Paratextual Promotion and the Poetics of Marketing Communication, refereed paper, 9th EIASM Workshop on Interpretive Consumer Research, Stockholm University27th April 2017 (with R.A. Hackley),

The strategic attention of global brands is shifting from traditional mass media advertising to hybrid genres such as branded content, product placement, brand blogs, Facebook advertising, sponsored TV ‘pods’, and ‘native’ advertising. In this conceptual paper we attempt to open up a cultural level of conceptualisation of this phenomenon by drawing on literary critic Gérard Genette’s (2010) work on paratexts. We suggest that paper-based paratexts, both peritextual and epitextual, such as titles, prefaces, footnotes, authors’ correspondence, serialisations, parodies and reviews can be seen as analogous in some respects to the hybrid advertising forms noted above, since they are dependent for their existence on, but are ostensibly secondary to, the primary texts of mass media advertising. We suggest that the analogy of the paratext articulates the iterative, provisional, participative, polysemous, liminal and intertextual character of much contemporary brand communication under media convergence.