Playing the Changes on the Jazz Metaphor: An Expanded Conceptualization of Music-, Management-, and Marketing-Related Themes

A metaphor based on the nature of jazz as a musical genre in general and on the sociopsychological process of jazz improvisation in particular has frequently surfaced in recent accounts of product innovation, brand positioning, team coordination, and organizational leadership from various areas of research on management and marketing strategy. As typically applied, this "jazz metaphor" appears unnecessarily limited in its scope. In this light, the author suggests a need for refining, extending, and enlarging the jazz metaphor to cover a broader range of music-, management-, and marketing-related themes. Toward this end, the author "plays the changes" on this perspective by developing a typology of jazz musicians based on different kinds of musical offerings and by elaborating this typology to propose a classification of management and marketing styles based on parallels with the jazz metaphor.