ABSTRACT
In the light of the recent proliferation of interest in videographic methods in marketing and consumer research, we wish to make a call for thinking critically about the medium. In this article, we challenge traditional means of semiotic analysis and consider contexts outside aesthetic symbolism that take into account wider agencements of videographic inquiry. We sensitise thinking about videographic production to include a broad scope of influence beyond production and spectatorship. By positing a mode of desiring relationalities in ‘semiocapitalist’ markets, and through the illustrative example of pop-music videos, we show how videography not only produces symbols, but also has the tendency to discipline the viewer into particular subjective positions. We hope to add to the conceptual toolkit of aspiring video scholars and encourage them to be increasingly critical and reflexive about their potential impact.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We have chosen to use ‘agencement’ to stay closer to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s original concept and to highlight the agentic relationality and the intertwined nature of all forces in such emergent events, rather than ‘assemblage’, which connotes a more technical notion designating an arrangement of objects (see Phillips, Citation2006).
2. ScHoolboy Q – THat Part ft. Kanye West (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ_DHRI-Xp0).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joel Hietanen
Joel Hietanen is Visiting Assistant Professor at Aalto University School of Business and Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. His topics of interest include consumer ethnography, particularly from the perspective of video-based criticism of representation.
Mikael Andéhn
Mikael Andéhn is Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. His primary interest includes the commercial relevance of place, with contributions to date spanning consumer behaviour, international marketing, brands, tourism and critical marketing and management studies.