[ecrea] Standing Out In The Crowd: Competing in the dynamic marketplace of cultural products

Call For Papers
2010 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
Washington, D.C., April 14-18, 2010
(Please excuse cross-posting)

Standing Out In The Crowd: Competing in the dynamic marketplace of
cultural products

Atle Hauge: Eastern Norway Research Institute
Brian J. Hracs: University of Toronto
Doreen Jakob: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Geographers have been endeavoring to understand the complex
relationships between cultural production, consumption, society and
space for some time. In particular, they consider the ways in which
cultural products generate and trade on symbolic value and how
cultural producers draw from and alter the meaning of place. Recently,
however, new technologies, social practices and consumer behavior are
changing these relationships. MP3?s, digital cameras, creative
software and online communities, which facilitate collaboration, file
sharing and consumption, for example, allow an unprecedented volume of
cultural goods and services to be produced and consumed in a
marketplace which is becoming increasingly global. This expansion has
also been accompanied by the general oversupply of cultural products
and the widespread practice of downloading MP3?s, movies and video
games over the Internet illegally. Together these conditions serve to
lower the monetary value of cultural products. As a result of these
market dynamics and intensifying competition cultural producers are
searching for ways to stand out in the crowd.
Contemporary examples demonstrate the innovative and diverse nature of
these competitive strategies. The U.K. band Radiohead, for example,
altered the production process by incorporating input from consumers
into the content and pricing structure of their 2008 album ?In
Rainbows.? Other strategies feature branding and marketing techniques
based on place, collaborations between producers in different
industries such as music, film and fashion, tapping into digital
markets through virtual spaces such as MySpace and YouTube and a host
of experience driven promotional strategies designed to enhance the
symbolic value of cultural products.
Despite this dynamic experimentation the goal of differentiating and
selling products is universal. While geographers have started to
explore some of these strategies, there is still much work to be done
in this area. Therefore, the goal of this session is to examine the
strategies cultural producers are developing and implementing to
compete in the contemporary marketplace in more detail, while paying
particular attention to their spatial dynamics and implications.
We welcome papers from diverse conceptual and empirical perspectives
that address the following and related themes;

?	Analysis of the relationship between technology and space and its
influence on cultural production and consumption
?	Critical studies on the role of marketing and branding within
society in general and cultural industries in particular
?	The economics and spatial dynamics of competition within cultural industries
?	Structures and outcomes of inter and intra sectoral collaborations
?	Comparative studies which look at the ways in which competitive
strategies are different and similar across space, industry and scale.
Those of global firms and indie producers operating in different
countries or markets or cultural and non-cultural industries, for
example.

Above all, this session aims to not only stimulate a forum to
investigate these themes but to establish a basis for future exchange
and collaboration as well.
If interested, please send a title and abstract (250 words) by Friday,
October 23rd 2009 to Doreen Jakob ((djakob /at/ email.unc.edu)).
___________________________________
Doreen Jakob

Visiting Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Department of Communication Studies
Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Research Associate
German Research Foundation (DFG)
Emmy Noether Research Group
Urban Renaissance Mega-Projects
Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin, Germany
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