Artful marketing: Visual and aural selling practices in the suqs (marketplaces) of Damascus, Syria

My dissertation examines visual and aural marketing practices used by merchants in the suqs (marketplaces) of Damascus, Syria. In the busy and cramped spaces of the city's large marketplaces, where a range of factors makes for intense economic competition, merchants must enact a kind of romance with their customers, wooing them with dazzling store displays, symbolic decorations, and creative auditory practices. This constellation of distinctively poetic selling practices is what I call 'artful marketing'---ways of selling which are artful both in their artistic inclinations and in the cunning ways they draw customers. I look at merchants' displays of religious imagery and political and familial portraiture; the arrangement of merchandise into artistically patterned displays; and vendors' street cries and other auditory practices to understand the place of artful marketing in Damascus' suqs. I argue that these visual and aural realms of marketplace interaction work as 'evidence' of the trustworthiness of merchants and their businesses in ways that direct verbal expressions cannot. Because these realms are explained by merchants as decorative and pleasurable, and because they are pointedly not framed as advertising techniques, they become more credible as evidence. Artful practices can perform important work in the selling process because they exist both as decorative backdrop and as distinctive information. Ultimately, these marketing practices are more than a means to an end, for they have the potential to both fuel and reflect larger sociocultural trends in Damascus: the changing religious landscape of the city; the infusion of kinship and politics with work; and debates over the merging of religion and technology. By looking at these local selling techniques, the marketplace is revealed to be a place of meaningful action, rather than merely a site for economic transaction.