Scholarly Research and the Future of Body Aesthetics in the Sport Marketing Literature

Academy of Marketing Science Review,  2008  by S, George,  Konstantinakos, Pantelis D

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From its beginning, with Plato and Aristotle, the history of philosophy encompasses a rich of reflection on the experience of beauty and on the nature of art as a distinctively human cause of beauty.

These experiences are examined within the context of philosophical, psychological, and social science perspectives on aesthetics. A distinction is made between aesthetic products and aesthetic consumption, and these two concepts are discussed in terms of marketing views of their core elements. Charter's review (2006) reflected the impact of "postmodernism" on aesthetics within marketing. Consideration was given to four philosophical conundrums relating to the aesthetic experience, which are relevant to marketing theory: disinterested attention; objective and subjective taste; the nature of the aesthetic encounter; and the relationship of evaluation to preference.

In modern literature, aesthetics is approached as a form of knowledge based upon the senses. Here, we follow Strati (2000) and Carter and Jackson (2000), who distinguish usefully between two senses of aesthetic: one which refers to judgments about taste, where the aesthetics are a property of some object and thus are external to the individual; and the other which refers to the emotional response experienced by an individual in relation to some externality, where the aesthetics are a property of the individual rather than the externality. It is this latter sense we use to inform this paper, which sees aesthetics as a process of knowing through tacit knowledge, and understanding achieved through empathy, which allows a contamination of the verbal by the visual and all the other senses (Strati 2000). The aesthetic works through processes of mimesis which involve "imitating, then bricolating and innovating with the behavior and symbols of others" (Linstead 2000, p. 63), so that an aesthetic response of subject to object involves an opening up to the object so that it works upon us, unselfconsciously, without the usual comprehensions of significance, meaning, interest or cause and effect, resulting in responses which are pre-conscious, beyond words, and therefore can clash with conscious, logical apprehensions.

TABLE 2

Conceptual Framework: The two tested theories

Based on the above theoretical background and in order to study the major objective of this paper, we formulate the following research propositions (Pface=+Subscript; vface=-Subscript; ):

Pface=+Subscript; 1face=-Subscript; : Does ethnicity influences positive body image attitudes attitudes and how it can be

measured empirically?

Pface=+Subscript; 2face=-Subscript; : Does gender role development influences positive body image attitudes and how it can be

measured empirically?

Pface=+Subscript; 3face=-Subscript; : Do gendered personality traits influence positive body image attitudes and how

it can be measured empirically?

Pface=+Subscript; 4face=-Subscript; : Do advertising and sports media influence body dissatisfaction attitudes and how it can