Heavy stuff, although broken into easily digestible pieces of generally ten pages or less, this book is a compendium of Sidney Levy’s thoughts, teachings, pronouncements, writings, and general contributions to the field of marketing over a half century – you know, the twentieth century, the one we purists know would not be over until 2001.
Levy has been a major contributor to marketing and market research thought since the late 1940s, principally during his 36‐year stint at Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management (he has been chairman of the Department of Marketing at the University of Arizona’s College of Business and Public Administration since 1997 – a title which requires two separate breaths to say). Among his honors are Fellow (and life member) of the Association for Consumer Research; 1988 AMA/Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator; HEC‐University of Montreal “Living legend of marketing”; and Kellogg’s Marketing Department chairman for 12 years. It is this back‐cover data that makes one want to read this book, although the works themselves are enticingly titled (e.g. “Absolute ethics, relatively speaking”, or “Defending the dowager: communication strategies for declining main brands”). As you first encounter the book, you feel when Levy speaks you ought to listen; after a few samplings, you want to listen.
The articles are organized into six topical sections: A Life in the Marketplace; Marketing; Products and Brands; The Symbolic Nature of Marketing; Consumer Analyses and Observations; and Qualitative Methods of Marketing Study. The first is the shortest, containing only two of his articles. “Stalking the amphisbaena” is a latter day (1996) submission to The Journal of Consumer Research, in which Levy was asked to be philosophical and reflective about his craft (the article would not be refereed!). It is a delightful piece. He likens our daily choices about what and how much to consume to the mythical two‐headed animal that could move backward and forward with equal ease. Just so, we consumers choose not only different products from time to time, but different ways in which we use products. He muses about the “family dinner” as it is currently practiced among a range of consumers: from the “I cook dinner every night for my family, because it’s the right thing to do” to the family that converted their kitchen into another office, since they eat out so often. His point is that there is much of the amphisbaena to pursue, in trying to understand individual consumers and in looking for trends to which forward‐looking marketers should attend. The second article is one of Levy’s early works, important primarily as it portends his subsequent brilliance.
The fourth section of the book, “The symbolic nature of marketing”, is absolutely fascinating. This section is by and large a metaphorical excursion into the imagery of branding, copy strategy, and trademarking. In one article, Levy talks about symbols of substance (easily grasped symbols, such as the white lab coat for medicine, science, and hence authority). Symbols of source relate to how products or people are depicted in the medium which is the source of our information (e.g. movement from background to foreground, denoting importance); and symbols of sorcery, the movement of a product without visible causation, attracting our attention and interest. Levy discusses the symbols of class, caste, and lifestyle, familiar to all of us, and how they affect our consumer behavior. He even discusses the public image of government agencies, and how that image affects the public’s willingness (or lack thereof!) to believe said agency can possibly be of any help at all to us.
It is impossible to “review” 54 articles, written over half a century. Every time I select one article of particular interest, I am left guilt‐ridden at omitting another. And that is perhaps the biggest “commercial” I can give for this book. Everything is readable at worst, fascinating at best. This is no college textbook – it is more something that could have been written by Levy with his feet on the windowsill, him looking out the window and contemplating the abstract nature of marketing itself. It is a flight of philosophy, not a manual of how‐to. But if that makes it sound like a coffee table book, amusing to peruse but of no practical reference value, I have misguided you. If the marketing practitioner will only reflect on the insights Levy provides, he or she will see limitless opportunities to apply them to the marketing problem du jour: a new ad campaign, the choice of a celebrity spokesperson, a brand’s positioning, whatever.
My dad used to tell of a man who jumped over the Hudson River. When asked how it was done, he replied that the man ran and ran from Philadelphia to the river’s edge. The listener scoffed, “That’s not such a great jump. Look at the start he had! ” Maybe you and I could produce such wonderful musings if we had had the same half‐century “head start” to compile them. Wait a minute – we have!The difference between Levy and me is that he actually did it, given the same 50 years. Hats off to a great marketing mind!
