Market-making strategies in Tanzimat era Istanbul: The quest for an elusive cosmopolitanism
通过分析坦齐马特时期一份亚美尼亚-土耳其语报纸上的广告,揭示了标准化营销、经销商网络和产品合法化如何作为做市机制引入新产品,并指出广告仅面向有限消费者群体,而非表面上的多元群体。
Focusing on a pivotal period of the Ottoman Empire, we illustrate how advertising tactics act as market-making tools for local and non-local businesses during the Tanzimat (1839-1876) (Re-organization) era through a study of advertisements in the popular Armeno-Turkish daily newspaper Manzume-i Efkr. We show that using standardised marketing communications in both form and content to invoke Westernness, forging dealership networks to induce demand, and legitimising the products and brands acted as market-making mechanisms and helped to introduce new products into the local market. Our findings further illuminate that although the market making efforts of the era might suggest the existence of a multilingual, ethnically, and culturally diverse consumer group, the adverts only speak to a limited and inorganically bound set of consumers.