Marketing in a Postmodern World

European Journal of Marketing 29,1 40
Received September 1993 Revised May 1994

Marketing in a postmodern world
A. Fuat Fırat
Arizona State University West, Phoenix, Arizona, USA,

Nikhilesh Dholakia
University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island, USA, and

Alladi Venkatesh
Graduate School of Management, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California, USA
This article begins with the premiss that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation from the modern to the postmodern era. Although this is a premiss and therefore need not be dwelt on at length, we believe a short introduction to the concept of postmodernity is necessary because of the intellectual controversy surrounding it and the relatively sparse discussion of postmodernity in marketing and business literatures (for exceptions see[1,2]). The bulk of this article, however, focuses on the relationship between marketing and postmodernity. The next section, entitled “The postmodern age”, discusses the major characteristics of postmodernity, especially from the perspective of those interested in marketing and consumption phenomena. This is followed by a section entitled “Marketing and modernity”, which explores some of the tensions that arise because marketing practice has become postmodern while marketing theory continues to be developed in a modernist mode. The final section, entitled “Marketing and postmodernity”, focuses on the growing nexus – indeed an identity – between these two phenomena and explores some themes that characterize the nature of postmodern marketing. The postmodern age Modernism versus postmodernism Possibly the main defining difference between modernism and postmodernism is postmodernism’s rejection of the modernist idea that human social experience has fundamental “real” bases. To the contrary, postmodernism posits that social experience is an interplay of myths that produce regimes of truth[3-6]. According to postmodernism, many of the fundamental modernist

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