Published Online:September 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Effective Executive
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJEE030925
DOI:10.71329/EffectiveExecutive/2025.28.3.42-59
Author Name:Jordan April and Kurt April
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Management
Download Format:PDF
Pages:42-59
Ordinary objects, like shopping carts, shopping bags, price tags, receipts, and flowers, are often overlooked in both scholarly and practical discourse. Yet, they are powerful artefacts embedded in dynamic systems of value, identity, and social meaning. Drawing from anthropological theory and marketing scholarship, this paper develops a three-lever conceptual model for analyzing everyday objects through the intersecting lenses of Context, Agency, and Meaning. By situating objects within their socio-historical trajectories (Context), recognizing their capacity to influence human behavior (Agency), and unpacking the symbolic and affective resonances they hold (Meaning), this model offers both anthropologists and marketing scholars a structured approach to understanding the ‘social lives’ of commodities. The paper argues that the integration of anthropological insights into marketing practice enriches both fields, enabling deeper engagement with the lived realities of consumers and the cultural ecologies of products.
In everyday life, material objects often fade into the background of routine experience. Yet, as anthropologists and marketing scholars alike have observed, these seemingly mundane artefacts are deeply embedded in cultural, social, and economic systems that shape, and are