Analysis Of Charles Addams Managing For Media Anarchy

Charles Addams once said, "What is normal for the spider, is chaos for the fly," and in their article "Managing for Media Anarchy: A Corporate Marketing Perspective," authors Margaret Bruce and Michael R. Solomon become one with the concept of the fly, viewing a world of processes and hierarchies as chaos. Latched onto the idea that in the modern world of "Web 2.0" corporations have little control over their public image, and evidence that their attempts to exert control often alienate their consumers, they seek to impose the order of the marketing world onto a sociological concept. Authored by two marketing professors, it is readily evident that the article lacks valuable insights from other fields that would have allowed them to expand

The article lacks interdisciplinary perspective and misapplies the societal concept of anarchy to a complex system due to this blind spot, though it does effectively explain certain aspects of the system and how they work in conjunction with a classic marketing campaign. The first idea that the article delves into is the concept of "horizontal organization" and in this argument the author's misapplication of the word "anarchy" becomes readily apparent. They define the "old" marketing system as one of "vertical organization" in which information "flows vertically from big companies or governments down to the people," (Bruce 307) and contrasts it with that of "horizontal organization, in which, " ...each of us communicates with countless others horizontally as well by a mere click on a keypad," (Bruce 307). Given that they have applied the term "anarchy," which

The article did not encourage any marketing techniques that are explicitly illegal, but it did reference several that are in a gray ethical era, like data mining individuals' online habits, and it discussed a business' need to plug any "leaks" that form, which I understood to be a reference to the publicity dumpster fire referenced earlier in the article, surrounding the BP Oil Spill and how it negatively impacted other companies like Chevron. It also discussed how " Members of a fandom are “the holy grail” to a company that searches for the highly (perhaps even obsessively) involved consumer," (Bruce 311). Though at a very tangible level it is impossible to sell a product to a consumer without having some grasp on psychology, trends, and what appeals to them, each of these proposed methods of appealing to the consumer seems to fall into a gray area of ethics concerning privacy, corporate cover-ups and exploitation of impressionable