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Games people play with brands: an application of Transactional Analysis to marketplace relationships

Games people play with brands: an application of Transactional Analysis to marketplace relationships
Games people play with brands: an application of Transactional Analysis to marketplace relationships
Relationships have been normalised in marketing theory as mutuality beneficial, long-term dyads. This obscures their emotional content, ignores critical conceptualisations of corporate exploitation, and fails to capture the range of possible marketplace relationship forms, including those that may result from individuals’ biographical psychology and that lead to repeated dysfunctional exchanges. In this paper we offer Berne’s (1964) Transactional Analysis (TA) as a way to uncover the biographical psychology that informs marketplace relationship structures and their accompanying emotions, and to provide a critique of such arrangements. We first explain TA, its origins, its relationship with psychoanalysis, its limitations, and contemporary extensions beyond therapy. We then present the structural basis of marketplace relationships from a TA perspective, before illustrating how TA Game Analysis can be applied through an analysis of the iPhone and related mobile phone contracts, and the Games If I didn’t Love Apple and Smallprint. Finally we discuss the implications of such an approach for transforming market practices based on recognition of Marketplace Games and their modification.
1470-5931
121-146
Molesworth, Michael
48a49a79-1d99-4120-b0aa-578e42541724
Grigore, Georgiana
01d4e5e2-8ef4-4ccd-b59c-aede4fcbc576
Jenkins, Rebecca
332d4a2a-240c-4a85-9d58-f9713b3f6150
Molesworth, Michael
48a49a79-1d99-4120-b0aa-578e42541724
Grigore, Georgiana
01d4e5e2-8ef4-4ccd-b59c-aede4fcbc576
Jenkins, Rebecca
332d4a2a-240c-4a85-9d58-f9713b3f6150

Molesworth, Michael, Grigore, Georgiana and Jenkins, Rebecca (2018) Games people play with brands: an application of Transactional Analysis to marketplace relationships. Marketing Theory, 18 (1), 121-146. (doi:10.1177/1470593117706530).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Relationships have been normalised in marketing theory as mutuality beneficial, long-term dyads. This obscures their emotional content, ignores critical conceptualisations of corporate exploitation, and fails to capture the range of possible marketplace relationship forms, including those that may result from individuals’ biographical psychology and that lead to repeated dysfunctional exchanges. In this paper we offer Berne’s (1964) Transactional Analysis (TA) as a way to uncover the biographical psychology that informs marketplace relationship structures and their accompanying emotions, and to provide a critique of such arrangements. We first explain TA, its origins, its relationship with psychoanalysis, its limitations, and contemporary extensions beyond therapy. We then present the structural basis of marketplace relationships from a TA perspective, before illustrating how TA Game Analysis can be applied through an analysis of the iPhone and related mobile phone contracts, and the Games If I didn’t Love Apple and Smallprint. Finally we discuss the implications of such an approach for transforming market practices based on recognition of Marketplace Games and their modification.

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Accepted/In Press date: 3 October 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 3 May 2017
Published date: March 2018
Organisations: Southampton Business School

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 404132
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/404132
ISSN: 1470-5931
PURE UUID: 5d06ccb7-e4c0-404d-9609-0a801f53e421

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Date deposited: 03 Jan 2017 09:32
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:59

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Contributors

Author: Michael Molesworth
Author: Georgiana Grigore
Author: Rebecca Jenkins

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