Purpose – Simon Cowell, the impresario behind The X Factor , a popular television talent show, has often been compared to P.T. Barnum, the legendary nineteenth century showman. This paper aims to examine the alleged parallels in detail and attempts to assess this “Barnum reborn” argument....

Purpose – In “There's a scholar born every minute”, the author aims to explain the background to Brown and Hackley's co‐authored paper, “The greatest showman on earth”, and respond to the comments of Richardson and Tadajewski. Design/methodology/approach – The major concerns of the...

Purpose – Dark marketing is the “the application or adaptation of marketing principles and practices to domains of death, destruction and the ostensibly reprehensible”. This paper examines the nature, character and extent of dark marketing, noting that it is made manifest in manifold...

Provides an introduction to the Special Issue by discussing the nature of marketing science in a postmodern world. Argues that science needs marketing more than marketing needs science. (Look folks, I didn’t want to include a review of my own book, but the regular journal editor insisted ‐...

States that numerous commentators have contended that we live in degenerate, degraded, decadent and soon‐to‐be discontinued times. Arguably a manifestation of “pre‐millennial tension”, this eschatological world‐view seems to be shared by many marketing theorists, for whom the end of...

Purpose – Collaboration is the norm in marketing and consumer research, yet the dynamics of academic cooperation are poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to probe the sociology of collaboration within marketing scholarship by means of a detailed case study of the seminal consumer...

A crisis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , is “a decisive moment”, “a turning point”, “a time of great difficulty”. If this is the case, then marketing cannot possibly be in crisis. Crises are temporary states of heightened anxiety, whereas marketing is in a...