Andy Warhol Consumer Research

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ANDY WARHOL: CONSUMER RESEARCHER

ABSTRACT -

This paper "breaks out of the box" by discussing the work of the artist Andy Warhol as a form of consumer research. The paper asserts that Warhol’s career- successful artist, experimental filmmaker, prolific writer and diarist, celebrity-offers insights into consumer culture that reinforces, expands, and illuminates aspects of traditional consumer research. Through illustrations, criticism, and interpretation, five specific areas of consumer research that Warhol’s work might contribute to are introduced: brand equity; clothing, fashion and beauty; imagery; packaging; and self-concept. This project joins recent efforts by consumer researchers to include humanities based methods such as literary criticism and semiotics into the consumer researcher’s toolbox.

I love America and these are some comments on it. The image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but important symbols that sustain us.

- Warhol 1985, p. 78

Humanities based research has changed the parameters of consumer research. Groundbreaking applications of semiotics (Mick 1986), literary theory (Stern 1988; 1989) postmodernism (Firat and Venkatesh 1995), history (Jones and Monieson 1990), visual studies (Scott 1994)to- name a few-have broadened the consumer researcher’s alette, adding useful tools to an interdisciplinary paintbox. Belk proposes that art offers a useful medium to study consumption-citing literature, comics, painting, photography, etc., as valuable records of materialism and non-traditional sources of data for consumer researchers (Belk, 1986). Art and science do differ in their methods, biases, and purposes, Belk insists, but there is much more overlap
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