Marketing Democracy

Public Opinion and Media Formation in Democratic Societies

Catherine Paradeise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351506854
• Subtopic: Political Propaganda

This book examines mass marketing techniques in a political rather than economic context. The authors' thesis remains persuasive: democratic politics, precisely because it requires mass support for its legitimation, increases the need for public opinion to be channelized and focused. This is precisely the task of marketing in the political process.Increasingly, advanced societies are involved in symbolic rather than direct forms of struggle. As a result, management of ideas becomes crucial to both political survival and economic expansion. Romain Laufer and Catherine Paradeise argue that public opinion and media formation is built into the fabric of Western political culture, dating from the Sophists in ancient Greece through Machiavelli in the aristocratic baronies of pre-capitalist Europe. With the rise of the bureaucratic-administrative state in the West, the need for persuasive public opinion analysis became part of the fabric of the advanced Western democratic and capitalist nations.The volume benefits from authors trained and familiar with the traditions of both the United States and Europe. They are able to consider contrasts in marketing styles as well as continuities of contents among advanced nation-states. No simple "how-to" manual, this bracingly different volume discusses its subject with an easy command of the philosophical and cultural literatures, as well as the major classics of economics, sociology, and political science.

1

Sophism and Marketing

Most people speak of ignorance without
really knowing what it is all about.

Everybody agrees, if only to complain about it, that bureaucracy is a characteristic feature of the modern world. The mainstream of intellectual opinion has acknowledged the central importance of bureaucracy ever since Max Weber gave a rigorous definition of the concept.

This is not the case with marketing: hard as it is to ignore the fact of marketing in all its striking manifestations, it is harder still to appreciate the significance of this phenomenon. Only fifteen years ago, many sectors of the economy, banks, manufacturing companies, hotels and publishers were managing quite well without it; political marketing was then just winning its first laurels in France; the public sector, for its part, treated marketing with high disdain, deeming it incompatible with its own characteristic goals and mode of management. The word “marketing,” was hardly ever seen in print, except in the classified advertisements of the big dailies. Now these very same dailies make frequent use of the word in their background articles. Yet this development is too recent for anyone to see more in it than a fashion or superficial phenomenon conditioned by what are assumed to be fundamental realities: the processes of production, finance and the advent of the age of communication.

As for Sophism, the term in its usual sense denotes a fallacious argument¹ of a kind condemned by the man of good faith. It is this conflict that philosophy teachers describe to their pupils when, in teaching Plato’s Dialogues, they recount the clash between Socrates and that group of Greek rhetoricians who called themselves the Sophists. Socrates holding the Sophists to ridicule: such is the inevitable outcome of that engagement as it is told in our high schools.²

Today, however, there is growing interest in a more positive and more detailed study of Sophism while increasing attention is being paid to the discipline of rhetoric³ which, not so long ago, was held in contempt (at least in its modern forms). Yet its audience is still too narrow for the Sophists to be known otherwise than in a caricatural form.

We believe that the words Sophism and rhetoric designate notions that are sufficiently close to each other for us to advance the following proposition: marketing is the bureaucratic form of Sophism. We shall elucidate the proposition in this chapter. Only then shall we turn to the task of showing how the phenomenon of bureaucracy makes marketing different from Sophism: this will be the subject of the next four chapters.

With the contemporary victory of opinion over reason, as revealed by a host of symptoms ranging from a growing taste for efficiency to an emphasis on public opinion and a decline in the teaching of philosophy, we might ask if Plato’s victory is not coming to its end as a pure fable, a pious lie which can no longer be sustained. The reason the philosophical tradition found it necessary to devote so much energy to denigrating the Sophists lies precisely in the great force of their arguments.

We shall first illustrate how Sophism and marketing do indeed correspond to the negative connotations of their use as invective. We shall then show how they also share a positive definition and we shall propose that this definition is essential to an understanding of marketing and, therefore, of contemporary society. Finally we shall ask how, through the centuries and in two profoundly different societies (albeit linked by ties of lineage) one and the same movement, known in one age as Sophism and in another as marketing, could have acquired such strength.

The Same Accusations

The indictment against Sophism and marketing contains the same accusations, point for point: their preference for appearances to the point of untruth, their technicist orientation which goes with an indifference to higher values, a mercantile attitude and the rejection of culture.

All is but appearance. The primary charge against marketing and Sophism is that they do not tell the truth. Marketing stands accused of manipulation: advertising spins out beautiful lies in order to sell; it attributes qualities they do not possess to the objects it promotes and wraps products up in flattering packages. Marketing feigns the better to beguile and dupe the consumer. Production engineers are very often at one with consumers in the contempt with which they regard the sales talk of those windbag merchants who call themselves marketing men. People who take up cudgels to warn the consumer against the carefully laid pitfalls of commercial propaganda find an echo in Plato’s charge against Sophism when he said that “Sophistic is to legislation what beautification is to gymnastics and appearance to reality.”⁴

This accusation is meaningless to those for whom it is intended since the reason men of marketing (like the Sophists) hold appearance (or the “plausible”) “in more honor than the true”⁵ is that, for them, there is nothing but appearance. It is the consumer’s perception of the advantages and disadvantages of the product, the analysis of his motivations and the image of the product in the public mind that govern the preparation of marketing programs. Even the price of the product is an element of its presentation and is therefore fixed at levels that have no bearing on what would seem to be appropriate. Only the fascination of appearances can win the approval of potential customers.

There is nothing but appearance. Did Protagoras mean anything else by his famous assertion that “man is the measure of all things?”⁶ If men have no common point of reference except perhaps the belief that they share the same feelings about things, no opinion can lay claim to a truth that does not exist. Man is limited to what his senses perceive of the world. His approval can be won only by influencing that perception. He can be enticed only by playing skillfully on his sensations and feelings. And the art of enticement requires a knowledge of how to conjure up appearances out of words and to present objects and people in a flattering light. Marketing men and Sophists claim to possess this technique.

The pragmaticians as technicians of enticement. Marketing men and Sophists regard themselves as technicians. They are doers or, better still, they know how to get things done. Only ask, and they perform. They are men of action. They know the art of playing with the sensations of men. Their role is limited to that of winning the public—the potential buyer or the member of the Greek city-state—over to the desire or the opinion towards which their client wishes it to be pulled. Since it is generally an effective weapon in their work of enticement, they generally behave as if they believed in it all. But this cannot be a condition of their action. For they are not concerned with the ends for which their services are bought. There is no dishonor in this for the value of every end is itself nothing but the effect of the conviction of the person who sets that end. Since there is no common measure between convictions, there is no yardstick by which to establish the superiority of any one end over the others.

Mercenaries. Thus the marketing men, like the Sophists, have no reason to take offense when certain people, fallen victim to other appearances, accuse them of being mercenaries. Their success, which brings them wealth and glory in this world, does not lie in the beauty of speculative thought that is devoid of efficiency; it is the success of those whom they charge for their services and who come back for more. People who accuse marketing of baseness for selling services very dearly echo, across the centuries, the philosophers at the end of the golden age of Greek philosophy, scandalized by the mercantile behavior of the Sophists who threw away their lessons for money.⁷

A pointless accusation for both marketing men and Sophists since, according to them, nothing, unless it be appearance, can confer any superiority whatsoever on disinterested acts. For the same reason, they do not question the purpose of those to whom they sell themselves. It is enough for them that their buyers have the money to purchase their services. The power they display in doing this is sufficient proof of their efficiency or their strength; and efficiency is the only conceivable sign of their value. Thus marketing is able to praise in turn the convenience of any brand of washing powder, or to show the most varied political programs in a favorable light using highly persuasive arguments. Thus it is that we can see praise being lavished on the attentiveness to the public of a policy that agrees with the results of an opinion poll and, in the same breath, on the courage of another action that disagrees with public opinion. “The art of persuading,” says Gorgias, “far surpasses all others and is far and away the best, for it makes all things its slaves by willing submission, not by violence.”⁸ The means he proposes are better ones because they make it possible to keep power or to win it peacefully. In other words, Sophistical reflection is possible only in a society with an already democratic orientation in which discussion is a normal form of political relationship.

Just as commercial marketing is possible only in a society whose members have the real possibility of buying, that is to say both the means to procure products and the opportunity of choosing among them. Marketing adopts a program of enabling firms to maintain their position in the market or to win a position. Thus it presents itself as the means of defending the interests of both the producer and the consumer, that is of defending the conditions for maintaining the possibilities of choice. Neither the Sophist’s technique nor that of marketing challenges the powers that be, any more than these techniques challenge anyone who, deeming himself the mightiest, might be tempted to appropriate power. When these techniques support an establishment in power—business or government—they set themselves the goal of ensuring the most efficient conditions for discussion and for winning consent, without any reference to some absolute virtuous power, by postulating the concomitantly legitimate and perfectible character of the power establishment.

Nor do they challenge the hegemonically inclined individual or group when placing themselves at the service of a conqueror—in the market or the agora—for they then postulate that it is preferable for the mightiest to win.⁹ For the Sophists as well as for the marketing men, the instruments of power—the means to obtain or maintain it—take precedence over the ends. Because the ends are pointless, since there is no universal standard, all that is left is to act “in the most opportune manner.”¹⁰ As Thrasymachus says: “the purpose of government is to be efficient and to succeed. This is the criterion by which it should be judged.”¹¹ The point to be justified is not why one governs or why one sells but how to govern or how to sell better. Like all techniques, Sophism and marketing are indifferent to power. They place no limit whatsoever on the exercise of power unless it be weakness, which carries its own sanction: elimination by the strongest. Only those who can afford to pay the Sophists and the marketing men can hope for the assistance of their services: those with power, in order to preserve it so that they may continue to protect the weak: those without power, in order to win it so that the strongest may triumph.

Technique versus culture. Technique requires apprenticeship. Technique also requires knowledge related to a practical purpose. If this knowledge serves as the basis for power, it no longer constitutes the innate quality of distinguished and disinterested minds but a collection of vulgar processes within the reach of anyone who wishes do take the trouble, time and money to learn them. This disrespect for culture is quite characteristic of marketing, which retains from traditional culture nothing but a motley collection of stereotypes that are effective for purposes of persuasion. Equally characteristic is the contempt in which marketing is held by the scholars in the fields surrounding it—economics, philosophy and sociology—which (considering themselves to be the bearers of “true values”) have, until recently, denied it entry into those temples of cultural legitimacy, the universities. (Marketing was not introduced into the French university curriculum until after World War II.)

“Nowadays, the words ‘success’ or ‘a successful man’ suggest most immediately the world of business, and only secondarily that of politics. As an analogy, one might assign to rhetoric the place now occupied by advertising. . . . As we have our business schools and schools of advertising, so the Greeks had their teachers of politics and rhetoric: the Sophists.” So Guthrie puts it.¹² Just as professors of marketing face opposition from the “noble” disciplines, so the Sophists faced it from the “philosophers of truth” because they declared themselves to be “technicians” and offered technical apprenticeship in their knowledge to all. A sacrilegious proposition this was, since it made talent not a moral and intellectual gift, reserved by the gods for a small elect, but a capacity that could be cultivated by anyone through a suitable apprenticeship organized by “teachers” with the help of text books. Sophistry was a democratic art that sapped the legitimacy of the power exercised by the elites in Athens by placing itself at the service of “the uncultured whose desire is not for wisdom but for scoring off an opponent.”¹³

The Sophists were iconoclasts, all the more so as, possessing specialist knowledge, they transmitted it not through the free and disinterested contact that the divinely elected philosopher might maintain with his disciples, but through nothing less than the business relationship that linked the master craftsman with his apprentice. Their minds perverted by money, the Sophists sold technical instruction that was divorced from culture—and were very successful at it. Here were minds whose distinction was acknowledged by their most prestigious adversaries,¹⁴ but they abandoned the cult of virtue to place themselves at the service of efficiency in the management of profane matters. Their aim was to train good talkers, capable of making points in a debate, not to arouse scientific interest in a subject for its own sake.¹⁵

Foreigners. There is another criticism that Sophism and marketing share across the centuries. The one like the other is accused of coming from abroad. Indeed the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sophism and Marketing
• 2 Laissez-Faire and the Crisis of Legitimacy
• 3 Counting—from a Symbolic Procedure to a Pragmatic Procedure
• 4 From the Market Price to the Product Image
• 5 From the Vote to the Survey
• 6 From Bureaucratic Counting to Social Indicators
• 7 Rhetoric: The Method of Discourse
• 8 Pragmatism: The Formation of the Cybernetic Ideology
• 9 The Workings of Cybernetic Ideology
• 10 Social Classes and Statistical Destiny
• 11 Managing the Impossible
• 12 1989: Two Centuries Later
• Conclusion
• Index