Critical Marketing

Pauline Maclaran, Michael Saren, Pauline Maclaran, Christina Goulding, Richard Elliott, Miriam Caterall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138441194
• eBook ISBN: 9781136412912
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Marketing is still widely perceived as simply the creator of wants and needs through selling and advertising and marketing theory has been criticized for not taking a more critical approach to the subject. This is because most conventional marketing thinking takes a broadly managerial perspective without reflecting on the wider societal implications of the effects of marketing activities. In response this important new book is the first text designed to raise awareness of the critical, ethical, social and methodological issues facing contemporary marketing. Uniquely it provides: · The latest knowledge based on a series of major seminars in the field · The insights of a leading team of international contributors with an interdisciplinary perspective . A clear map of the domain of critical marketing · A rigorous analysis of the implications for future thinking and research. For faculty and upper level students and practitioners in Marketing, and those in the related areas of cultural studies and media Critical Marketing will be a major addition to the literature and the development of the subject.

Part I

Being a Critical Marketer: Reflections from the Field

1

Critical Research in Marketing: An Armchair Report

Linda M. Scott

I admit I experienced ironic amusement when asked to address the question, ‘What exactly is critical marketing research?’ in my talk for the ESRC Doctoral Symposium. I chuckled that marketing doctoral students put such a question to their advisors because I had recently asked the same of several colleagues and they too expressed uncertainty about what that term really meant. I already knew there was no answer that could command easy consensus.

As a rhetorician, I am disinclined to advocate ‘correct’ definitions, but instead prefer to locate the meaning of any term in the common usage of the community in which it appears. Being sensitive to the historical construction of academic inquiry, I also would rather point to the current moment in the practice of critical research, specifically in marketing, as a distillation of past theory, current agendas, evident mistakes, and future potential, than adhere too slavishly to some canonical body of theory or erstwhile political perspectives borrowed from other fields. So, I decided to approach the question by asking a sampling of community members what they thought ‘critical marketing’ was.

I assembled an informal list, comprised to some extent of the usual suspects (for instance, people who had already written on critical research in the marketing literature), but I also included scholars who work in other research streams, but whose general opinions I respect. And, I included a scattering of people who are not based in business schools but who have had enough interaction with marketing to have become opinion leaders. Some I asked are senior academics – journal editors and ACR Fellows, for instance, were well represented on my list – and some are new to the field. This was by no means an exhaustive list: only 41 people were on it. Because Jonathan Schroeder and I were dividing up the world, so to speak, for the speeches at the workshop, I only included North Americans. So, obviously, I failed to ask many who would have had important things to say. But the lecture was coming up soon and I needed a quick take on the question, so I asked a list of people I knew well enough to answer me right away, even during the Christmas break, and promised myself to bill this survey for what it is: a quick-and-dirty convenience sample.

In order to frame the parameters of the question and give permission for multiple viewpoints, I told the list I had been having conversations with several colleagues and found their ideas about ‘critical research’ varied among four definitions:

1. To some people, ‘critical’ just means ‘interpretive’ or ‘qualitative’.
2. To some people, ‘Critical’ is capitalized and it explicitly means ‘Marxist’.
3. To some people, ‘critical’ refers to a stance that is concerned with larger social issues or using marketing for socially progressive purposes.
4. To some people, ‘critical’ means research that is critical of more mainstream approaches to the study of markets and marketing.

Twenty-five people responded to my query and only a handful of them are quoted here. Importantly, none of them knew in advance what my conclusions would be or how I would ultimately use what they wrote. Therefore, though they all gave their permission to be quoted, the presence of a name here in no way indicates endorsement of my own perspective on critical marketing research.

As the emails began filling my inbox, it became clear that many answers had been strongly influenced by the personal experiences of the writers. The notion of ‘critical marketing’, it seems, is a flashpoint for many, holding the potential to ignite not only on politics, but also on methods, rigour, evidence, and academic freedom. Several expressed anger, disdain, or fear of reprisals if they criticized the critical. Others expressed passion and a strong sense of urgency for a global initiative. It seems important to recognize up front that this essay is built on the off-the-cuff, but often intensely felt, perspectives of those who were asked. Hence, I have called it ‘an armchair report’.

In order to frame my own synthesis of these motley responses, I want to describe the particular armchair in which I sit. Though I have recently moved to England, my exposure to the situation in Europe is so limited that I can only speak from the American experience with critical research. Even in the US marketing academy, I have been an outsider, albeit one with some pretty good connections to insiders. Until very recently, I had never worked in a business school, though I have built my career by publishing in the marketing literature. All this time, I have worked out of a multidisciplinary appointment in the Communications College at the University of Illinois. My background, however, gives me a fortuitous perch from which to comment on this particular question at this specific time.

My own training is in arts theory, especially literary theory. In the American academy, literary studies, rather than the social sciences, was the original field of entry for critical theory. Because ‘critical theory’ and ‘criticism’ are what all literary types believe they do, it has long been the convention there to capitalize ‘Critical’ when referring specifically to a stance informed by Marxism (including theoretical influences ranging broadly from Marx and Engels to the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools to Althusser and Gramsci). I will be following that convention here, for reasons I think will become clear.

Critical Theory was carried along when literary theory – including semiotics, rhetoric and poststructuralism – became fashionable in the 1980s as a lens for examining a range of cultural forms, but especially advertising and film. The combination bore a new subdiscipline, ‘cultural studies’, which was sometimes housed in English departments and sometimes in communications schools. I spent nearly 15 years working in a cultural studies environment considered by many to be paradigmatic: the University of Illinois was home to both the Institute for Communications Research, where I held an appointment, and a weekly series of salons called the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, where I was ‘a regular’.

Both the literary approach and cultural studies were identified with qualitative research and, in communications where I was housed, this produced a confrontation over the practice of science and the use of quantitative methods very similar to the one that occurred later in marketing. In some ways, the identification of cultural studies with qualitative data grew predictably from its origins in English departments, where statistics are nonexistent, science anathema, and questions of evidence, to say the least, narrowly circumscribed. The influence of poststructuralism, along with works from the history and philosophy of science like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), gave a language and a strategy with which to take on the precepts of scientific research. However, though the fight over methods was intense, the focus on a Critique of capitalism (and its cultural forms) was the most salient feature in the rise of cultural studies.

Indeed, cultural studies was so often characterized by a Critical perspective that, by the 1990s, the two had become synonymous. Ultimately, the Critical agenda had to be clearly reflected (using whatever Theory was currently fashionable) in any scholarly work before it could be accepted for publication. Those who attempted to write outside the prevailing perspective or, heaven forbid, to disagree with it, were simply frozen out. On the ground, colleagues who seemed to think differently from the ingroup were, at best, ridiculed as being in need of reeducation. Thus, freedom of inquiry became substantially constrained. The growing attention to political correctness infected even the classroom, where some students chafed under the unspoken but palpable limitations on their freedom of expression. Subordinating evidence to politics slowly became the order of the day, leading to a pronounced erosion of both critical thought and liberal education. The Critique, with its unrelentingly negative hermeneutic, had a further tendency to look like despair, scoffing at hope and disdaining those who sought solutions that fell short of revolution.

Two areas in which the Critical turn had its most public successes and its most blazing failures were the analysis of images and the emergence of women’s studies programmes. Since my research interests cluster around imagery and women’s history – and since I held appointments in both women’s studies and art at Illinois – I was in a position to observe both triumphs and tragedies.

Critical Theory has a perspective on visuals that is at once naïve and paranoid. Though many canonical works in cultural studies involve the analysis of images – John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1973), Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ in Screen (1975), and Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements (1979) are three famous examples – the lack of expertise or narrow range of evidence that too often marked such works eventually contributed to a growing sense that Critical research was inclined to make grandiose claims on insufficient grounds and without consideration of alternative explanations. The iconophobia that characterized this discourse had an unpleasant Calvinist ring to it – and tended to alienate many whose field of study really was imagery (e.g. art and art history).

In the USA, women’s studies has experienced extraordinary growth and institutional success since its inception in the 1970s. The New Left and Critical Theory, it can be argued, found their most unambiguous success in American academic feminism: the typical parsing notwithstanding, all the feminist theories acceptable in the academy are antimarket and anticapitalist (the term ‘liberal feminist’ became almost as insulting an epithet as ‘antifeminist’). Women’s studies remains one of the most popular undergraduate majors, in spite of a growing chorus of criticism from within the discipline itself. (Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge’s Professing Feminism (1995) is one example), from the emergent Third Wave (for instance, Rene Denfeld’s The New Victorians (1995)), as well as, predictably, from the radical right. The range of critics belies the consistency of the critique: that women’s studies has become exclusive, hostile to dissent, blinkered by politics whether the question is tenure decisions or reading lists, and stubbornly set against traditional questions of evidence, especially where the documentation at hand is scientific or quantitative.

As the Critical view moved into fields like sociology with strong traditions reliant on statistics (as in, for instance, demography) and research funding more closely tied to government, the question of evidence seemed to me to intensify, as did the acrimony over required political views. The publication and promotion scandals, the paradigm schisms that destroyed departments – these became the stuff of academic legend. The political too often became personal.

Keep in mind that this was all occurring against a historical backdrop bearing the most contradictory evidence imaginable: the fall of the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the market conversion of nearly every other Marxist regime in the world, and the declaration by a generation of economists that the ideal of a centrally planned economy had finally been proven unworkable.

Yet the situation in business schools was also eerily out of touch with reality. As critiques appearing in vehicles ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the Chronicle of Higher Education have observed, the American business school had grown, during this same period, into an insular institution of technocrats. In the face of corporate financial scandals at home and an exploding market economy that threatened to destabilize societies and environments all over the world, American business education and research had focused so narrowly their sights were now sunk deep, ostrich-like, and they could offer little to meet the challenges of either practice or ethics. Indeed, in marketing, the research ideal for 30 years has been producing practical tools that will indiscriminately help industry sell more stuff. I cannot imagine a situation that cries out more clearly for a critical perspective than these material realities.

Interestingly, marketing focused narrowly on science in a desperate bid for academic credibility. My own sense is that the academy outside business schools has no respect at all for their research specifically because it so totally lacks critical perspective. Regardless of the level of scientific rigour that may be flaunted, the determination of business schools to be the unquestioning handmaids of industry make them a laughing stock at the campus level of most universities. Never mind that business academics have the highest salaries and most generous endowments – in the eyes of their more traditional colleagues, these are just the material evidence of souls being sold.

Marketing has inherited this moment. With cultural theory impinging on the discipline as it has over the past 20 years, I think it was inevitable that a critical (if not Critical) point of view on markets would begin to emerge. Yet coming also on the heels of what has happened elsewhere in the academy, some ambivalence is just as inevitably created among scholars committed to positive change but also to rigorous research and mutual respect. I thought it understandable that the responses I received were often contradictory, but impassioned.

Responses to the suggestion that ‘critical research’ merely referred to interpretive research were summed up by Rich Lutz in only two words: ‘NO WAY’. Rich, along with many others, referred to Marxism (whether or not capitalized) as a primary identifying feature of what they saw as Critical research (again, whether or not they themselves used a capital ‘C’). Several also specifically declared the roots of Critical work to be in either the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, or both. Some listed related high theorists, like Althusser or Baudrillard, while others cited examples from our own literature:

From my perspective ‘critical’ has the broader meaning of ‘critical theory’ in general. By this I mean the body of theory based on the work of people like Gramsci and Foucault which questions the nature of the work we do as social scientists. That means asking who benefits from what we do, and how we are, ourselves, part of the ideological apparatus of capitalism. For me that means broadening the scope of research ethics to consider the historical power relationships in which our work is embedded.

Rick Wilk

. . . I see it as related to critical theory, the Frankfurt school, Julie [Ozanne] and Jeff [Murray]’s work (when talking about work within our ACR/JCR world), the Birmingham School, and thus tangentially small-M (neo) Marxism. In a more general and less lit-bound sense, I see it as research that is critical of contemporary (particularly laissezfaire, unrestricted) capitalism. It looks at contemporary capitalism and capitalist/consumer culture with an eye to questions of social equity, environmental effects, personal freedom, international distribution of resources, and social progress.

Rob Kozinets

Interestingly, several others besides Kozinets specifically located the term in a broadly Marxist tradition, but also provided further elaboration that many of us would see as offering a much larger...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Defining the Field of Critical Marketing
• Part I Being a Critical Marketer: Reflections from the Field
• Part II Critical Debates: Questioning Underlying Assumptions
• Part III Effecting Change Through Critique:Social and Environmental Issues
• Index