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Antibusiness movies and folk marketing.

Article Excerpt
We observe a disproportional number of movies that vividly portray business and businesspeople with an unfavorable bias, often depicting ordinary business activity as zero-sum and sometimes depicting it as callous, immoral, and criminal. These movies also often aggrevate existing economic misconceptions that might include what we could call folk marketing. Folk marketing includes false ideas, such as marketing being a zero-sum game (rather than adding value), marketing research being intrusive clandestine surveillance (rather than advocating the buy viewpoint), and secrecy about market data being evidence of nefarious activities (rather than simply hiding strategies from competitors). Marketing scholars need to combat vigorously these false ideas. Moreover, when advertisements sponsor movies, it might be necessary to consider the conjoined movie content and the consistency of that content with the desired brand image.

Key words: antibusiness movies; motion pictures; films; motion picture industry; bias; villains; perceptions of businesspeople

An Antibusiness Bias in Movies

Eliashberg et al. (2006) provide an excellent summary of a stream of business research that studies the motion picture industry or business research that is relevant to the study of motion picture industry. Indeed, many recent articles on this interesting topic include Krider et al. (2005), Ainslie et al. (2005), Godes and Mayzlin (2004), Tyagi (2004), and Sun et al. (2004). However, ironically, motion pictures also study business and provide there own perception of businesspeople. Moreover, the depiction of business and businesspeople in motion pictures might have as great an influence on public perceptions of business as all of our research combined.

We who teach marketing and business often preach the virtues, and the necessity, of satisfying consumer wants and the positive role of business toward that end. In contrast, the motion picture industry often seems to convey a diametric image. Senter and Overell (2001) provide numerous examples of films casting businessmen as the nefarious villains, the exemplar perhaps being the fictional character Gordon Gekko, in Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street (Arsenault 1998). There are myriad other examples including a recent film in which crazed movie business people somehow find profit by destroying life in Australia (Seligrnan 2000).

Business executives seem to be aware of their negative image in the media. A Harris poll found that 70% of responding business executives believed that television coverage was antibusiness (Berry 1984). Moreover, businesses receiving negative news coverage rarely had an opportunity to respond (Berry 1984). An old study (Theberge 1981) conducted by the Washington-based Media Institute carefully recorded the depiction of businesspeople in 200 episodes of 50 prime time U.S. TV programs. The study found that 55% of businesspeople (usually men) commit illegal acts, ranging from fraud to murder; 45% of all so-called business activities on TV were portrayed as illegal; and only 3% of TV businesses engage in socially or economically productive behavior. Subsequent analysis generally reported similar results. For example, a subsequent documentary reported that "The businessmen ... portrayed on TV ... make an awful lot of money, without ever having to ... produce useful products ..." they just "lie, steal, cheat, blackmail, even murder" (e.g., Bayles 1987, p. 20). As Stein (1997) observed, if it is an adventure movie, the businessmen are usually murderers and gangsters, while the gangsters were usually businessmen.

Thomas and LeShay (1992) later argued that television stigmatizes wealth, rather than business. That study concluded that screenwriters target businesspeople only because popular culture resents the wealthy, and the public often associates businesspeople with wealth. However, subsequent analysis (Lichter et al. 1997) rejects that argument, based on a content analysis of all occupations depicted in 30 television seasons. This study found a negative portrayal of 60% of business characters when they...