VIENNA CHAPTER: Kuenstlerhaus, Vienna
May 21st, 2005
2.00 – 6.00 pm (lectures part 2: Travelling Agents)

Lecture:
Global Marketing Strategies and Cultural Identity

As the anthropologist William Mazzarella argues, after 9/11 the “political and marketing rhetoric share one basic ideological premise: namely that the alternative to the semiotic order imposed by their particular constructs is chaos, monstrous mutation, fragmentation, the absence of value.” This panel reflects on the complex cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalized marketplace. When Indian markets opened in the early 1990s configurations of local and global were decisively changed, and professional advertisers suddenly had to concern themselves with matters of cultural integrity. India has one of the fastest growing markets in the world, and Indian mass consumer-markets are at the centre of attention of marketing and advertisement agencies, which specialize in the translation of its complex political, cultural and economic idiosyncrasies into viable strategies for MNC's. What new modes of self-imagining arise as ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ become the basis for marketing?

Nayantara Ghosh (Vienna) is a linguist and an executive search consultant with extensive experience in the assessment and development of senior executives and top management teams. She is training and lecturing on intercultural management.

Respondents: Bernhard Fuchs teaches at the Department of European Ethnology in Vienna.
Nita Tandon is an artist, born in India, lives and works in Vienna.

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