The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing

Mark Tadajewski, Matthew Higgins, Janice Denegri-Knott, Rohit Varman, Mark Tadajewski, Matthew Higgins, Janice Denegri-Knott, Rohit Varman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317247289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Routledge Companion to Critical Marketing brings together the latest research in Critical Marketing Studies in one authoritative and convenient volume. The world's leading scholars and rising stars collaborate here to provide a survey of this lively subdiscipline. In doing so they demonstrate how a critical approach yields an enriched understanding of marketing theory and practice, its role in society, and its relationship with consumers themselves.

It is the first attempt to capture the state of Critical Marketing research in many years. As such, this seminal work is unmissable for scholars and students of marketing and consumer research as well as those exploring sociology, media studies, anthropology and consumption scholarship more generally.

1

INTRODUCING AND ADVANCING CRITICAL MARKETING STUDIES

Mark Tadajewski, Matthew Higgins, Janice Denegri-Knott, and Rohit Varman

Introduction

In this chapter we aim to accomplish a number of objectives. We will weave a history of marketing theory and practice that permits us to juxtapose the views of mainstream and Critical Marketing scholarship. In doing so, we will contribute to existing genealogical accounts of the development of critical perspectives in marketing (e.g. Tadajewski, 2010b), but without traversing exactly the same terrain. Nor will we recount the various pedagogic methods through which Critical Marketing can be incorporated into the curriculum as this has been undertaken elsewhere (Tadajewski, 2016a). Instead, this historical introduction will enable us to unpack core assumptions underwriting Critical Marketing Studies including ontological denaturalization, defatalization, epistemological reflexivity, conflict and critical performativity.

The difference between the current chapter and previous historically oriented accounts is that we explicate the above concepts using a different range of authors to those normally consulted in depth. This thereby extends existing debates in Critical Marketing Studies, hopefully adding value for the audience of this book. Since a great deal of this material will be new to many readers, we will strive to be as clear as possible and provide as many direct quotes of long out of print texts as is appropriate. Following this, we will introduce each chapter in this volume.

A history of marketing

To begin with, marketing as a practice has a long history, and can be traced back to ancient times. It has been discussed in various ways, but prior to the emergence of institutionalized definitions of the subject, basically referred to the processes involved in selling and buying. Subsequent definitions promoted by the American Marketing Association throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have built upon this edifice. Initially, the definitions were more macro-focused. They talked about flows within the market, rather than specific interest groups.

Harry Tosdal, most prominently, started using the terms marketing management and related language in the 1920s. By 1927, Percival White was penning one of the most explicitly managerial texts of the time, making a case that business people should – as Adam Smith, Daniel Defoe and numerous others had already registered – start with the consumer and work backwards. It was not a matter of producing what industry wanted to produce, but about understanding and delivering what the consumer desired. This, as most students of marketing know, is the marketing concept. It is the axis around which the discipline turns and the viewing glass that we are encouraged to use when thinking about the marketplace.

Clearly, there is much value in pursuing such a strategy, but there are other approaches depending on the nature of the market, the competition being faced, and the power relations embedded therein. So, it only represents a partial account of the role of marketing in society. It is a theory – a story – that effectively helps marketing shed any connotations of manipulation.

Ask most people what image the practice of marketing conjures up in their minds and it will not be very positive. The image of the pushy salesman, forcing unwanted goods and services on to an unwitting customer, is probably going to figure prominently in their collective consciousness. Levitt (1960), of course, sought to cleave a distinction between marketing and sales that reflects, in reality, a succinct summary of the ideas presented above. Marketing, he maintained, was not simply about pushing products on to consumers. It was about meeting specific needs. Levitt’s ideas, while important for the continued legitimation of the subject, are a simplification. Simplification is necessary in the classroom. It is handy for practitioners in the boardroom when they require soundbites to justify their role and accumulate political power. But it easily shades into misrepresentation.

Fred Borch (1958), a practitioner working and writing around the same time as Levitt, presents arguably a more accurate picture of the nature of marketing. This is something Chapter 12 – by Mark Tadajewski – explores in some depth. Suffice to say, Borch argued that good marketers do not simply listen to their customers and produce what they want and stop there. They listen and then they communicate. They engage in the marketing concept and the much derided sales concept (i.e. trying to stimulate demand via effective marketing communications). But, this active selling element tends to be underplayed. It is too easily associated with the idea of “hidden persuaders” (Packard, 1960) plumbing the depths of our minds to identify weaknesses that can be mobilized in the service of organizational objectives such as profit.

What we must always bear in mind when consulting any academic literature is that there is a great deal of self-legitimation and self-justification going on. This has been necessary at various points in the history of the marketing discipline, most notably during the 1960s when students were starting to look at marketing askance, perceiving it to be a conduit through which the status quo was reaffirmed. Within that context, legitimation was undertaken via the “broadening” movement. This involved the promotion of the utility of marketing for organizations and groups outside of the for-profit realm (e.g. charities) (Hackley, 2001). To say the least, this has been well received by academics who are able to point to it as a way of underlining their positive contribution to wider society.

Within most schools of business, critical accounts are given limited, if any, attention. Marketing education more often reflects the balance of focus found in Wilkie and Moore’s (1999) celebration of marketing’s contribution to society. This long paper devotes considerable – and somewhat justifiable attention – to the positive contributions the discipline and practice has made in this world. Tacked right on to the end of the paper and given very short shrift is a limited discussion of the criticisms it has faced. Although we believe that marketing does have much to contribute to society, as scholars and lecturers we have an ethical responsibility to present an accurate, more balanced picture of the discipline, its core assumptions, and effects across the world. This is what Critical Marketing aims to accomplish. Certainly, we must be wary of assuming that the way resources are allocated at present is necessarily the most appropriate for the population of the world as a whole.

For example, there has been a long history of criticism associated with the cost of advertising, its utility, necessity and whether there are more useful ways of spending the huge sums allocated for marketing communications. To start to foster the kind of critical reflexivity (i.e. thinking about our role in the world and how it, in turn, influences us) that is part and parcel of Critical Marketing, the following quotation should encourage us all to question whether the economy should be modified:

The sophistication and subtlety, complex and clever symbolism, needed to convince a consumer that a tub of vegetable fat can give us something special, is a truly difficult task. Hundreds of thousands of individuals must devote their lives to helping corporations manipulate people into buying more margarine or a pair of sneakers at the expense of another corporation selling an almost identical item . . . As Held . . . has calculated, humanity could have used 1 year [of] global advertising revenue to completely eliminate hunger and malnutrition, provided reproductive health care for all women, distributed clean drinking water to all people, achieved universal literacy, doubled the budget of the United Nations, and immunized every child – twelve times over.

Scarpaci, Sovacool & Ballantyne, 2016, p. 128; emphasis in original

You do not see commentary like that in marketing textbooks. So, to set the scene for what follows, a brief definition is in order. Now, a note of caution, a definition by definition effectively closes down debate, and that is not what we want to encourage. The chapters that follow are introductions to various topics and they are not the final word on the matter they discuss. Only those with a profound sense of egotism would assume otherwise. Critical Marketing,¹ then, “is concerned with challenging marketing concepts, ideas and ways of reflection that present themselves as ideologically neutral or that otherwise have assumed a taken-for-granted status” (Tadajewski, 2011, p. 83).

Now, despite the fact that the critique we have in mind is largely absent from much conventional marketing education, there is a large literature that engages in some element of critical reflection on marketing. What is different about the type of critique we are talking about here is that the material we, and our colleagues in this collection explore, usually draws upon some form of critical social theory. This could include the writings associated with the Frankfurt School, Pierre Bourdieu, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks or Michel Foucault among many others (Tadajewski, 2010b).

Critical reflection upon marketing is not a new practice nor has it been restricted to the publications of marketing academics (Caplovitz, 1967; Huxley, 1932/2007, 1958/2004; Klein, 2005; Lasn, 1999; Packard, 1960). We need to widen our perspective considerably if we are to make sense of the types of critiques that marketing has faced. As such, we begin with material that has taken a critical look at marketing, yet without engaging with the critical social theory characteristic of Critical Marketing Studies. The mists of time await.

Roman and medieval reflections

As Dixon (2008) has revealed, marketing has received both praise and criticism since ancient times. This continues to the present day. The role of an individual in facilitating the exchange process – that is, marketing – was heralded as a positive contribution by Plato. It was an essential part of what Adam Smith later called the division of labor, that is, where people with specific skills or attributes undertake certain types of work because they are the most efficient and effective at it. Aristotle, likewise, echoed these views.

At various junctures, notably in Roman times (from the classical era to the middle ages), but particularly in the medieval period – around the fifth to fifteenth centuries – selling practices tended to attract more mixed attention. Some writers bemoaned the practices as failing to add value; for them it appeared that the marketer was more parasitic upon society than a contributor to social welfare. In contemporary language, it was sometimes considered similar to a zero sum game. In other words, for one individual to make a profit, someone else had to take a loss. There was no mutual benefit. There was always a loser in an exchange situation.

Other thinkers – specifically Herodotus and Cicero – disdained certain facets of manual labor and particular forms of mercantile activities (particularly small-scale selling). These types of arguments were often linked to more focused criticisms about the effects that selling was having within cities and towns (i.e. merchants crowding streets with seating and their wares). Moreover, there were concerns about traders who sought to take advantage of their customer base by misrepresenting their products. They tried to do so by hiding in darker parts of the marketplace so that product adulteration, faults and outright misrepresentation were more difficult to discern. For example, Plato, along with Aristotle and various biblical sources, were all scathing about attempts to manipulate the purchaser through the use of deliberately modified weighing scales. Legislation was invoked or demanded to prevent such activities (Dixon, 2008).

Typically, however, the person occupied in selling was viewed in a largely positive light. They accepted risk in travelling to foreign locations, selecting merchandise that might or might not sell, that might perish on the return journey, and incurred considerable cost in transportation to the location that had the best remunerative possibilities. The profit that they made on these items was considered their salary (Dixon, 2008). In a refrain that sounds remarkably contemporary, Plato concluded that people try to be honest. But, we are all human, and temptation is never far away. This was especially problematic within the marketplace. It presented frequent opportunities to encourage even the most virtuous to stray from the path of “moderation”; to try to make as much money as they could. As these early scholars realized, the profit motive exerts a considerable pull for some, and it has led to much reflection on how the economic and social system could be rethought and reoriented, most notably in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries.

Nineteenth century: Edward Bellamy

There have been numerous writers who have offered critical commentary on marketing in some respect. Many of them have received little attention thus far, so we will pause to introduce a number that do not figure prominently in the chapters in this volume or feature elsewhere in any significant detail.² Generally speaking, we can differentiate the literature we explore below into two strands. There might be a utopian aspect to these writings in that they seek to envision another world; alternatively, they represent subversive commentaries on changing consumption patterns and the industrial control of production, prices and consumption. Edward Bellamy (1888/1996), for instance, famously writes about the travails of Julian West in his book Looking Backward, his sketch of a utopia.³ A subscription to socialism underwrites the two books by Edward Bellamy that we will review.

Socialism entailed a belief that society should rest on egalitarian foundations. There should be no single privileged class taking advantage of other groups. This differentiated it from capitalism, where the ownership of production rested in the hands of a limited number of people who received the majority of the wealth derived from production and consumption. As Veblen (1923/2009) famously unpacked, this capitalistic group were often “absentee owners”, that is, the people who owned a corporation or company frequently did little or none of the actual labor involved in the creation of value, while profiting immensely from it.

Socialism wanted to expand the ownership of industry to encompass the whole of society. It differs slightly from communism in this respect. Social change was likely to be a slower process under socialism than communism (Newman, 2005). Where these views of society align is that industry would be collectively owned and all would benefit from it (with certain provisos). Cooperation rather than competitive, capitalist individualism was to be the order of the day. As part of this social change agenda, the gender stratification of capitalism was to be abolished. Men and women would occupy equal status, with social solidarity functioning as a guiding principle.

In Bellamy’s (1888/1996) Looking Backward, the central character, Julian West, was the beneficiary of the largesse of capitalism and the wealth accumulated by ancestors. His life was easy, carefree and on a positive trajectory. But he suffered from insomnia and sought treatment for his condition. It was a little too effective. Going to sleep in 1887, he awakes in September 2000 to find the world completely transformed. The political and business landscape was redefined. Corporations no longer controlled the production process; people did not have to work for these “soulless machines”. They labored for the government, with all members of the active work force receiving the same wage, albeit with hours of work modified according to the nature of the labor (i.e. less pleasant jobs have to be performed for fewer hours per day).

In this new environment, advertising has disappeared. There are no signs blighting the cities and we are far removed from any presence of a sales orientation (i.e. high-pressure selling – something that John Wanamaker famously remarked was a feature of the retailing environment that he hated as a youth in the nineteenth century). As a replacement, the government provides cards with full and complete product information to guide consumer decision-making. Upon entering retailing emporiums, people are able to examine a sample item, with store workers only present to take the relevant order: “What a prodigious amount of lying that simple arrangement saves!” Julian opines (Bellamy, 1888/1996, p. 50). Orders are sent via pneumatic tubes to a central warehouse which distributes the product quickly and efficiently to the individual’s home. We can read this as a pre-emptive response to emerging debates about the costs of marketing and sales that were beginning to take hold just after the period Bellamy was writing his best-selling classic (it sold hundreds of thousands of copies very quickly according to Morgan (1944)).

Throughout his book, Bellamy offers a crit...