Once Upon a Market Dreary: The Prescient Marketing Principles of Edgar Allan Poe

An American icon, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is famed for his fiendish tales of fear and trembling, and premature burial. He is less well known as a businessperson, let alone a marketing thought leader. Poe, though, was not only an entrepreneurially inclined self-promoter of genius, but he practised prescient marketing principles that are pertinent to present circumstances. In a world where dark tourism, dead celebrities and disinterred brands loom large, Poe’s principal principles – perversity, poetry, plagiary, plasticity – are prior portents of marketing precepts. Written in an appropriately literary style, this paper shows that dead men do foretell tales. Of markets dreary.