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On Curiosity: the Art of Market Seduction MATTERING PRESS Mattering Press is an academic-led Open Access publisher that operates on a not-for-profit basis as a UK registered charity. It is committed to developing new publishing models that can widen the constituency of academic knowledge and provide authors with significant levels of support and feedback. All books are available to download for free or to purchase as hard copies. More at matteringpress.org. The Press’s work has been supported by: Centre for Invention and Social Process (Goldsmiths, University of London), Centre for Mobilities Research (Lancaster University), European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, Hybrid Publishing Lab, infostreams, Institute for Social Futures (Lancaster University), Open Humanities Press, and Tetragon. Making this book Mattering Press is keen to render more visible the unseen processes that go into the production of books. We would like to thank Joe Deville, who acted as the Press’s coordinating editor for this book, Jenn Tomomitsu for the copy-editing, Tetragon for the production and typesetting, Sarah Terry for the proofreading, and Ed Akerboom at infostreams for the website design. Cover Mattering Press thanks Łukasz Dziedzic for Lato, our incomparable cover typeface. It remains one of the best free typefaces available and is released by his foundry tyPoland under the free, libre and open source Open Font License. Cover art by Julien McHardy. ON CURIOSITY The Art of Market Seduction FRANCK COCHOY TRANslated bY JaciARA T. liRA Originally published as De la curiosité: L’art de la séduction marchande © Armand Colin, 2011. This translation © Franck Cochoy, 2016. First published by Mattering Press, Manchester. Cover art © Julien McHardy, 2016. Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London Freely available online at www.matteringpress.org/books/on-curiosity The conditions of the licence agreed with the original publisher mean that Mattering Press cannot grant permission to reprint or reproduce this translation by any electronic, mechanical, or other means. Permission requests can be sent to the publisher at [email protected]. The cover art is licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike licence. Under this licence, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the material is not used for commercial purposes and the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar licence. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the licence at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ISBN: 978-0-9955277-0-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-9955277-1-3 (ebk) Mattering Press has made every effort to contact copyright holders and will be glad to rectify, in future editions, any errors or omissions brought to our notice. CONTENTS List of Figures 7 Acknowledgements 9 Teaser 11 1 · From Eve to Bluebeard: The Difficult Secularisation of Curiosity 17 2 · Bluebeard: Towards the Marketisation of Curiosity 35 3 · ‘Peep Shop’? An Anthropology of Window Displays 54 The Effects of Locks 58 The Effects of Mirrors 76 4 · ‘Teasing’ 99 Packaging (Teasing, Scene 1) 100 Advertising (Teaser, Scene 2) 111 Continually Agitating Curiosity, or How to Lead a Consumer towards Wonderland 141 Data Matrix 149 5 · ‘Closer’ 157 Door-closer 161 Closer 169 Appendix · Bluebeard 205 Notes 211 Bibliography 237 LIST OF FIGURES Illustrations Fig. 1 Lucas Cranach the Elder and Gustave Doré 19 Fig. 2 Frans Francken II; Gustave Doré 39 Fig. 3 The Progressive Grocer, February 1940, p. 127 77 Fig. 4 The Progressive Grocer, February 1940, p. 59 79 Fig. 5 The Progressive Grocer, February 1940, p. 58 93 Fig. 6 Monsieur Plus, Bahlsen 106 Fig. 7 The Progressive Grocer, December 1957, p. 38 (detail) 107 Fig. 8 The Progressive Grocer, December 1957, pp. 35–40 109 Fig. 9 Avenir, the Billboard Company that Keeps its Promises 112 Fig. 10 Neuf Ad: Do you Prefer Brunettes? 123 Fig. 11 Volvo Tentation Offers 128 Fig. 12 Daily Mail, 30 April 1914 (quoted in Field, 1959) 137 Fig. 13 Advertising Association Campaign, 1936 139 Fig. 14 The Progressive Grocer, September 1929, p. 56 139 Fig. 15 No More of This at Your Standard Stores (Wilson 1978) 140 Fig. 16 Fnac, Curiosity Agitator (v. 1) 141 Fig. 17 Data Matrix 150 Fig. 18 Door-closer (Nantes, August 2010) 161 Fig. 19 The Progressive Grocer, The magic door, February 1951, p. 201 169 Fig. 20 The Progressive Grocer, August 1940, pp. 76–77 170 Fig. 21 Mediapart, 16 June 2010, ‘The Stolen Secrets of the Bettencourt Affair’ 184 7 ON CuRiOsiTY Fig. 22 Le Figaro.fr and Le Figaro: Are you in favour of the total ban on the burqa? (22 and 23 April 2010) 189 Fig. 23 Making Things Public, ZKM 191 Fig. 24 LeMonde.fr and CoveritLive, 1 July 2011 196 Fig. 25 Closer, no.266, 17–23 July 2010 197 Boxes Box 1 Bluebeard and Psychoanalysis, or the Misfortunes of Misplaced Curiosity 37 Box 2 The Gift Package: The Economics of Surprise 104 Box 3 Volvo’s Tentation (Temptation) Offers 128 Box 4 ‘Adverteasing’: a technique that is older than we might think 136 Box 5 The Woerth-Bettencourt affair 180 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i wOuld liKe to exTeNd mY HeartfelT THANKs to All THOse wHO contributed significantly to the writing of this book, through their assistance, their support, their contributions, their suggestions, their proofreading, the documents they passed on to me or suggested, and/or the opportunities they gave me to test my arguments during different symposiums and seminars: Luis Araujo, Nicolas Auray, Vincent Berry, Alexandra Bidet, Anni Borzeix, Emmanuel Boutet, Arlette Bouzon, Florence Brachet-Champsaur, Roland Canu, Johann Chaulet, Nathalie Cochoy, François Cooren, Marlène Coulomb, Frédéric Couret, Barbara Czarniawska, Caroline Datchary, François Dubet, Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier, Paul Du Gay, Marie-Anne Dujarier, Patrick Fridenson, Danielle Galliano, Martin Giraudeau, Mathieu Gousse, Johan Hagberg, Benoît Heilbrunn, Jean-Claude Kaufmann, Emmanuel Kessous, Martin Kornberger, Aurélie Lachèze, Michèle Lalanne, Raphaël Lefeuvre, Claire Leymonerie, Celia Lury, Christian Licoppe, Alexandre Mallard, Liz McFall, Catherine Paradeise, Guillaume Queruel, Stefan Schwartzkopf, François de Singly, Jan Smolinski, Laurent Thévenot, Valérie Inès de la Ville, Lars Walter, and Steve Woolgar. I feel immensely indebted towards Jaciara Topley Lira and Joe Deville for their amazing work on the translation. Thank you so much, Joe, for your encour- agement to publish this book in English at Mattering Press, and for working so hard to have it even better than the original version! More generally, I am very grateful to all those whose works nourished and inspired me: with a special thanks to Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. I also owe a great deal to the colleagues and institutions which generously supported my work: all of the partners from the Œnotrace project, CERTOP, my laboratory, and the sociology department at the University of Toulouse II in 9 ON CuRiOsiTY France; the Center For Retailing, the Center for Consumer Science and Handels, the School of Business, Economics and Law of the University of Göteborg in Sweden. These last three institutions welcomed me as Visiting Professor from 2009 to 2013 and provided me with the ideal conditions for writing this book. Nor can I forget the support given to me by the Education Abroad Program and the National Research Library Facility at University of California, Berkeley, to which I owe some of the essential data on which my work is based. And finally, my gratitude goes to the natural and legal persons who allowed me to reproduce some of the illustrations included in this book (those being, and in order of appearance): the Samuel Courtauld Trust and the Courtauld Gallery in London for Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve; the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna for Frans Francken the Younger’s Cabinet of Curiosities; the Progressive Grocer magazine for all the images I borrowed from that publication; the Saint-Michel biscuit factories for the Bahlsen advert; Claire Jonvelle and Myriam Szabo for the Myriam advert, produced by the CLM-BBDO agency; SFR for the Neuf Telecom advert; Volvo Cars for the leaflet on ‘Offres Tentation Volvo’, produced by the Unedite agency; the History of Advertising Fund for the English Advertising Association campaign; FNAC as an agitator of curios- ity for the FNAC advertising spot; the journal Mediapart for its headline from 16 June 2010. Of course, the statements expressed herein are mine alone. 10 TEASER In many respects, this book might derail some readers. All those who prefer to know what to expect, to reason on the basis of well-established analytical frameworks and not to risk wasting their time on uncertain ramblings, are thus strongly advised to go on their way. seduCiNg AN AudieNCe – attractiNg THe atteNTiON OF A ReAdeR, catching a client’s attention, converting a non-believer, responding to a user’s expectations, persuading a voter, etc. – often involves building technical devices which play on people’s social dispositions. The excerpt above is one such device (the irony!): it is a small, rhetorical machine which attempts to play on the reader’s disposition towards conservatism and/or exploration. And there are many others, especially within marketing settings, which will be my field of choice here. For example, in order to attract customers, we can use a slogan promoting their penchant for repeating a habit (‘Nutella, spreading happiness every day’); suggest a loyalty card which employs calculative capacities so as to better tie them to a future routine (‘5% discount on the brand’s products for cardholders’); propose a brand which appeals to a propensity for altruism (‘Max Havelaar: great coffee [for] a great cause’); and so on.
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