The Consumption of Performance

This article develops a vocabulary to describe the management of performance and the nature of consumer judgments of staged performance quality. It distinguishes three kinds of performance--contractual, enacted, and dramatistic. While all marketing actions are by nature dramatistic, this article explores how marketing can obscure the traces of dramatism by reframing the performance as contractual or enacted. Alternatively, marketing may seek to emphasize a performance's dramatistic character, selecting among skill, show, thrill, or festive frames. I apply this framework to examine the issue of the quality of performances. Copyright 1992 by the University of Chicago.