595  2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc. ● Vol. 34 ● February 2008 All rights reserved. 0093-5301/2008/3405-0007$10.00 Reconstructing the South: How Commercial Myths Compete for Identity Value through the Ideological Shaping of Popular Memories and Countermemories CRAIG THOMPSON KELLY TIAN* This study explicates the coconstitutive relationships between commercial myth- making and popular memory that arise through myth market competitions for iden- tity value. We develop a genealogical analysis of the representational strategies and ideological rationales that two prominent New South mythmakers use to shape popular memories in relation to their competitive goals and to efface counter- memories that contradict their mythologized representations. We then derive a conceptual model that highlights competitive, historical, and ideological influences on commercial mythmaking and their transformative effects on popular memory, which have not been addressed by prior theorizations of the meaning transfer process. A similarly egregious example of looking at history less in terms of the content than the package comes from the Mississippi Delta, where without acknowledging the decidedly anti-boosterist message of a recent book about the area, the Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau has simply appropriated its title in order to make “The Most Southern Place on Earth” its official slogan. None of this should be surprising.... Any effort to com- modify cultural identity is going to entail some selective emphasis and cosmetic historical ad- justment. We hardly need a marketing survey, after all, to know that barn dances and bar- becues sell better than lynchings and pellagra. (Cobb 2000, 21) *Craig Thompson is the Gilbert and Helen Churchill Professor of Mar- keting, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 4251 Grainger Hall, 975 Uni- versity Avenue, Madison, WI 53706 (cthompson@bus.wisc.edu). Kelly Tian is professor, Department of Marketing, College of Business, New Mexico State University, MSC 5280, P.O. Box 30001, Las Cruces, NM 88003-1498 (ktian@nmsu.edu). The authors extend our sincere apprecia- tion to the JCR reviewers, associate editor, and editor who graciously provided insights and guidance that enriched this research. We thank them kindly. “Reconstructing the South: A Theoretical Reflection on the Ico- nography of New South Mythmaking” is a supplemental visually oriented analysis available through the online version of the Journal of Consumer Research. In this online supplement, we use iconic images of the Southern United States and white Southerners, tracing back over 100 years, to elab- orate further on the historical backdrop discussed in the printed article, T he Most Southern Place on Earth (1992), which, in- cidentally, was authored by James Cobb, is a stark analysis of the Delta region’s contentious racial politics and the poverty endemic to its sharecropper economy, not ex- actly the kind of storytelling commerce bureaus use to prime the tourist trade. Yet the book’s title resonated with com- mercial portrayals of the Southern United States that had been established in popular memory long before Cobb’s marketable turn of phrase. From the 1920s onward, business interests and state governments across the South have de- voted significant resources to the goal of attracting tourists, particularly Northern vacationers seeking respite from harsh winters. As Brundage (2000, 10) observes: “The advent of automobile tourism has led to a commercially oriented cel- ebration of southern architecture, landscape, and history, and, in turn, historical memory in the South has come to reflect the ubiquitous influence of tourism.” Seen in this light, the commercial appropriation of Cobb’s book title is not so much a case of placing a cosmetic gloss on Southern history as it is a leveraging of culturally rooted and depo- liticized commercial myths and their ideological framing of popular memory. placing particular emphasis on the interrelationships between the politics of identity and influential commercial representations of the South. John Deighton served as editor and Russell Belk served as associate editor for this article. Published electronically July 23, 2007