Ever Fallen in Love with Marketing: Marketing in Punk, Marketing of Punk

Ever since it first came apparently from nowhere to shock the establishment back in the 1970s, punk has come a long way and been the subject to many popular myths, stereotypes and media imageries. Interestingly, the vast majority of those myths have actually had their origins within punk culture itself. But because punk is primarily an umbrella for a range of different, independent punk subcultures, each of those myths seems to carry very different, often contradictory meanings across those individual punk subcultures and communties. Historically, understanding the social and communal roles of popular myths and beliefs has offered researchers a meaningful lens into how members of a (sub)culture/community construct, foster and maintain their communal identity, heritage and/or moral value system. Popular myths tend thereby to understood as historical heritage with universal meanings that provide a culture/community with its communal identity. This working paper outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the researcher’s ethnographic study, whose aim it is to explore how and why popular myths are created, disseminated, interpreted, reinterpreted and adopted within different individual punk communities as part of communal identity and heritage.