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LAZULI BUNTING MANUSCRIPT REVIEW HISTORY MANUSCRIPT (ROUND 2)

Abstract

One hundred years after its sinking, the holds many in its thrall. If not quite a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, it continues to captivate consumers worldwide. This article explores the myths and meanings of RMS Titanic from a Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) perspective. Employing a combination of historical methods, literary criticism and empirical investigation, it unpicks the meanings of “myth” in consumer research and shows how these myth-interpretations are enshrined in the “unsinkable brand.” RMS Titanic, we contend, is more than a mere carrier of myth, a myth-conveyance, it is an all-purpose omni-myth where manifold meaningful consumer myths mingle, merge, mutate and multiply. So much so, that extant attempts to encapsulate iconic brand meanings – as gestalts, mosaics, doppelgängers, et al .– are called into question. Myths, Barthes observes, are less like abstract, purified constructs than formless, unstable condensations, which are inherently and ineradicably ambiguous. Although brand ambiguity is often regarded as something best avoided, this article argues that consuming ambiguity is integral to unsinkable brands like Titanic.

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Myths…are obscure in origin, protean in form and ambiguous in meaning. Seemingly immune to rational explication, they nevertheless stimulate rational enquiry, which accounts for the diversity of conflicting explanations. —K.K. Ruthven (1976, 1)

April, according to T.S. Eliot (1922), is the cruelest month. If 2012 is anything to go by, it is also the craziest. April 2012 was the month when the world went wild for Titanic, the allegedly “unsinkable” steamship that sank on its maiden voyage one hundred years earlier (Sides 2012). The centennial of the sinking was commemorated in many cities associated with the legendary White Star liner, not least Liverpool, Southampton, Cherbourg, Cobh and New York (Ward 2012). It was likewise marked by manifold works of popular culture including movies, musicals, murals, magazine articles, museum exhibitions, computer games, iPhone apps and requiem masses (Economist 2012a). The final meal of the first class passengers was on the menu of numerous restaurants; cruise ships traced the route of the iconic vessel, pausing to lay wreaths at the site of the wreck; plans were announced for a full-scale reconstruction of Titanic, which is expected to weigh anchor in 2015; and, sellers of Titanic collectibles slapped images of the ill- starred ship on everything from teddy bears and T-shirts to bath plugs and tea bags (McKeown 2012). Viewed dispassionately, this fixation is hard to fathom. The loss of life on Titanic was miniscule compared to prior and, when set against subsequent catastrophes, the 1912 tragedy barely registers (Eyers 2013). Yet Titanic is still regarded as a quintessential calamity, the model against which human misfortunes are measured (Biel 2012). In the pantheon of mishap, the ship stands shoulder to shoulder with the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy (Wade 1986), the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion (Howells 2012) and Titanic’s terrible 21st century equivalent, September 11, 2001 (Pellegrino 2012). For Molony (2012), Titanic is nothing less than the Rolls-Royce of misadventure, an iconic superbrand of the mortality market alongside Hiroshima, the Irish famine, the San Francisco earthquake and the Great Flood of Genesis. Branding Titanic in this way may seem distasteful, bordering on obscene, but it is very much in keeping with the turn to “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone 2006). That is, the commodification of sites associated with dreadful deeds and appalling accidents, such as Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Bolivia’s Road of Death and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. It is also, arguably, in accord with contemporary consumer society’s culture of commemoration, where anniversaries are regarded as marketing opportunities waiting to happen (Economist 2012b; Simpson 2006). However, the monetization of the Titanic is more than a manifestation of humankind’s appetite for the macabre, the malignant, the monstrous, the marketable (Warner 1994). It is a prime example of mythopoeia. As many commentators have noted, it is the myth of the unsinkable ship – myths, rather – that has made this dark brand meaningful to millions of consumers (Barczewski 2004; Biel 2012; 2011; Foster 1997). It is the myths of the Titanic, moreover, that are making millions of dollars for sellers of unsinkable souvenirs, experiences, and cultural representations (Meredith 2012). This paper aims to study the unsinkable brand through a mythological lens. After summarizing the major mythic traditions in consumer research and recounting the oft-told tale of the Titanic – then pausing briefly to consider the ship’s brand credentials – we explain our methodological approach, which is predicated on the principles of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) in general and “practical” literary criticism in particular. The results reveal that Titanic

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isn’t so much a myth, singular or plural, as an all-purpose omni-myth, where manifold consumer myths clash, collide, coalesce and cancel each other out to contradictory yet compelling effect. As a consequence, the brand is ineradicably ambiguous, a ship-shape shape-shifter with something for everyone. Although ambiguity has long been anathematized by the thought leaders of our field, this article argues that disambiguating brand ambiguity is a research quest worth pursuing. In terms of its contributions, our paper responds to Arnould and Thompson’s (2005, 876) call for historically informed analyses of “the commodity form (broadly defined)”. Empirically, it extends CCT’s repertoire to all four composers of brand stories – owners, consumers, influencers and popular culture (Holt 2003) – thereby adding additional instruments to the myth- ensemble. Methodologically, it returns to the corpus of literary criticism largely neglected since the passing of its prime mover, Barbara B. Stern. Conceptually, it contends that extant attempts to encapsulate outstanding brands in an overarching construct – “gestalt,” “mosaic,” “panopticon,” “doppelgänger,” etc. – are meritorious yet misplaced. Paradigmatically, our paper adheres to the principles of the liberal arts, insofar as it extracts enlightenment from a single, stupendous case study rather than a representative sample of Titanic fanatics. And, rhetorically, it maintains that “myth” is a multi-faceted approach to consumer culture, which is overdue careful scrutiny and systematic critique.

THE MYTH IN LITERATURE

In his compact introduction to the principal theories of myth, Segal (2004) identifies ten academic domains where the subject looms large. These range from religious studies and psychology to anthropology and literary criticism. If Segal were writing his text today, he might be tempted to add consumer research to his list of traditions. As a glance through past issues of JCR (and the ACR proceedings) attests, the corpus of consumer research is replete with myth-lit – writing and theorizing about myth (see Arsel and Thompson 2011; Thompson 2004; Zhao and Belk 2008). When this body of work is examined in detail, it is clear that the M-word is used in several different ways. These differences, admittedly, are only to be expected. Multiple meanings of myth have long been recognized (Armstrong 2005; Coupe 1997) and latter-day literary theory alerts us to the semantic ambiguities in academic and everyday language (Stern 1996; Sutherland 2010). It is useful, nevertheless, to identify the major myth-interpretations, because they help us better understand the mythopoeic propensities of CCT and interpret our Titanic findings. One of the most common uses of the word myth in consumer research – or any other domain, for that matter (Cohen 1969) – is as a mistake, a misapprehension, a misunderstanding shared by many people. Thus Zhao et al. (2010) speak of the myths and misapplications of mediation analysis in consumer research. Muñiz and Schau (2005) note the Apple Newton community’s mistaken beliefs about a replacement operating system. Nuttall et al. (2011) reveal that many advertising research articles are devoted to refuting the fallacies of the field. Scott (2005) exposes the manifold myths of American feminism’s anti-beauty ideology, not least the notion that blondes are overrepresented in marketing’s portrayals of the feminine ideal. Even Arnould and Thompson (2005), in their inaugural essay on CCT, are at pains to unpick four fallacies surrounding qualitative research: namely, that consumer culture theorists study contexts as ends in themselves; that the major differences between CCT and other research traditions are

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methodological; that the subfield is anti-managerial in ethos and outlook; and, that CCT is characterized by serious character defects including introspection, overstatement, and orgiastic outpourings of self-expression. The success of their attempted demythologizing is debatable, though, since Arnould and Thompson (2007) later refuted the myths surrounding their refutation of the myths surrounding Consumer Culture Theory. A second take on myth treats the term as a societal salve, a cultural emollient, a necessary suture that stitches together the existential wounds of consumer society (Holt 2002, 2004; Thompson 2004). Postmodern consumers make sense of their inherently contradictory, often bewildering, existence by drawing upon a repertoire of meaning-laden myths that they embrace, absorb and endeavor to live by. Thus the Man of Action hero, a synthesis of breadwinner and rebel, exemplifies male consumers’ mythopoeic propensities (Holt and Thompson 2004), as does the myth of the Lost Cause for patriotic denizens of the New South (Thompson and Tian 2008), as does the Prometheus myth for pyromaniacal Microserfs at Burning Man (Kozinets 2002), as does the discourse of cosmopolitanism for worldly wise but belonging bereft corporate globetrotters (Thompson and Tambyah 1999), as does the amalgam of myth and ideology behind Turkish consumers’ jihad against infidel brands (Izberk-Bilgin 2012), as does the Mountain Man myth for wannabe throwbacks to the days when men were men and Sasquatch was nervous (Belk and Costa 1998). Although this line of reasoning is ultimately reliant on Lévi-Strauss (1963), who contended that the function of myth is to mediate and ideally resolve the contradictions and paradoxes of human existence, consumer researchers have adroitly adapted his insights to commercial concerns. Brands, some say, are akin to societal Band Aids, and those brands that assuage the contradictions of contemporary consumer culture – Harley Davidson, Snapple, Corona, et cetera – are those that are elevated to iconic status (Holt 2004). Until, of course, such times as they lose touch with the mood swings and primal fears of the angst-afflicted marketplace. The third interpretation of myth, in accordance with numerous academic authorities in anthropology, psychology and literary theory (Segal 1999), is narratological. As Durgee (1988) observes, within consumer research the term myth is routinely employed as a synonym (or near- synonym) for story. Brown (2006), Geisler (2008), Kozinets (2008), Holt (2002), Luedicke et al. (2010), Peñaloza (2001), Stern (1995), Thompson (2004), Thompson and Haytko (1997), Maclaran and Brown (2005) and many more use myth and story interchangeably, albeit all sorts of close substitutes including narrative, discourse, legend, fable, parable, allegory and ideology are adopted as the occasion demands (Shankar et al. 2001). Few of these usages would pass muster if a strict definition of myth were adhered to. According to Cohen’s (1969) seminal review, a myth is a narrative of sacred events that is communicated in symbolic form, often involves imaginary or superhuman objects and actors, and tends to pertain to societal origins or cultural transformations. However, since fellow mythographers regard this definition as unnecessarily stringent (Kirk 1970; Segal 1999), it seems unreasonable to ask consumer researchers to adhere to standards that specialists can’t satisfy, especially in a world where storytelling is a sine qua non of 21st century management (Salmon 2010) and where brands are routinely regarded as stories in a bottle, box, canister, container, carrier bag or flagship store (Mathews and Wacker 2008; Peñaloza 1999; Twitchell 2004). Today’s consumers, Holt (2004) contends, do more than chug a cool refreshing Coke, Corona or Snapple, they imbibe the myth- steeped stories that iconic brands embody. Alongside the three principal interpretations of “myth” in consumer research, two additional aspects are apparent: milieu and metamorphosis. Despite Arnould and Thompson’s

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(2005) desire to downplay contextual considerations, emplacement is integral to many publications. Consumer myths, as often as not, pertain to specific places, sites, stores, regions or countries (Thompson 2004). The western stock show (Peñaloza 2001), the Glastonbury pilgrimage (Scott and Maclaran 2013), the Mountain Man rendezvous (Belk and Costa 1998), Chicago’s ESPN Zone and Nike Town (Kozinets et al. 2004; Sherry 1998), the southern States of North America (Thompson and Tian 2008), the transnational myths of Asian consumers (Cayla and Eckhardt 2008), the myth of the westernized good life in Turkey (Üstüner and Holt 2010), the path-breaking Consumer Odyssey, which was a veritable moving feast of myth making (Belk et al. 1989), are grounded in locales that are as site specific as the mythological traditions of Ancient Greece or Pharaonic Egypt or the Celtic fringe or Native North America from Coyote to Quetzalcoatl. Granted, not every study is spatially emplaced. The Man of Action article (Holt and Thompson 2004), the Apple Newton paper (Muñiz and Schau 2005), the techno-myths typology (Kozinets 2008), the branded troublemakers testament (Holt 2002), the anti-allopathic discourse of homoeopathy enthusiasts (Thompson 2004) are ostensibly placeless, albeit such studies are often predicated on a peculiarly American mythos that doesn’t automatically apply in exogenous cultural contexts. The myth of the frontier and freedom embodied in Harley Davidson (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), the traditions of Thanksgiving ascribed to Frye’s four-fold myth model (Stern 1994), the anti-Starbucks discourse in coffee- cultured college towns (Thompson and Arsel 2004), the myths of American feminist discourse from Susan B. Anthony to Gloria Steinem (Scott 2005), the clash of consumer moralities triggered by gas-guzzling Hummer ownership (Luedicke et al. 2010) are rather less resonant outside the United States, cultural cross-currents and transfers notwithstanding. Metamorphosis is evident too, inasmuch as academic approaches to consumer myth- making have changed through time. A secular tendency toward ever-increasing intricacy and intertwining – what Thompson (2004, 169) terms “legitimate blending” – is apparent in the consumer research literature. The earliest papers were essentially Cyclopean (i.e., akin to Cyclops, insofar as they were predicated on a single iconic myth or model of mythical analysis). Thus Levy’s (1981) inaugural article relied on Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist stance. Hirschman (1988) took her cue from Carl Jung’s archetypes. Stern (1994) sought succor in Northrop Frye’s anatomical framework. The Winnebago-borne transcontinental trek by Belk et al. (1989) was modeled on Homer’s legendary account of Odysseus’s travels and travails. Latter-day studies, by contrast, are rather more Hydrarian (i.e., analogous to the Hydra, on account of their multiplicity and intermingling). They typically comprise a myth-mash of storylines and legends. Thompson and Tian (2008, 596) talk of a “syncretic blending” of multiple myths in their study of the New South. Arnold et al. (2001) identify five interwoven myths in a single Wal-Mart flyer. Scott and Maclaran (2013) encounter pick and mix eclecticism among consumers of Glastonbury grail trails. Peñaloza (2001) painstakingly uncovers a mélange of wild western myths at a Colorado stock show. American Girl, meanwhile, is a place where extended families negotiate and transmit newly forged timeless myths of contemporary femininity, which are simultaneously individual and universal. Powerful brands, Diamond et al. (2009, 130) conclude, are the products of “multiple sources authoring multiple narrative representations in multiple venues” (and, as we shall see, for a prolonged period of time).

NEARER, MY BRAND, TO THEE

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If CCT is a city where Olympian myths dwell, Titanic’s epic story is surely worthy of citizenship. As historical analysis reveals, the gigantic keel of Titanic was laid on March 22, 1909 (Ward 2012). Twenty-two months later, the legendary White Star liner was launched from Slipway 3 at Harland & Wolff shipyard in , Ireland (Eaton and Haas 2011). At the time, Titanic was the largest moving object on earth and one of the most technologically advanced (Johnston 2008). It was also the last word in luxury, a floating grand hotel. Not only were its first and second class cabins lavishly decorated in a variety of historical styles – Regency, Jacobean, Georgian, Louis XV, Queen Anne, Heppelwhite and William & Mary, among others – but its opulent public rooms were a riot of stained glass, intricate woodwork, crystal chandeliers and deep pile carpets. In addition to its state-of-the-art electric lighting and cutting-edge telecommunications equipment, Titanic boasted a swimming pool, squash court, gymnasium, Turkish baths, banks of elevators and stupendous sweeping staircases for grand entrances and exits. True, the bulk of its passengers was accommodated in second and third class but fixtures and fittings there were on a par with first and second elsewhere. If not quite the “ship of dreams” mentioned in ’s blockbuster film, RMS Titanic was a technological and mechanical work of art (Davenport-Hines 2012). After ten months’ fitting out in Belfast, and formal certification by the British Board of Trade, Titanic sailed for Southampton on April 2, 1912 (Wilkinson and Hamilton 2011). Although its maiden voyage had been delayed by a coal strike and an accident to its sister ship, Olympic, whose repairs held up work at Harland & Wolff, Titanic finally cast off at noon on April 10. The luxury liner picked up 274 passengers in Cherbourg, France, and, after collecting 120 more in Queenstown (Cobh) on the southern tip of Ireland, it steamed off to New York on April 11. With each passing day, Titanic’s speed steadily increased, as its spanking new engines were eased into action. Sailing conditions were excellent and, while the North Atlantic ice floes were extensive that year, the ship took the standard precaution of a safer southerly route. On Sunday 14th, Titanic’s wireless operators received several ice warnings from nearby ships, including the Californian which stopped for the night rather than sail into an ice field. Some but not all of these were passed on to Captain Smith, since the operators were employed by the Marconi Company, not White Star, and spent most of their time sending frivolous messages from first-class passengers to their acquaintances on shore (Matthews 2011). Titanic steamed ahead, confident it could cope with the inclement conditions… As everyone knows, Titanic couldn’t. Hampered by an uncharacteristically flat calm – which made icebergs harder to see at night, because breaking waves at the base indicated position and magnitude – the lookouts failed to spot a large iceberg looming right ahead. Despite desperate attempts to take evasive action, the ship received a glancing blow from the berg. It was 11.40 p.m. Less than two-and-a-half hours later, Titanic sank beneath the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. There were insufficient lifeboats to accommodate 2,026 passengers and crew, and many were launched less than full. Approximately 1,500 people died that night, mainly from hypothermia, though there were dramatic differences in the survival rates of the various shipboard classes (Maltin and Aston 2010). All 705 survivors were picked up by the Carpathia, which had steamed to the rescue at dangerously high speed. They were taken to , where an official inquiry was promptly launched into the unthinkable sinking of the unsinkable ship. Three-hundred-and-thirty further bodies, most still in their life jackets, were gathered up by the Mackay-Bennett and Minia from Halifax, NS, the majority of which were interred at the city’s (Bartlett 2010).

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The sea continued to give up its dead for months thereafter. In fact, the American inquiry had been completed before the final three corpses turned up in an open boat several hundred miles south of Titanic’s last reported position. By then, many of the facts, fables and fictions surrounding the “unsinkable ship” had hardened into the narrative that’s been recycled ever since: too few lifeboats, sailing unforgivably fast, ignoring ice warnings, inadequately trained crew, selfless acts of heroism, unconscionable acts of cowardice, , band playing to the last, the plutocrats in first class who perished with dignity, the paupers in steerage who were locked down below (Biel 2012; Howells 2012). Whether it be the legend of Captain Smith urging panicking passengers to “Be British!” before doing the noble thing, or the scurrilous story of Bruce Ismay, the chairman of , who escaped on a lifeboat while dressed as a woman, the lore of the Titanic is inexhaustible. Within weeks of the sinking, movies, songs, poems and books about the calamity were in circulation and macabre memorabilia were on sale, most notably a black teddy bear by Steiff. The shock waves reverberated for decades in cities like Southampton, where most of the crew resided, Belfast, where the supposedly unsinkable ship was built, and New York, which lost numerous eminent citizens including Astor, Straus and Guggenheim (Barczewski 2004). All erected Titanic memorials in due course, as did many other places including Liverpool, Halifax, Queenstown and Washington DC. All were determined never to forget that fateful night (Hammond 2004). Forgotten, though, the Titanic soon was as the 20th century rolled on and its calamities accumulated. The unsinkable brand, nevertheless, resurfaced during the 1950s, thanks to a bestselling book by Walter Lord (1955). An advertising copywriter for JWT, Lord’s breathless retelling of Titanic’s tale – a real time account that anticipated the non-fiction novels of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer (Philbrick 2005) – was made into an enormously successful British movie, A Night to Remember. The Titanic picked up further steam when discovered the wreck in September 1985 and whose dramatic undersea photographs triggered a spate of touching remembrance, tasteless scavenging and lucrative touring exhibitions by the salvors-in-possession (Ballard 1995). The momentum increased a decade later when James Cameron’s prodigiously expensive movie of the tragedy – widely expected to sink without trace on release – not only triumphed at the box office, with worldwide receipts of $1.8 billion, but bagged a record haul of eleven Oscars which put it on a par with Golden Age Hollywood classics like Gone With the Wind and Ben Hur (Lubin 1999; Studlar and Sandler 1999). Top speed, however, was reserved for the centennial celebrations of 2012. And nowhere was the frantic fanaticism for all things Titanic, noted earlier, more apparent than in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A striking, six-story, steel-clad, star-shaped, staggeringly expensive commemorative center has been built beside the original slipway, graving dock and drawing office of the immemorial vessel. The centerpiece of a riverside regeneration project – pointedly called – Belfast’s Signature Building showcases the world’s most famous ship, with artifacts, replicas, interactive displays and innovative dark ride technology. Constructed to the same dimensions as the original liner, the city’s Signature Building may or may not be the biggest brand museum in the world but, according to its general manager, Titanic is one of the world’s five most famous brands (Kinkade 2011).

BE BRANDED!

Although Apple, Google, Coca-Cola and others would doubtless disagree with the above assertion, the center manager’s claim raises an interesting question: To what extent can Titanic

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be considered a brand? One hundred years ago this issue would not have arisen. Although trademarks have been around since 2,250 BCE (Moore and Reid 2008) and although packaged goods rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, when mass production, mass consumption and mass communications created conditions conducive to the ascent of brand (Koehn 2001; Sivulka 2011; Tedlow 1990), the term was initially confined to FMCGs and similar staples. In 1912, then, Titanic would not have been regarded as a brand. A steamship, yes; a tragedy, definitely; a vehicle for advertising affiliated brands, such as Vinolia soap, quite possibly. But the vessel itself, the catastrophe? Certainly not! It is only since the Second World War that the branding concept has been broadened to embrace hospitals, universities, art galleries, police forces, political parties, utility suppliers, religious denominations, rock bands, sports teams and celebrities A to Z (Heding et al. 2009; Lury 2004; Olins 2003). As Muñiz and Schau (2008) note, the term is applied to almost everything in contemporary consumer society, from water to dirt. Indeed, when the branding concept is being extended to diseases, panhandlers, and TED conferences (Ferris 2008) – not to mention academic constructs like Service-Dominant Logic and CCT, which was specifically formulated as a sub-disciplinary brand (Badot and Cova 2008) – the designation can hardly be denied to Titanic. Brand Titanic may be acceptable conceptually, but empirically its standing is uncertain. As part of our research program, outlined below, we asked informants about Titanic’s brand credentials. The outcomes were mixed. A movie director concurred with the Titanic-as-brand proposition, contending that the ship possessed worldwide name recognition and was nothing less than a “one-word sales pitch” (that is, the nautical equivalent of “Prince,” “Madonna,” “Shakira” or “Eminem”). Individuals associated with Belfast’s Signature Project were equally sold on the idea (so much so, they published an official “brand book,” which affiliated tourist facilities are expected to adhere to). By complete contrast, the marketing manager of Harland & Wolff, the organization that built the ship and is most closely associated with the brand (bar White Star, which went belly up in 1947), instantly dismissed the idea out of hand. “Titanic,” he said, “is not a brand, because the name cannot be trademarked or copyrighted. The name is part of the public domain, all over the world. We are not happy with some of the uses of the word Titanic, but we can do nothing about it. We can’t stop them.” Legal considerations aside, Titanic the Brand is equally equivocal for consumers. The notion was met with bewilderment in all four focus groups. When the suggestion was put to the Spanish focus group, for example, one informant retorted “A brand of what? Titanic is not a brand. It is the name of a ship. It’s the movie, basically…which was kind of sad.” Another informant conceded that it might be a brand for marketing professionals but not for the average consumer: The Titanic isn’t a brand, not for ordinary people. It’s more like an archetype of the, um, perfect . You know that claim about Titanic being one of the top three brands in the world? I checked it out on Google and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think the marketing people made it up. (Heritage consultant, interview) The ship’s status, in short, is not dissimilar to that of branding itself, which is ill-defined at best and devoid of consensus at worst (de Chernatony 2010). Not only do front line brand managers disagree on the exact meaning of the word – AMA definition notwithstanding – but branding best practice is neither formally established nor systematically enacted. Thought leaders, admittedly, urge ambitious brands to adhere to clear positioning, concise propositions and consistent performance (Keller 1999, Ries and Trout 2001; Aaker and Joachimsthaler 2009).

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But empirical studies of outstanding brands show that clarity, concision and consistency are conspicuous by their absence (Holt and Cameron 2010; Kates and Goh 2003). Branding, if anything, is characterized by strategic ambiguity, ambiguity that has increased in recent years as a consequence of co-creation, where ascribed meanings of brands ebb and flow between producers, consumers and other interested parties (Beverland 2009; Fournier and Avery 2011; Puntoni et al. 2010), opinionated brand communities in particular (Cova et al. 2007).

METHODOLOGICAL PREMISES AND PRACTICE

The mounting ambiguity of branding is disconcerting for some (Rose 2011). It runs counter to conventional wisdom and is thus worrisome for the high priests of best practice (Keller 2003). This anxiety, however, is also partly attributable to the poetics of our field, the “scientific” discourse of the consumer research community, the scholarly ideology we’re socialized into (Hunt 2002). In this regard, I.A. Richards (1929), the founding father of literary criticism, makes an important distinction between scientific language and literary language. The former aspires to clarity, precision, specificity, accuracy and exactitude; the latter sets great store by richness, variety, allusion, equivocation and polyvalence. Scientists minimize meaning, poets maximize. Ambiguity and analogous figures of speech, such as paradox, oxymoron, irony and caesura, are integral to the literary worldview. Far from being flatulent rhetorical flourishes, or pretentious demonstrations of preening self-indulgence, they are the pith and pelf of poetry’s power (Sherry and Schouten 2002). Ambiguity, therefore, should be admired, applauded and, not least, analyzed by appropriate literary methods (Graff 1995). Although Richards’ attempts to unpick the paradoxes and analyses the ambiguities that inhere in works of literature have been dismissed by Eagleton (1983, 51) as “lemon squeezing,” his Practical Criticism laid the foundation for arguably the most influential school of twentieth century literary theory. Led by John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, the New Critics rejected biographical, psychological and historical explanations of poetic meaning for detailed line-by-line explications of individual works of literature, a process known as “close reading” (Davis 2008). The New Critics, in other words, focused on the words on the page, excavating layers of meaning, identifying the incongruities, noting the contradictions, and teasing out the ambiguities that were the starting point for subsequent, even more radical schools of literary theory such as deconstruction and post-structuralism (Lentricchia 1980). The line of descent from New Critics to Deconstructionists is not continuous, admittedly. New Critics believed in conciliation, inasmuch as the paradoxes, tensions and ambiguities within a work of literature are resolved within the confines of the “verbal icon” itself (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). A successful poem was an harmonious, balanced, self-justifying entity, a little piece of perfection (Logan 2008). Post-structuralist deconstructionists, by contrast, maintained that linguistic meaning was wild, untrammeled and chaotic, with a tendency to spin off into ever more complex spirals of ineradicable indeterminacy (Eagleton 1983). The basic principle, though, of alighting on the ambiguities of individual words or phrases – a word like myth, for example – is common to both. Derrida’s deconstruction lies on a direct line of descent from Richards’ eminently practical research methods. As, indeed, does the corpus of literary criticism within consumer research. Barbara B. Stern, the preeminent literary theorist in our field, began as a New Critic and subsequently applied the copious schools of “lit-crit” to consumer concerns (Stern 1989). These ranged from Derridean readings of radio advertisements (Stern 1996), through New Historicist excavations of

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branding’s meanings (Stern 2006) to archetypal analyses of Thanksgiving celebrations (Stern 1995). In so doing, Stern did much to establish literary criticism as a legitimate approach to qualitative consumer research. According to Arnould and Thompson (2005), the interpretive pirouettes of literary theorists – as performed, for example, by Stern, Scott, Holt, Escalas, McQuarrie and Mick, et al. – are central to the CCT program, specifically the “mass mediated marketplace ideologies and consumers interpretive strategies” sub-division, which focuses on the texts and artifacts of popular culture. Researching iconic brands from a literary-cum-cultural perspective is an eclectic undertaking (Cross and Gilly 2012). It involves archival endeavor and empirical investigation (Holt 2004). It necessitates the examination of participants’ narratives – which are authored by several interested parties, principally brand owners, brand consumers, brand influencers and the creators of cultural representations – while remaining sensitive to the wider social, economic and technological developments that shape the stories stakeholders tell (Holt and Thompson 2004). It is a qualitative methodology that does not aspire to generalizability, except in the liberal arts sense, whereby universal resonance or meaning can be found in an individual work, but attempts rather to situate brands within the swirling currents of consumer culture. Brand Titanic can be plumbed with profit from this CCT perspective. In order to do so, the authors combined empirical data gathering and archival research in the RMS Titanic repository. Representatives of all four authors of the brand story were contacted and questioned over a five year period. A mixture of qualitative methods was employed, in keeping with established cultural research conventions (Hackley 2003). These included introspective essays (74), focus groups (4), long interviews (9), netnography (1) and participant observation at Titanic-themed exhibitions, museums, memorials, guided tours and fund-raisers (8). Of the four principal brand authors, most data were gathered from consumers (mainly Irish but also French, German, Spanish and American). The brand owners were also interviewed and, while Harland & Wolff no longer builds ships from scratch, it continues to sell Titanic memorabilia and takes a proprietorial interest in the wreck (Pellegrino 2012). A selection of key influencers – specifically, spokespersons for tourism, property development, public relations, movie making, historical preservation and the marketing of Belfast’s Signature Building – was questioned about their involvement with the brand. Popular cultural representations of the unsinkable ship (in movies, novels, photographs, oral histories, newspaper articles, television documentaries) were collated and content analyzed, as were extant anthologies of Titanic’s cultural impact (Biel 2012; Foster 1997; Howells 2012). Archival research at the Public Records Office, Belfast, which holds a large Titanic collection, was supplemented with digital data gathering exercises. These ranged from website monitoring and e-interviews to a “passive” netnography (Kozinets 2010) of comments posted on Titanic-related media stories. In practice, our research program evolved through four overlapping phases. It commenced with three years’ work in the Titanic archive, coupled with background reading, exhibition attendance and family history excavation. (The lead author’s great-grandfather helped build RMS Titanic, both his father and grandfather worked for Harland & Wolff, and a great- aunt owns several authentic items of .) The second phase comprised content analysis of relevant cultural representations – movies, novels, cartoons, computer games and so on – plus the passive netnography, which continued throughout the study. The third phase involved empirical data gathering, specifically introspective essays from groups of undergraduate and postgraduate students, who comprised an eclectic mix of ages, genders, ethnic affiliations and feelings for Titanic, both pro and anti. The final phase, which coincided with the centennial

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commemorations, consisted of depth interviews and focus groups with a broad spectrum of stakeholders, noted above, coupled with site visits to Belfast’s Signature Building, at both peak and off-peak times. All told, our dataset consisted of approximately 1,200 A4 pages of written text, along with associated photographs, videos, artworks and ephemera. In the belief that the aforementioned meanings of myth might help anchor the ebb and flow of Titanic culture, this dataset was interrogated using the semantics-sensitive technique of practical literary criticism. It is important to stress, though, that unlike ethnographic or grounded theory approaches to qualitative inquiry, which presuppose that meaningful constructs eventually emerge from researcher engagement with the raw data, literary procedures are impositional, inasmuch as texts are interrogated with intent (Eagleton 1983). That is, they are apprehended from a preordained critical position, be it Marxist, Feminist, Psychoanalytical, Post-colonial or whatever. This does not mean that literary methods are rigid or doctrinaire, since a flexible, iterative, “to-ing and fro- ing” interpretive process prevails in practice. However, they do approach the data from a top- down perspective rather than a bottom-up manner. They are the liberal arts equivalent of deductive reasoning and although inductive approaches predominate in CCT, deduction is not unknown (e.g., McQuarrie and Mick 1996; Stern 1995; Thompson 2004). It is also important to stress that, compendious as it is, our dataset is far from comprehensive. Given the staggering amount of secondary material that’s available, it comprises the merest tip of the Brand Titanic iceberg. We’ve nevertheless endeavored to combine the in- depth interviewing and deep hanging out models of data gathering. We’ve incorporated an historical dimension, in accordance with Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) recommended research agenda. We’ve delved into the of netnographers, albeit for supplementary rather than primary research purposes. We’ve sought, what’s more, to cover all four brand author bases identified by Holt (2003), not least the legendary brand behind the unsinkable brand, Harland & Wolff, which has been at the center of the Titanic cultural complex for more than a century.

MYTH THEMES

In his introduction to Robert Ballard’s bestselling account of the discovery of the wreck, Walter Lord (1995) tries to explain Titanic’s incredible and continuing hold on the world’s imagination. Its abiding mystique, he ventures, is attributable to the elements of Greek tragedy, epic, myth and legend that are integral to the steamship’s story: the sheer scale of the disaster; the hubristic proclamation of its unsinkability; the nemesis of Mother Nature’s iceberg; the warnings that went unheeded; the in-built morality tale about pride coming before a fall; the symbolism of a monster ship that mirrored the social stratification of the vainglorious Gilded Age; the universal resonance of a life-or-death situation, which forces us to wonder what we would do in the same awful circumstances… Lord’s attempted explanation may or may not pass muster, but the mythic components of the Titanic narrative are incontestable. The ship’s name alone is myth writ large. The Titans, as an Irish newspaper observed on the day of the launch, were a legendary race of giants who waged war against Olympus and paid a heavy price for their presumption. Roundly trounced by Zeus’s thunderbolts, the titans were consigned to a watery limbo beneath the lowest depths of the Tartarus. The name, then, was hardly an auspicious choice, though the Irish News editorial optimistically concluded that the steamship had obviously been named in a spirit of

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contradiction. Clearly, the craft represented the acme of order and modern civilization. Therefore its builders were a latter-day race of mythical giants who were wiser than their foolhardy forefathers (Lord 1986). That editor’s attempted exculpation of White Star’s cavalier behavior – there are maritime superstitions against tempting fate with bombastic ships’ names (Wade 1986) – now strikes us as one among many Titanic ironies. But it also intimates that Titanic is an open, “writerly” text, which is amenable to all sorts of idiosyncratic, individualized readings (Barthes 1990). The tragedy, Lord (1995) records, has something for everyone, whether they’re mystics, moralists, metallurgists, memorabilia collectors, maritime enthusiasts or myth-minded academicians. Be that as it may, the openness of the Titanic text is amply illustrated by its ability to accommodate the four interpretations of myth that circulate in consumer research: myth as misapprehension; myth as medicine; myth as melodrama; myth as milieu and metamorphosis.

Myth as Misapprehension

Myth, as we have seen, is often used synonymously for fallacy or misunderstanding, not least in consumer research, where Carrigan and Szmigin (2005), for example, scotch the canard that convenience goods are convenient for multi-tasking mothers, Visconti et al. (2010, 526) subvert the “myth of the architect” in their study of vernacular street art, and Weinberger and Spotts (1993) show that the commonly accepted differences between America’s hard sell advertising ethos and Britain’s soft sell commercial culture are unfounded. Titanic too floats on a sea of misapprehension. In their attempt to place the tragedy within the context of analogous calamities, Cartwright and Cartwright (2011) list forty separate myths – straightforward errors of fact – that are held by many people. These include: the myth of proclaimed unsinkability (no such boast was made by its builders), the myth of inadequate lifeboat provision (the ship exceeded the standards that then prevailed), the myth of the speed record attempt (Titanic wasn’t designed to capture the Blue Riband), the myth of reckless disregard for icebergs (true, but this was common practice on the transatlantic route), the myth of women and children first (on the starboard side, yes, on the port side different disembarkation policies disastrously prevailed), the myth of stiff-upper-lipped stoicism as the ship slipped under (disbelief, followed by denial, followed by shambolic disorganization, followed by mass panic was closer to the mark); the myth that Titanic broadcast the first S-O-S signal (the Marconi operators commenced with old distress call, C-Q-D, then switched to its nascent replacement, S- O-S, though they weren’t the first to send that signal); the myth of an unquenchable inferno which raged below decks throughout the voyage (perfectly true, but it smoldered rather than raged and fires-in-the-hold weren’t unusual back then); and, the myth that Robert Ballard’s expedition to the wreck was a front for covert CIA activity at the height of the Cold War (it was actually a US Navy-funded investigation into the 1960s’ sinking of two nuclear submarines). So prevalent and pervasive are the myths surrounding Titanic that an entire genre of tie-in texts, dedicated to debunking the misconceptions, now exists (e.g., Maltin and Aston 2010; White 2011). Likewise, most exhibitions attended as part of our empirical research program include interactive displays concerning the multitude of myths and misunderstandings that continue to circulate, despite decades of detailed investigation and repeated refutation: Finally, we get to the ninth gallery, which is devoted to the aftermath of the sinking and its impact on popular culture. There’s a computerized quiz about the myths and legends. It’s proving very popular, with a long line of rubber-necking people eager to pit their wits

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against the machine and, presumably, separate fact from fiction. I patiently wait, quietly confident that I know all there is to know about Titanic. I wonder if there is a prize for those who get every question right. I play. I get two wrong. I thank heaven a klaxon didn’t go off when I erred so embarrassingly. I slink out of the gallery muttering imprecations about Bruce Ismay. How am I supposed to know what he did with the rest of his life? Who cares that his frickin’ racehorse won the Derby? (Researcher field notes) Above and beyond the mistaken myths enshrined in popular memory, our archival research reveals that the entire Titanic complex is replete with misunderstandings. Almost every aspect of the sinking, apart from the timing of the iceberg collision (11:40 p.m.) and the stern section’s final plunge (2:20 a.m.), is misapprehended at best and misrepresented at worst. Despite three official enquiries, there is no consensus on the causes of the accident, which has led to endless debates about the details of the disaster (Maltin and Aston 2010). Did the band play “Nearer, My God, to Thee” at the end and if so which version?; were steerage passengers locked below decks or denied access to the lifeboats?; did the Californian ignore Titanic’s distress flares or was there a “mystery ship” between them?; were panicking passengers shot by the first officer, who then took his own life?; did Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon bribe the seamen on board Lifeboat One, with a view to standing off and staying safe rather than returning to rescue the dying?; did the stricken ship split in half or sink in one piece, as was widely assumed at the time? Added to all this is the misunderstanding caused by the basic layout of the ship (which was a labyrinthine maze of corridors, stairwells, and bulkheads), the misunderstanding occasioned by the band’s sprightly playing of upbeat ragtime standards (which led many to underestimate the seriousness of the situation), the misunderstanding many passengers felt when first urged to abandon ship (most were reluctant to leave a large, warm, well-lit luxury liner for a tiny lifeboat on the cold, dark North Atlantic), the misunderstanding among passing ships when they discovered Titanic was in trouble (the Californian thought its distress flares were fireworks), the misunderstanding back on shore when news of the sinking broke (initial reports suggested everyone survived and the damaged vessel was being towed to Halifax), the misunderstanding over who exactly died and who didn’t (due to typographic errors in the bulletins issued by White Star), the misunderstanding surrounding the total number of people on board (which is still not settled, despite a century of discussion) and, most incredibly of all, the misunderstanding about where the wireless-equipped liner actually foundered (the wreck was found fifteen miles from its final broadcast position). All of these unfathomable issues have been compounded and perpetuated by one hundred years of cultural representations, not least the public enquiries which were riven with conflicting eyewitness testimony, some of which was willful White Star misinformation (Lightoller 1935). First officer Murdoch’s portrayal in Cameron’s Titanic, for example, caused a storm of controversy in the Scottish sailor’s home town (Barczewski 2004), as did the stereotyped depiction of Irish emigrants in steerage, who were “Riverdancing as the ship went down” (Donnelly 2004), as did the insinuation that Titanic was badly built, since the Olympic had a long, successful, accident-free life and was known as “Old Reliable” (Johnston 2008): When oh when are people going to stop banging on about design faults? If the design was lethal, then how come her sister ship the Olympic sailed for years across the Atlantic before being scrapped? They were the same basic design after all. (Diddleypete, netnography)

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Brand Titanic, then, is not unlike a cultural iceberg, where surface facts belie the fallacies beneath. The same is true of consumer reaction. On the one hand, most of our informants are familiar with the unsinkable selling proposition, succinctly summarized by a somewhat cynical interviewee as “it sailed, it sank, people died.” On the other hand, all sorts of idiosyncratic misunderstandings are apparent. The dates, the dimensions, the destinations, the departure times, the direction it was sailing, the details of the captain, crew, construction, controversies, conspiracies, etc. are routinely misreported, even by self-styled experts. This inconsistency- filled discourse, of course, is not necessarily a brand negative, since it raises questions, stimulates debate and perpetuates the conversation. Nor, for that matter, is it alleviated by exhibitors’ attempts to explain the twists and turns of the tragedy: To broaden my knowledge of the Titanic, I visited an exhibition. It consisted of displays of memorabilia taken from the Titanic and its sister ships. There were cards on the walls taking you through the story of the Titanic. To be honest, I thought it was hard to follow. In the end I just walked around in a bit of a daze, confused about what order I was supposed to be doing it in. (Clare, introspection) When asked, moreover, about the misapprehensions, the marketing manager of Harland & Wolff rolled his eyes and shook his head. He’d been approached by innumerable ill-informed reporters and television producers with a hare-brained theory to prove, whether it be the substandard workmanship of his forebears or the yarn that Titanic and Olympic were swapped surreptitiously as part of an insurance scam: Informant: I’m sure you know the myth of the insurance swindle. Well, we have concrete proof that Titanic and Olympic weren’t swapped. The fixtures and fittings of the Olympic were sold to a hotel in the north-east of England [the White Swan Hotel, Alnwick, Northumberland]. A few years ago, we refurbished them and when we removed the wooden paneling the works number on the back was 400, not 401. Interviewer: 400 being Olympic and 401 Titanic. Informant: Exactly. There was no secret switchover, no insurance plot hatched by White Star. The nonsense that some people talk about Titanic. You wouldn’t believe what I hear in here. It got so bad that we produced an education pack. It explains the facts and tells the true story of Titanic. Interviewer: So, you’ve cured the problem? Informant: No. No. The problem can’t be cured. People believe what they want to believe. The pack doesn’t make much difference. There’s no telling them. (Sales manager, interview) The owners of the brand aren’t alone in their exasperation, either. Consider the reaction of one affronted informant when faced with a flagrant fallacy in Orlando, home to the world’s longest-running exhibition of Titanica: When I worked in Disney World, Florida, as a cultural representative, our job was to tell visitors about where we were from. One day in work I overheard one of my colleagues from Liverpool telling guests that the Titanic was built in Liverpool. I was in shock! I couldn’t believe she didn’t know it was built in Belfast. I just took it for granted because I knew the Titanic was built in Belfast, everyone else did too. Needless to say I wasn’t long in letting her know of her mistake! (Ian, introspection).

Myth as Medication

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Myth may be a pejorative term for many – not excluding Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) who denounced his compatriots’ belief in the “myth” of the French Revolution while lauding the mythical beliefs of South American Indians – but within the consumer research community, an efficacious perspective prevails. Espoused by Holt and Thompson in particular, this regards myth as a salve, an emollient, a marketing-mediated medical intervention that alleviates, at least temporarily, the existential anxieties of our contradiction-striated consumer culture. Thompson and Holt’s salvific stance isn’t short of empirical support (e.g., Levy 1981, Hirschman 2000; Muñiz and Schau 2005; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). But as Kozinets (2008) adroitly asks in his analysis of techno paradoxes – not least the Titanic, which he includes in Figure 1, but doesn’t specifically discuss in tech-topian terms – what are the implications when the plaster itself is paradoxical, when the cure is contradictory, when the infirmary is infirm? If powerful bands are characterized by ambivalent meanings, inbuilt ambiguities, a paradoxical essence (Brown et al. 2003), how can they provide the perfect palliative that the myth doctors prescribe? These questions are directly relevant to Titanic culture, which is nothing if not contradictory. The sinking of the unsinkable is itself a contradiction, as are watertight compartments that aren’t, as is the Titanic’s original status as a nondescript ship. As our archival analysis reveals, up until the sinking, Titanic was regarded as remarkably unremarkable compared to its big sister and alpha predecessor, Olympic, which was launched the year before to worldwide acclaim (Johnston 2008). The back-up vessel, by contrast, was launched with comparatively little fanfare or awestruck media attention. In truth, Titanic’s high speed transatlantic dash was designed to generate the press attention that had been lacking up to that point. At the time, Titanic was just another enormous White Star liner, the second of three “Olympic class” carriers: You know, Titanic was not that significant. Even in its day. Titanic was the second of its class, the Olympic class. It was not that big a deal. The Olympic was the important one, a step change. Olympic was the greatest ship of its day, not Titanic. When Olympic was launched, it was painted white so that it would look good in photographs and publicity. The Titanic wasn’t. All that stuff you read that Titanic was a wonder of the world. It wasn’t. Well, it was. But not really. Not back then. (Sales manager, interview) Titanic may not have been a big deal at the time – albeit the photographs and newspaper reports of its launch indicate it was far from insignificant – but it is undeniable that many benefits flowed from the greatest new product failure in history, paradoxical though this appears. Apart from the seafaring benefactions that the sinking precipitated – changes to lifeboat regulations, permanent North Atlantic ice patrol, round-the-clock wireless communications, international agreement on distress signals – it’s evident that many individuals and institutions gained by association with the steamship (see Heyer 1995). The Marconi wireless system benefitted enormously from its starring role in the sinking, as did David Sarnoff, the radio operator who parlayed his bit part into a stellar career at RCA. , a third-rate rag at the time, established its reputation as the newspaper of record thanks to its accurate reporting of the Titanic tragedy. J.J. Astor, the richest man on board and a pariah in American polite society, was redeemed by his self-sacrificing behavior as the majestic craft went down. Harvard University got a badly needed new library, thanks to the generosity of an on-board benefactor whose husband and son didn’t survive. The “unsinkable” Molly Brown didn’t do too badly either, nor did Captain Rostron of the rescue ship Carpathia, who was lionized for the rest of his life, nor did the surviving babes-in-arms on board, such as , who were feted in

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their declining years at Titanic conventions and commemorations. All reaped untoward rewards from the nightmare. That said, the reputations of several key players were ruined as a consequence: Bruce Ismay, , Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and Captain of the Californian, for example (see Molony 2008). But for all the appalling loss of life, it’s undeniable that the disaster was a good career move for many, what Žižek (2009), discussing Cameron’s Titanic, terms the “ambiguity of obscenity.” That is, human catastrophe as a blessing in disguise. James Cameron, lest we forget, also won the ship-shape sweepstake, as did Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio and Celine Dion. Ditto salvage teams, auction houses, maritime museums, memorabilia merchants and itinerant exhibition impresarios, like Inc., who boast that 25 million paying customers have visited their blockbuster shows in Orlando, Atlanta, Las Vegas and elsewhere. It thus seems that broken brands can be good business and, just as being complicit with the illicit is beguilingly aberrant (Goulding et al. 2009), so too myth can medicate even when the medicine is distasteful. However, this appropriation of the appalling – attempts to capitalize on catastrophe – is not without countervailing consumer backlash: Instead of being seen as the disaster that it was, the Titanic is being turned into a goldmine by the management and marketing and entrepreneurial skills of branding consultants. It’s sickening. (Julie, introspection)

In all the Titanic hype, where is the memorial to the victims? That is a good question. The answer is that there isn’t a memorial because it’s all about the money honey. (TJMcClean107, netnography)

When people are asked what they think or know about the Titanic, they seem to be able to recount the events which took place in the film and Celine Dion’s name would be mentioned on numerous occasions, due to the smash hit “”. This should not be how the younger generation remember or are taught history. Hollywood has taken advantage of the tragedy and has manipulated people into thinking this is the way in which the line of events happened. They are just out to make more money for themselves. They should think of the families and friends of those who died in the tragedy and make a film which they would be proud of, without all the hype behind it and such extensive merchandising techniques. (Jemma, introspection) Clearly, the Titanic is no laughing matter. Ironically, though, the comedy of the catastrophe is everywhere apparent. Our historical research reveals that many of those on board treated the collision and its aftermath in a light-hearted manner (Lord 1955). Some passengers played soccer with chunks of ice on the promenade deck, others threw blocks of ice into their friends’ beds for fun, yet others dropped fragments into their drinks to freshen things up. The words “watch out for small ice” were used as a jokey salutation between members of the boat crew when changing shift or climbing into the crow’s nest. Many passengers made frivolous remarks about the life-jackets’ fit or fashion or figure-flattering effect prior to putting them on, or wondered whether appropriate provision had been made for young children and companion animals. Even the radio operators joked with the captain about the most appropriate distress signal, whether to employ the traditional C-Q-D or the new-fangled S-O-S. Captain Smith recommended the latter, with a laugh, “since it might be your only chance to use it” (Bartlett 2010, 130).

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Graveyard humor in the face of impending tragedy is of course understandable – consider the Titanic quips that survivors exchanged when their cruise ship, Explorer, hit an Antarctic iceberg and capsized in November 2007 (Chittenden 2007) – but the comedy has continued ever since. Humor is rarely absent in cultural representations of the sinking, such as the first Hollywood talkie which had the band playing “Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be?” as the steamship went down. Raise the Titanic was not only a hugely expensive box office disaster, but it provoked the legendary quip from producer Lew Grade, “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!” Cameron’s Titanic is so full of in-jokes, gross-out humor and knockabout moments – the spitting competition, for instance, the Wayne’s World-esque line “angels might fly out of your arse,” Ismay’s philistine reaction to Rose’s mention of Freud’s symbolic phallus, “is he on the passenger list?” – that some film analysts maintain it owes much to the screwball comedy genre (Lubin 1999). The deleted scenes include an outtake where the Unsinkable Molly Brown asks a bar steward for more ice as bergs loom menacingly in the background. The humor, what’s more, doesn’t stop with cinematic moments of light relief (as in Titanic’s cameo appearances in humorous movies like Ghostbusters 2, Time Bandits, Cavalcade and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked). It is found in many cultural forms from lists of top ten on-line Titanic jokes, through the tourist industry’s annual Titanic Awards for the worst holiday resort, via spoof academic articles on the psychopathology of the iceberg, to the song cycle about Shine, an African-American trickster figure who survives the Anglo-Saxon sinking (Biel 2012). It is hard, furthermore, not to chuckle on discovering that Robert Ballard’s main rival for recovering the wreck had previously cut his teeth on searches for Noah’s Ark and took decisions on oceanographic search patterns with the aid of a pet chimpanzee. Ditto the memorabilia, which is often in dubious taste, whether it be swizzle sticks, ice-cube molds, soap- on-a-rope and bath-time playthings in the shape of the steamship, or tongue-in-cheek T-shirts that either proclaim I Survived the Titanic (and in much smaller letters) Exhibition at the or announce the wearer’s lifelong membership of the Titanic Swimming Club, estd. 1912 (Deuchar 1996; McKeown 2012). Humor, moreover, is never far away from our informants. One tells of her father’s response on picking her up from a showing of Cameron’s Titanic (“‘Well, did the ship sink and everyone die in the end?...ha, ha, ha?’ He thought it was so funny because he set us off into a fit of sobbing again!”). Another reports on his experiences as a barman in a pub designed to look like Titanic’s first-class lounge (“people kept asking for more ice or claiming to feel a bit seasick as they staggered across the floor”). Yet others, whose forefathers formerly worked in Harland & Wolff, jokingly blame the sinking on their ancestors’ bad workmanship (“And, oh my God, the bolts shot off the side of the ship…My great-great-granddad didn’t do a good job there!”) or tell tales of filling tiny terraced houses with magnificent fixtures and fittings purloined from the luxury liner (“visitors used to ask ‘What time do you set sail?’”). Even the marketing manager of Harland & Wolff acknowledges that jokes and banter about Titanic are not unusual when clients are relaxing after a hard day’s negotiation over multi-million dollar contracts (“Titanic is a foot in the door,” he concedes). By far the most common reaction, though, is a simple refusal to take the selling or the sinking of Titanic too seriously, since the seriousness of the sinking and its selling is unspeakable: We build hotels like we used to build ships. Then take the people who stay in them to see where we used to build the ships. New proposals for the Titanic Quarter will cut out the middle man: the shipyard will become a giant hotel (Patterson 2006, 195).

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A while back, I was making a presentation to a gathering of potential investors in America. I’d made up little gifts for them. They were bits of wood from the blocks that supported Titanic’s keel during construction. They were polished up, with an inscribed brass plate, and placed in a nice velvet bag. All very classy. However, the person who introduced me to the crowd said that the gift blocks had come from the Titanic itself. That I’d been down to the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic to pick them up! He made the story up on the spot. He told the crowd what they wanted to hear. He was a marketing man. Like you. (Laughs.) (Property developer, interview) Joking aside, the salient point is that Titanic’s contradictory cultural complex complies with Holt and Cameron’s (2010) contention that iconic brands are born in moments of societal rupture and ideological opportunity. In his in-depth study of the sinking’s cultural resonance, Biel (2012) stresses that Titanic wasn’t so much timeless as timely. The accident attained iconic status because it coincided with contemporary concerns over religiosity, immigration, feminism, and class conflict and by highlighting these issues in a dramatic fashion (e.g., “Nearer, My God, to Thee”), Titanic served as a lightning rod for society’s sense of self. The second wave of Titanicity, similarly, transpired in the mid-1950s when the sudden death visited upon the steamship’s passengers resonated with a society worried about no-warning thermo-nuclear immolation. The third wave, which surged in the wake of Ballard’s discovery of the wreck using advanced undersea technology, struck a chord during the new dawn, hi-tech, rip-roaring Reagan years that were pricked by the Challenger disaster, in a terrible echo of 1912 (Howells 2012). The contemporary tsunami, what is more, cannot be divorced from the nostalgia boom that has permeated western society in the first decade of the 21st century (Reynolds 2011) and which is related in turn to a series of tumultuous events – from the Iraq invasion to the Occupy movement – that has shaken western culture and triggered a turn to times past, tragedies included (Lowenthal 2012).

Myth as Melodrama

Curing a contradiction with a contradiction seems contradictory in itself, but it is arguable that paradox, oxymoron, tautology, non sequitur and so on enhance rather than detract from the palliative process. Great works of art, poetry especially, are predicated on paradox (Brooks 1968) and, as myth-shaped consumer research is pre-eminently a poetic enterprise (Sherry and Schouten 2002), the attendant uncertainties, ambiguities and imponderables are surely better regarded as improvements not impairments, embellishments instead of errata. This ethos of augmentation is equally evident in our third myth mode, where the term is employed as an exalted word for story (Hopkinson and Hogg 2006; Levy 2006). The mythopoeic pushers of consumer research may not be trafficking in myth as such, which is formally defined as an anonymously authored hereditary tale (Stern 1995) that “explains the origin of life, religious beliefs, and the forces of nature as some kind of supernatural occurrence, or that recounts the deeds of traditional superheroes” (Morner and Rausch 1995, 141). But they are definitely dealing in stories. Magnified versions of mundane stories admittedly. Melodramas as often as not. And, when it comes to magnified stories in general and melodramas in particular, RMS Titanic is not found wanting. Yarns and fables and legends and superstitions accumulate around the brand like barnacles (Foster 1997). Innumerable movies, musicals, miniseries, documentaries, poems, plays, operas, murals, periodicals, pop songs, museum displays,

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photographic exhibitions, heritage centers, computer games, light shows and so on, have been conceived or created or curated or composed (Wilson 2012). The artwork alone is vast, especially on-line. There are websites and appreciation societies beyond number. The first film was made less than a month after the sinking and starred one of the survivors. More than one hundred Titanic-themed Tin Pan Alley songs were copyrighted in 1912 alone. Over 2,000 books have been published about the steamship, everything from the story of the iceberg to studies of passengers’ companion animals. There’s a vampire novel set on the rescue ship Carpathia (Forbeck 2012); there’s a Sherlock Holmes sequel, where the great detective grapples with Moriarty’s vengeful brother on the boat deck (Seil 1996); there’s a teenage mutant horror story that treats Titanic as a 21st century plague ship (Bateman 2007); there are all sorts of heartrending romances, heart-stopping thrillers and heartfelt family sagas, such as Danielle Steel’s (1991) No Greater Love and Louise Patten’s (2010) Good as Gold, that use Titanic as a colorful backdrop and its sinking as crude but effective plot device. There are works of hard-core pornography set on the throbbing, pounding, heaving steamship (McCaughan 1998). There is a strangely affecting short story, based upon a tabloid headline in the National Inquirer, about the ghost of a Titanic victim trapped for eternity in a waterbed (Butler 1997). There is an equally spooky police procedural that passes caustic comment on Belfast city’s commercialization of the catastrophe: “Look at that,” McKenna said, indicating the stretch of land around the cranes. “They’re calling it the Titanic Quarter now. Can you believe that?” Fegan didn’t answer. “There’s a fortune being made out of that land. It’s good times, Gerry. The contracts, the grants, all that property they’re building, and everybody’d got their hand out. But, Jesus, they’re naming it after a fucking boat that sank first time it hit the water. Isn’t that a laugh? This city gave the world the biggest disaster ever to sail the sea and we’re proud of it. Only in Belfast, eh?” (Neville 2010, 20). And the melodrama doesn’t end there. As archival analysis shows, the calamity is a crucible of conspiracy theories and tall tales (Ward 2012). The former range from the aforementioned claim that the sinking was an elaborate insurance scam by Bruce Ismay, which went disastrously wrong, through the unfounded rumor that Titanic was cursed by an Ancient Egyptian mummy in the cargo hold, to the crazy contention that the accident was a Dan Brown- style Jesuit conspiracy led by Father Browne (of Titanic photographs fame). The latter comprise exaggerated narratives, tales as tall as the Titanic itself (Lord 1986). These include everything from the fanciful story that Harvard undergraduates are required to take a swimming test as stipulated in the will of Eleanor Widener (the survivor who endowed the eponymous library in memory of her bibliophile son, Harry) to the rather more remunerative theory that the Titanic contained a vast treasure trove of gold bullion, silver ingots, precious jewels and so forth (or, conversely, was ironically transporting a consignment of domestic refrigerators and industrial ice-making machines). All sorts of eerie premonitions have been reported furthermore, albeit some are more believable than others. At one end of the fidelity spectrum is the far-fetched yarn that the ship’s cat and its kittens perspicaciously disembarked at Southampton. Somewhere in the middle is the unproven assertion that fifty-five pre-booked passengers had bad feelings about the voyage and cancelled their journeys. The opposite end is occupied by the incontrovertible fact that Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novella Futility tells the tale of a brand new luxury liner which collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic en route to New York, and sinks with huge loss of life due to a

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shortage of lifeboats. Fourteen years before the event, Robertson named his fictional steamship Titan (Behe 1988). Such omens and presentiments are readily dismissed, but the spookiness of the ship is undeniable. Several scientists who have visited the sunken vessel and encountered the so-called “ghosts of ,” report strange, spine-chilling, goose-pimpled, hair-raising sensations. As indeed do some of our informants: To think that the remains lay at the bottom of the ocean undisturbed for so long, it’s actually quite spine tingling. Seeing footage of it through the diver’s cameras it’s hard to believe that people were once on board the ship. Seeing bits and pieces still intact, people’s possessions lying still is incredible too. It’s very eerie looking at the ship under the water, as if it’s a ghost ship with many watery souls still on board. (Nicola, introspection)

So weird and wonderful are the “cultural effusions” (Barczewski 2004, xiv) surrounding Titanic that it is difficult to know where the truth stops and fiction starts. The legendary conman Titanic Thompson was supposed to have been on board (hence the nickname) but wasn’t. The legendary African-American boxer, Jack Johnston, was allegedly denied passage by a racist booking agent (who said “we ain’t haulin’ no coal”), but wasn’t. The legendary psychic W.T. Stead predicted the disaster in several short stories (one of which described an encounter between the real life Captain Smith and an iceberg) yet he boarded Titanic anyway and failed to survive its sinking. The legendary fictional character Jack Dawson was figment of James Cameron’s imagination, but the grave of a near namesake in Halifax’s Fairview Lawn cemetery, is visited by fans of the blockbuster movie, many of whom leave tokens of undying affection (Nash and Lahti 1999). Meanwhile, the legendary stoker Frank “Lucks” Towers, who survived the Titanic, survived the sinking of the Empress of Ireland two years later and survived the sinking of the Lusitania, which was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, may or may not have existed (the jury is out, as it is on the claim that Towers’ incredible story inspired Rod Sterling’s Twilight Zone). The Titanic, it appears, is capable of accommodating just about every first class fable, second class yarn and third class shaggy dog story that chooses to clamber on board. It also serves as a storytelling crucible for consumers. A number of our informants’ unprompted responses to Titanic comprised adaptations of the tragic archetype to their personal circumstances. Some refer to the terrible loss of life that night and relate it to sudden deaths of their loved ones though accident or disease. Some interpret Titanic in professional terms, as an emblem of their ambitions, aspirations and dashed hopes in unsuccessful attempts to forge careers, build businesses or attain educational qualifications. Some treat Titanic as a “precedent and template” (Bergfelder and Street 2004, 1) for analogous human calamities like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, the Fukushima earthquake or the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some see Titanic as a symbol of Ireland’s war-torn society and the litany of unnecessary killings that have occurred in the century since the ship was built in Belfast. Some even turn the tragedy on its head, arguing that Titanic is ultimately inspirational, a necessary reminder to live every day to the full, to make the most of the moment, to count one’s many and varied blessings because death and disaster might be lurking right around the corner. Such consumer interpretations suggest that Titanic is more than a ship that sank or a terrible tragedy, let alone a story-stoked brand. It is an abiding symbol, a morality tale that calls down the ages, an encapsulation of the human condition. Thus one informant contends that the

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Ship of Dreams is indeed a ship of dreams. Another regards the legendary liner as an epic Greek tragedy, a metaphorical evocation of humankind’s vale of tears. For yet another, Titanic isn’t so much the acme of catastrophe, the quintessence of calamity, as the storytelling equivalent of a perpetual motion machine: The Titanic was always referred to as the Ship of Dreams and it is clear it meant different things to different people and like those people I myself have my own dreams and I hope that I will get everything I want in life no matter how many icebergs there are in the way. It makes me realize that no dream is too small or impossible if you really want it, but there will be times when it will be more difficult than others or seem impossible but you can make it. (Wayne, introspection)

The phenomenal hype surrounding the Titanic is not as a result of its engineering qualities, but the sinking as almost a metaphor for life’s tragedy. The stories of human relationships within the tragedy, the fact that the full spectrum of human life and society was there, the different nationalities, the thwarted hope of those wanting to improve their lives, man versus merciless nature, man cut down to size in the face of almighty god under the starry heavens, the fact that it was the greatest man-made object anywhere in the world at the time, the unbelievable loyalty and dedication of the captain and the crew. This was a tragedy where the reader could not fail to be affected. It was a film waiting to be made. (JSavo89, netnography)

The stories are unending. We have a master-plan for the next three years, based on brainstorming sessions. But they are self-perpetuating. We have human interest stories, engineering stories, cultural stories, design stories, architectural stories, historical stories, inspirational stories, off-beat stories, quirky things. The stories themselves generate stories, because we get local coverage of the international coverage in Fodor, National Geographic, The Economist and around the United States generally. There’s always something. Always new angles. We’re holding stuff back we have so much. It’s non-stop. (PR consultant, interview)

Myth as Milieu and Metamorphosis

If the storied side of mythopoeic consumer research is stressed by all and sundry, the same cannot be said for milieu. Despite the fact that many JCR articles are spatially emplaced, milieu tends to generate less discussion than it warrants (Sherry 2013), possibly as a consequence of CCT’s eschewal of context, which was purportedly hampering its progress (Arnould and Thompson 2005). Regardless of the reasons – and notwithstanding Holt’s (2004, 58-9) paean to “populist worlds” – milieu is an Olympic to melodrama’s Titanic, important yet overlooked. Although, as we have seen, Titanic is often regarded as a universal archetype – Pellegrino (1990), for instance, compares the ship to Albert Einstein, the consummate scientist, and Jack the Ripper, the ultimate serial killer – numerous places and nations are associated with the liner. From the very outset, the myths and legends surrounding the unsinkable ship have taken on a nationalistic cast (Howells 2012). The interpretation of the incident, for instance, was very different on either side of the Atlantic. For the British, it was a manifestation of admirable sang froid in the face of catastrophe – no panic, dutiful crew, politeness prevailed, orderly queues at the lifeboats.

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In North America, by contrast, the entire episode was seen as a shambolic example of English ineptitude, inefficiency, amateurism and arrogance (Biel 2012). J. Bruce Ismay, the British managing director of White Star, who saved his skin by taking a place in the last lifeboat when hundreds of steerage passengers were denied the opportunity, was vilified by the American press, which dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay (Wade 1986). The official report on the sinking didn’t pull its anti-British punches either, castigating the crew for its complacency and disorganization: “It is said by some well-meaning persons that the best discipline prevailed. If this is discipline, what would have been disorder?” (Wade 1986, 290). These contrasts, according to Howells (2012), cannot be divorced from real-politic in general and the respective standing of the great powers in particular – America emerging as an imperial colossus, Britain on the slippery slope of incipient decline. However, they demonstrate how the same sequence of events can have different meanings in different places. Indeed, German interpretations of the Titanic tragedy are very different again, not least as a source of wartime propaganda (King 2004), as indeed are Scandinavian interpretations (Björkfors 2004), as are those of the Irish. For Hill (2004), Titanic symbolizes the socio-cultural schism that has obtained on the island of Ireland in the century since the sinking. The Titanic was built in Belfast, an industrial enclave of a predominantly agricultural island, by thousands of Irish workmen most of whom were devout Protestants and Unionists. That is, British in outlook and allegiance. If not quite a Protestant ship for Protestant people, Titanic was British to the last bolt and rivet (Foster 1997). The shipyard’s employees were exclusively drawn from a single, bitterly sectarian, section of Irish society, even though Catholics comprised 25% of the local population. The ship was built, what’s more, at the height of Ireland’s “Home Rule” campaign, which agitated for a modicum of independence from British dominion. This prospect filled Ulster Protestants with dread, since they’d be a tiny minority huddled in one corner of a predominantly Catholic island. Thus the success of the Belfast shipyard – the biggest and best in the world – denoted continuing Protestant ascendency, as did its pride and joy, the most titanic steamship ever built. Inevitably, the catastrophic failure of its single greatest achievement was a devastating blow to Protestant pride. It was a blow that was reinforced by Irish partition in 1922, when the six northern counties clung on to British citizenship, like beggars at a feast. Further humiliation was heaped on the hubristic city by drastic, Detroit-style industrial decline and a low-level civil war that blighted the final three decades of the twentieth century (Neil 2001). The urban rot was only stopped in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, when the city finally awoke from its sectarian slumbers (Neil 2010). For most of this period, Titanic was a taboo word (Hill 2004). Harland & Wolff actively opposed any discussions and/or debates about the disaster, even refusing to accommodate the (Northern Irish) producer of the 1958 movie A Night to Remember, despite his family connections to the firm. For Foster (1997, 76), Titanic symbolized nothing less than the “thwarted nationhood” of Ulster Protestants: “At the level of community dreamwork, the foundering of the ship and the founding of Northern Ireland were intertwined; the ship became Northern Ireland…but it always in danger of being sunk by the chillingly impersonal iceberg dynamics of Irish nationalism.” Symbolic ship of state, or not, the simple fact is that Titanic was denied for decades. Meanwhile, the world woke up to its enduring appeal. The remarkable photographs of the wreck by Robert Ballard may have captivated television audiences around the globe but in the north of Ireland – then embroiled in a prolonged spasm of sectarian conflict – the ship still symbolized

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societal divisions and continuing discrimination against Catholic workers. In her quasi- autobiographical novel, Titanic Town, Mary Costello (1992) recounts an urban legend that the serial number of the ship enshrined anti-Catholic sentiments and how Protestant workmen profaned the Pope as construction progressed. These myths are still extant, as our data demonstrate, even though they’re entirely without foundation: My only opinion toward the shipyard it was built in was instilled to me by my father at a young age. This was that it was a predominantly Protestant work force who subjected Catholics workers to beatings and threw them into the water at the docks. Another memory I recalled was the hull number 3909 04 assigned to the Titanic, if written in longhand and looked at in a mirror read NO POPE. Of course this is just urban legend and not even slightly true. (Martin, introspection)

I asked my father how he felt towards the Titanic. He told me some interesting facts, one of which was that very few Catholics were employed to work on the Titanic or even at the docks at all. “The Titanic was built with only Protestant hands”, he says, almost indicating that that is why it was such a disaster. (Mairead, introspection) Come Cameron’s blockbuster, the release of which coincided with Northern Ireland’s return to comparative normality, the Titanic was increasingly seen as an exploitable asset. According to a 1999 editorial in the province’s most influential daily newspaper (Barczewski 2004, 237): The possibility of promoting Belfast as the birthplace of the doomed ship should have been spotted years ago. Imagine how America would have sold the story had the yard been located in the United States…It is an ace card in our tourism pack, and should now be played with vigor…The Titanic tragedy focused world attention on Belfast in 1912, and now, almost a century on, it can again have the same impact. In marketing parlance, the story of the liner is a unique selling point for Northern Ireland, and could open the door to thousands of tourists. This prospect, along with ensuing grand plans to turn the derelict shipyard into a massive riverside redevelopment project called Titanic Quarter, was initially met with distrust, dismay, and outright hostility (Neil 2006). Money talks, however, and when the expensive apartments, marinas and recreational facilities started to rise on the site of the old slipways – and the centenary of the sinking appeared on the horizon – the pot of gold at the end of the Titanic rainbow loomed ever larger in civic consciousness. This culminated in a lavishly appointed, £100 million visitors’ center devoted to all things Titanic, albeit the ship has been radically reframed and reinterpreted as part of this rehabilitation process. Far from being a disaster, Titanic is now a signifier of Ulster’s technological prowess. Far from besmirching Belfast’s image – the flawed product of a flawed society – Titanic now symbolizes what the “comeback city” could aspire to once again. Far from being the cockpit of crude sectarianism, where Catholics were unwelcome at best and persecuted at worst, Titanic now stands for peace, prosperity, progress and political power sharing. No longer a Protestant ship for a Protestant people, Titanic has been stripped of its bigotry and repainted in catholic colors (catholic with a small c, that is, open to all consumers and cultures regardless of religious denomination or political affiliation). The only barrier to entry is an ability to pay at the ticket booth: The signature building has many parallels with Belfast itself. Just as Titanic was at the cutting edge of technology and innovation in the nineteen hundreds, the same is true today in the new Belfast, the renaissance city, which is at the forefront of so many things

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– aerospace, wind turbines, robotic technology, culturally too. It’s an inspirational message that’s reflected in the signature building, which has the latest design technology and is at the leading edge of visitor experience. (Project manager, interview) More than that, Titanic has been recoded as Irish. In its day, when Britannia ruled the waves, Titanic was regarded as the epitome of Britishness, not only by the Ulstermen who built it but also in the rest of Ireland, where the sinking was seen as God’s punishment for Protestant pride and Britain’s perfidy. It remained so for decades thereafter. Despite the unfortunate fact that a large proportion of steerage passengers were Irish emigrants, no memorial to the country’s Titanic victims was erected in Eire until 1998. According to Hill (2004), this remarkable turnaround was triggered by Cameron’s blockbuster movie, which portrayed the steamship in an ethereal Celtic light. Everything from the Enya-inspired soundtrack, through the wild Irish jigging below deck, to one character’s claim that “fifteen thousand Irish hands built this ship,” illustrates Cameron’s Hibernian refit of the craft, as did his representation of the Anglo-Saxon first-class cadre as the bad guys. Painting Titanic green in this way would have caused a riot in the north of Ireland for most of the twentieth century. However, it had the miraculous effect of making the tainted ship acceptable to the Catholic community and indeed Ireland as a whole. Cameron’s portrayal of Irishness may have been grotesquely stereotypical – an on-screen theme pub with added special effects – but it resonated with a war-weary society in the north and an emergent Celtic Tiger in the south. It thus set the scene and paved the way for today’s money-spinning Titanic attractions: The people in Belfast didn’t speak about Titanic once it sank. They just stopped talking about it. Let’s not go there, lads. You have to wonder whether Titanic would be established in Belfast as it is now if the Titanic movie hadn’t been such a success, or a success story. It’s kind of ironic that they’re building a world around a ship that sank, essentially, and 1500 people lost their lives. (Movie director, interview) It thus seems that the Titanic’s loss has been Belfast’s gain. And while the old tensions that the ship represents still remain, they’ll be conveniently ignored while the cash registers are ringing and tourist dollars fill the former graving docks. This isn’t so much a process of brand co-creation as a co-conspiracy of consumer silence. Publically, no one wants to rock the boat. Show me the money is the only show in town. Belfast’s Signature Building has papered over the city’s cultural contradictions with dark rides and computer graphics, the bread and circuses of the 21st century. On the surface, then, Titanic has evolved though a three-stage process of countermemory making. It was neglected, then accepted, then idealized thereafter. Arguably it has come full circle, from silence to silence. However, the silence of shame amid the tumult of bigotry has been replaced by the silence of selfishness against a background of branding. Cash flows rather than ice floes top today’s Titanic agenda. In this milieu at least, the myths and misfortunes, have metamorphosed into money making marketing opportunities.

TITANIC REFLECTION AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

The above account of Titanic’s rebranding parallels Thompson and Tian’s (2008) myth-shaped study of the New South. In addition to the Celtic connection, the neo-romantic archetype of hubris and nemesis is shared by both, as is the attempted creation of counter-memories that are modern, meaningful and money-minded. Our maritime myth-mash is more than a distant echo of Appalachia, though. Titanic’s myth-match mirrors many of the published articles on

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consumer mythopoetics. All four of Kozinets’ (2008) ideological techno-narratives are evident in the Titanic complex, for instance. All four of Barbara Stern’s (1994) archetypal mythoi are apparent, tragedy above all. When Muñiz and Schau (2005) attribute the Apple Newton’s consumer appeal to its untimely demise, they could be writing about Titanic, which was cancelled in such a cruel and catastrophic fashion. The myth of Prometheus, unearthed by Kozinets (2002) at Burning Man, is integral to Titanic culture, especially in the small city that built the monster ship from scratch: Harland & Wolff were responsible for producing an amazing ship which was the largest moving object at that time. How amazing is it to know that something so remarkable came from Belfast. It was a big accomplishment for little old Belfast to be recognized for their part in the ship. I never imagined that something so astonishing could come from Belfast. I mean we are always known here for the bombs and the riots, but for once we have a piece of gold that no one else can claim. (Elizabeth, introspection) The same is true of Star Trek-style utopianism (Kozinets 2001), since Titanic was a ship of dreams in its day and a harbinger of brighter tomorrows right now. True, the inverse panopticon noted in ESPN Zone – which functioned as a delightfully heightened version of reality (Kozinets et al. 2004) – is itself inverted in Titanic mythology, which represents a heightened version of disaster and human suffering. Nevertheless, the nearly analogous notion of the doppelgänger brand (Thompson et al. 2006) could have been developed with the liner in mind (for those who subscribe to the insurance swap scam, that is). Nor, for that matter, should we overlook the tribulations of American masculinity (Holt and Thompson 2004), which were riveted into the hull of Titanic, both at the time of the disaster (when male passengers’ heroic self-sacrifice resonated with an increasingly emasculated society), and in the aftermath of Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck (when he was lauded as an heroic throwback to the American man of action earlier embodied by Kit Carson, Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett and Co.). Titanic’s subsumption of extant consumer myths could be extended almost indefinitely, from the Russian doll model of narrative intermingling (cf. Diamond et al. 2009) – what Brown (2005, 176) terms “Matryoshka Marketing” – to the feminist neo-Jungian reflections of Elizabeth Hirschman (2000, pp.334-5), who contends that Cameron’s Titanic captures “the evolution of women’s roles in American culture over the course of the 20th century.” In so doing, she tugs at a strand of the Titanic tapestry that has been tightly woven from the start. The steamship went down at the zenith of the suffragist movement and the alleged nobility of the men on board was then regarded as a resounding response to the concurrent campaign for women’s rights (Biel 2012). As Larabee (1990) shows, the great ship was promptly reimagined in all sorts of grotesquely gynomorphic forms, from a virgin bride ravished by the masterful male iceberg to an avenging virago who castrated the cream of Anglo-Saxon manhood in a wanton act of premature emasculation. Clearly, copious consumer myths can be accommodated on Titanic. It is therefore tempting to infer that the legendary liner is a kind of master-myth, a mega-myth, an übermyth akin to the deep metaphors and prototypes that underpin consumer discourse (Veryzer and Hutchinson 1998; Zaltman 2003). The ship, certainly, is often referred to in quintessential terms, as the acme of catastrophe, as the ultimate warning from history, as a morality tale magnified many times over: When the dream ended in a nightmare, the material world lost its credibility and, for a moment in passing time, myth became reality. The Titanic’s mystique is therefore a poetic realm, in which her maiden voyage expresses the blind justice of Greek Tragedy

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and the allegorical warning of the medieval morality play. Here, the Titanic is an eternal symbol: She was, is, and will be. She was the Titans’ struggle against Jove, the Babylonians’ ziggurat to heaven. She was Lucifer’s fall from grace, the Night-Sea crossing of the medieval alchemists, and the moment of truth realized too late by the tragic hero whose aspirations led him fatally beyond his limitations. She is not mere history, but a parable to the effect that the mighty of each age must fall. In a word, she is Hubris (Wade 1986, 322-3). Attractive though it is, this idea of an ur-myth is regressively reductive, a new twist on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism or the one-brand-one-myth mentality that obtains among management consultants (Atkin 2004; Hanlon 2006; Kuenstler 2012; Randazzo 1993). Our research suggests that the perennial appeal of Titanic lies not in its monolithic monumentalism but in its multifariousness, its abundance, its ambiguity. Just as the mystique of the contemporaneous Gibson Girl was attributable to her nebulousness – she had something for everyone (Scott 2005) – so too Titanic’s status as the archetypal disaster is due to its myth-mixed plurivalence. That is to say, it is the ship’s myriad ambiguities, manifold imponderables, and copious contradictions that keep consumers captivated (McCaughan 1999). RMS Titanic is what movie director J.J. Abrams calls a “mystery box,” a container of infinite possibilities that continues to fascinate because it remains unopened (Rose 2011). Akin to Bigfoot, Mothman, the Marie Celeste, the Loch Ness Monster and KFC’s secret blend of herbs and spices, Titanic falls into the “unsolved mystery” category and is perpetuated thereby. Alongside Godzilla, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the “vampire squid” of Wall Street, Titanic is undead and undying. Metaphorical boxes, to be sure, aren’t exactly in short supply in marketing and consumer research and, for all its appeal, Abrams’ analogy hardly does justice to the prodigality of Titanic culture. Nor, for that matter, do the metaphorical alternatives posited by scholars of consumer myth making. These attempted encapsulations of the mythography of consumption are many and varied. They include mosaics, gestalts, manifolds, panopticons, dramas, and doppelgängers. Most, if not all of them, are adaptable to Titanic culture (as are the icebergs, onions, ladders, pyramids and flow charts of mainstream brand management). The basic problem, though, is that they are predicated on the premise of e pluribus unum, a single synoptic trope that corrals the copia. Titanic, by contrast, is characterized by ex uno pluries, an unstoppable outpouring of infinite variety. It is more akin to a kaleidoscope than a gestalt, a hall of mirrors than a mosaic, an Erector set than a manifold, a projective technique than principal components. The “culture” in Titanic culture is less a shared worldview or ideology than a culture in a Petri dish, a burgeoning brand bacteria, a flourishing myth mold, an amorphous amoeba that breeds with abandon. Protozoan analogies are fated to fall short too. As our epigraph indicates, myths are obscure in origin, protean in form and ambiguous in meaning. According to Barthes (1973), they cannot be considered abstract, purified essences. Myths are formless, unstable, nebulous “condensations” composed of yielding, shapeless, ambiguous associations. Even at their most pellucid, myths are surrounded by “a halo of virtualities where other possible meanings are floating” (Barthes 1973, 143). It follows that any attempt to concretize consumer myth-making is fraught with difficulty. This is not to suggest that iconic brands are blank spaces, or empty sets that sell, much less blend invisibly into the background (Coupland 2005). Merely that the pursuit of a definitive myth-descriptor is a quixotic quest, the consumer research equivalent of a unicorn hunt.

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Rather than continue to add to the raft of myth-representations, our Titanic research suggests that it’s time to tackle the troublesome issue of brand ambiguity. According to Kemp’s (2012) study of western cultural icons From Christ to Coke, outstanding symbolic objects are characterized by fuzzy boundaries, blurred edges, hazy outlines. The outer limits of icons are unfocussed, imprecise, ill-defined. This fuzziness is contrary to the conventional wisdom of branding, which has long lauded clarity, precision, specificity (Reeves 1961). Blurred edges are associated with myopia, after all, and that is something to be avoided at all costs (Levitt 1960). Fuzziness, nevertheless, is creeping into the branding conversation, largely on account of increasing consumer co-creation and the negotiation of meaning between customer-led organizations and vociferous brand communities (Cova et al. 2007; Fournier et al. 2005; McAlexander et al. 2002). Yet eradicating ambiguity, instead of embracing it, remains the received wisdom. As Bengtsson and Ostberg (2006, 88) observe, the “key aim in conventional brand management thinking is to streamline marketing communications so as always to communicate the same message. If a company stays true to its timeless essence over time it will, according to theory, achieve a clear uncluttered image in the consumers’ minds that is compelling because of its consistency and clarity.” The “ambiguity advantage” (Wilkinson 2006) remains unrecognized by many brand managers, even as its prevalence is increasingly discerned by consumer researchers (Holt 2004; Gershoff et al. 2007; Lee and Suk 2010; St. James et al. 2011). This indicates that deeper understanding of brand ambiguity is necessary. At present, we are content to note its existence, trace its evolution and contend that strategic benefits can accrue from its presence (Dickinson- Delaporte et al. 2010). A theory of ambiguous branding is required. Rather than develop such a theory from scratch – or build one up on the basis of ethnographic in-dwelling – it may be helpful to turn to literary criticism, where ambiguity has long been part of the academic agenda. William Empson (1930), for example, famously identified seven types of ambiguity and, while his typology of ambiguity is itself ambiguous, bordering on incomprehensible, Empson’s spectrum of ambiguity is a construct worth considering. It’s time to make the case for brand ambiguity. It’s time to highlight the benefits of ambiguous branding. It’s time to lay the Unique Selling Proposition to rest and replace it with Unfathomable Selling Perspectives (Holt 2002, 2005).

CONCLUSION In his overview of Titanic’s legends, controversies and culture, Ward (2012) attempts to account for the ill-starred ship’s incredible appeal. Its impact at the time of the sinking, he contends, is easily explained. Titanic was the largest moving object on earth, sailing between the two wealthiest nations, which foundered on its maiden voyage with huge loss of life among rich and poor alike. It was the ultimate news story in an era when news’s newfound ability to race around the world instantaneously was in its infancy. One hundred years on, Titanic’s hold on the popular imagination is less easily accounted for. Ward (2012, vi), however, posits that it’s because “the disaster happened beyond the usual confines of time and space. It took place in neither the old world or the new, but in a liminal space between the two. Having vanished below the horizon west of Ireland, the Titanic never reappeared. Instead, unseen in the witching hour of a moonless night, for the eternity between the collision and the final plunge, her passengers and crew found themselves poised between life and death.”

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Even as the rescue ship made its way to New York, he concludes, “Titanic was entering the realm of myth” (Ward 2012, vi). This paper has explored the myths and meanings of Brand Titanic. Predicated on the practical literary criticism of I.A. Richards, it examined the unsinkable brand in relation to the multiple meanings of myth in consumer research. It showed that four key forms of myth- interpretation are discernible in Titanic’s multi-faceted brand culture. And contended that “the most famous ship built since Noah’s Ark” (Cameron 2011, 11) has something for everyone, the consumer research community included.

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REFERENCES

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Maltin, Tim and Eloise Aston (2010), 101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic…But Didn’t! London: Beautiful Books. Mathews, Ryan and Watts Wacker (2008), What’s Your Story: Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands, Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press. Matthews, Rupert (2011), Titanic: The Tragic Story of the Ill-fated Ocean Liner, London: Arcturus. McAlexander, James H., John W. Schouten and Harold F. Koenig, “Building Brand Community,” Journal of Marketing, 66 (January), 38-54. McCaughan, Michael (1998), “Titanic: Out of the Depths and into the Culture,” in Symbols in Northern Ireland, ed. Anthony D. Buckley, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 133-51. McKeown, Lesley-Anne (2012), “Swamped by an Ocean of Titanic Merchandise,” Belfast Telegraph, February 16, 3. McQuarrie, Edward F. and David Glen Mick (1996), “Figures of Rhetoric in Advertising Language,” Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (March), 424-37. Meredith, Fionola (2012), “Cashing In? So What? That was Always Titanic’s Role,” Belfast Telegraph, April 11, 29. Molony, Senan (2008), Titanic: Victims and Villains, Stroud: Tempus. ______(2012), The Irish Aboard Titanic, Cork: Mercier Press. Moor, Liz (2007), The Rise of Brands, Oxford: Berg. Moore, Karl and Susan Reid (2008), “The Birth of the Brand: 4000 Years of Branding,” Business History, 50 (July), 419-32. Morner, Kathleen and Ralph Rausch (1995), “Myth,” in NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms, Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Publishing, 141-2. Muñiz, Albert M., Jr. and Hope Jensen Schau (2005), “Religiosity in the Abandoned Apple Newton Brand Community,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (March), 737-47. Nash, Melanie and Martti Lahti (1999), “Almost Ashamed to Say I am One of Those Girls: Titanic, Leonardo Di Caprio and the Paradoxes of Girls’ Fandom,” in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, ed. Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 64-88. Neill, William J.V. (2001), “Marketing the Urban Experience: Reflections on the Place of Fear in the Promotional Strategies of Belfast, Detroit and Berlin,” Urban Studies, 38 (5-6), 815- 28. ______(2006), “Return to Titanic and Lost in the Maze: The search for Representation of ‘Post-conflict’ Belfast,” Space and Polity, 10 (2), 109-20. ______(2010), “Belfast. Rebranding the Renaissance City: From the Troubles to Titanic Quarter,” in Urban Design and the British Urban Renaissance, ed. John Punter, London: Routledge, 305-21. Neville, Stuart (2010), The Twelve, London: Vintage. Nuttall, Pete, Avi Shankar and Mike Beverland (2011), “Mapping the Unarticulated Potential of Qualitative Research: Stepping out of the Shadow of Quantitative Studies,” Journal of Advertising Research, 51 (1), 153-66. Olins, Wally (2003), On Brand, London: Thames & Hudson. Patten, Louise (2010), Good as Gold, London: Quercus. Patterson, Glenn (2006), Lapsed Protestant, Dublin: New Island. Pellegrino, Charles (1990), Her Name Titanic: The Untold Story of the Sinking and Finding of the Unsinkable Ship, New York: Avon.

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