Marketing and Literature: The Anxiety of Academic Influence

Abstract

Literary criticism, according to leading theorist Frank Lentricchia, involves striking texts together to see if they spark. Although many scholars have successfully struck marketing texts together, the sparks they have produced pertain primarily to marketplace phenomena rather than the academic marketing literature itself. Drawing on Bloom's “anxiety of influence” thesis, this article strikes together the published works of two prominent marketing thinkers, Theodore Levitt and Morris Holbrook. It argues that far from being positioned at opposite ends of the academic spectrum—pure versus applied—they are, in literary terms at least, precursor and ephebe, father and son, one and the same.