantum theory of branding, tripping point theory, and the Celtic Marketing Concept. All are drawn from the author's own non‐fiction publications. The quantum theory of branding, for example, contends that the most successful brands combine two mutually incompatible propositions (a bit like Shakar's paradessence) and that consumers' feelings about these brands are also contradictory. Thus Starbucks gets premium prices for a commodity while globalization protestors throw stones at the coffee retailer's shop windows and then relax with a Frappuccino Grande. What is more, we are also given tantalizing tidbits like side stories about Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan, a line about “a man who's so in touch with his feminine side that he's been accused of sexual self harassment,” and reflections on the closure of the Titanic Bar and Grill suggesting that it might yet be raised or that it went down to the strains of Nearer my Cod to Thee. This is Stephen Brown at his best. Do not miss it.