Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
religions are constructed. In most religions there are stories of holy fi gures doing miraculous
things (Pearson 1998).
In the fi eld of marketing, the magician involves fostering 'magical moments' that are based on
products, services, experiences or people with the power to change people and their destiny
(Mark and Pearson 2001), such as technological products, political candidates or places that
afford people some type of personal or professional improvement.
Enacting the magician archetype
Appendix 17.3
is an abstract of a story in which the components of the magician archetype are
observable. This text represents the emic interpretation and contains an entire blog story.
Appendix 17.4
shows a prediction matrix of the magician archetype, developed using literature
on the archetype (Eliot 1990; Mark and Pearson 2001).
An analysis of the consumer's magician storyline
The story recounts experiences of the protagonist and her colleagues in Tokyo while spending
most of her time working in a laboratory. There are many references to the magician theme,
beginning with her work in the lab, which has a connotation of a quest for knowledge and
mastery in her fi eld of study. Knowledge of the laws of the universe is one of the desires of the
magician (Pearson and Mark 2001). The experience of buying clothes, eating, playing a sport and
the positive results of her lab work portray magic moments and times of transformation. In
the fi nal story, where the protagonist in the consumer story ascribes magical powers to the
stick at the temple guarded by the God of Thunder, she feels she has control of the luck and
good fortune she and her labmates intend to inherit in the forthcoming year. The protagonist
believes that magic can control future events. Spangler (1995) claims that if fi gures like Merlin
have such Power in our collective imagination, it is because we intuitively know that we are all
potential magicians.
In order to use the DFA as the approach to test the consistency of the story as an example of
the magician archetype, the 'Magician's Archetypal Story Pattern Instrument' (
Appendix 17.4
)
was applied to the Tokyo story, resulting in 100 per cent matches with the 16 theoretical
propositions stated.
Conclusions
In his study on the contemplative look and behaviour of tourists, Urry (1992) proposes that how
a tourist faces an experience of this kind involves placing himself within a historical process and
consuming signs or markers that represent stories in particular, and that how different tourists
face a particular process (and in relation to a specifi c place, city or country) is infl uenced by the
way that the collective memory of society is organized and reproduced.
Archetypal themes are bridges that connect consumers and places, not only from the
viewpoint of marketing managers that use the 'mask' of myth, but also from consumers'
unconscious perspectives. Through experiencing stories and daily interaction with places, the
tourist can enact and enjoy archetypal themes. According to Jung (1959), archetypal ideas or
themes are part of the unconscious system that works in the present to compensate for or correct
the extravagances of the conscious mind. The conscious mind desires clarity and to work with a
handful of content at a time, while archetypes help a human being not to forget his roots and
seek a synthesis of his self (Jung 1959).
