(Un)marketing the Uncanny

1. Purpose: Argues that the uncanny should be retrieved as a valuable concept in understanding the relationship between religion and marketing.
2. Design/methodology/approach: Case analysis of reported apparitions in Ballinspittle in 1985 and Medugorje since 1981.
3. Findings: Distinguishes between vicarious and unmediated consumption of the uncanny. Explicates how the uncanny and the sacred are distinguished from and relate to one another, and how the former may or may not be translated into the latter. Highlights the role of market actors and institutions in mediating the uncanny. Shows how the uncanny upsets some of the precepts of social science inquiry, as well as the scholar’s mediating role between the emic and the etic.
4. Research limitations/implications: Scope for more research on the marketing of religion.
5. Practical implications: Building on the notion that the uncanny is an unconcept, the paper identifies unmarketing as a way of thinking about marketing in this context.
6. Social implications: Religious beliefs – which are a potent, peculiar and intoxicating admixture of the uncanny and the sacred – continue to have a unique hold on what we might describe as consumers. Consequently, it is important that they be studied.
7. Originality/value: Very little, if any, prior research on the marketing of the uncanny.