Marketing and Social Construction

Exploring the Rhetorics of Managed Consumption

Chris Hackley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415208598
• eBook ISBN: 9781134618972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Marketing is at the centre of the business education boom: a million or more people worldwide are studying the subject at any one time. Yet despite widespread discontent with the intellectual standards in marketing, very little has changed over the past thirty years. In this ground-breaking new work, Chris Hackley presents a social-constructionist critique of popular approaches to teaching, theorising and writing about marketing.

Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date European and North American studies, Dr Hackley presents his argument on two levels. First, he argues that mainstream marketing's ideologically driven curriculum and research programmes, dominated by North American tradition, reproduce business school myths about the nature of practically relevant theory and the role of professional education in management fields. Second, he suggests a broadened theoretical scope and renewed critical agenda for research, theory and teaching in marketing.

Intellectually rigorous yet comprehensible, this work will be of vital importance to all those interested in the future of teaching and research in business and management.

1 Marketing, Ideology and an Excess of Reflex

This book is about marketing and social construction. In my dictionary of choice about is a synonym for ‘on all sides of’, ‘all around’ and ‘near to’, each of which would be more appropriate than ‘about’ to describe the proximity of my book to its subject. The metaphoric about duly ‘deconstructed’ (in the broad American sense of deconstruction) my postmodernist, reflexive and quirky intellectual positioning should be aptly signified in the first paragraph, notwithstanding the dangers of setting down a scholarly intellectual marker with definitions from an ‘English Dictionary’ produced by ‘Children’s Leisure Products of New Lanark, Scotland’. But to get to the point (another misleading metaphor I’m afraid: my dictionary tells me that ‘point’ means things like ‘location’, ‘a unit on scoring or judging’, ‘a railway switch’ and ‘to extend the finger (at or to)’, any of which would be more appropriate to my style of discussion), some readers very interested in marketing might find it hard to recognise the marketing in this. The social construction, too, will seem quite different from the kinds of social construction many researchers in marketing and management are accustomed to. In the book I ‘extend my finger’ (at or to) a popular view of the scope and nature of marketing studies which I presume to label as ‘mainstream’ and I ‘locate’ my own view in a region far removed from what I call ‘mainstream’ marketing texts and business school courses. I adopt several ‘railway switch’ positions within the interpretive tradition of marketing and consumer research which are not necessarily typical of the kinds of interpretive positions for which Burrell and Morgan (1979) are often cited in support. Finally I issue a ‘unit on scoring or judging’ with regard to social construction which is more informed by post-structuralist and critical traditions than by the phenomenological social constructionism social researchers know from Berger and Luckman (1966). So I invoke unities like ‘marketing’ and ‘social construction’, and indeed ‘mainstream’ merely in order to destabilise and then reconstruct them in the pursuit of my own literary marketing agenda. I try to do this while writing in a textually self-conscious manner, drawing attention to my own literary devices even as I invoke them in an unrestrained rhetorical claim for authorial privilege (but I promise to put my children’s dictionary away and to stop digressing about every metaphor that intrigues me). You will have grasped by now that the idea of ‘research’ in my idea of ‘marketing’ is unlike the kind of research familiar to many marketing academics. My research interests are not centred around the measurement of all things marketing and the inducement from these of management maxims, concerns which occupy a major place among the priorities of many marketing academics and professional marketing institutions. But please, before you consign my book to the remainders bin along with the other deviants, drop outs and doppelgängers of the postmodern marketing fringe, let me assure you that my ‘location’ of view does indeed make use of unities, fundamentals and essentials of a most gratifyingly solid textuality. For those of you who actually enjoy reading the works of marketing nihilists and nontenured professors I have to tell you in honesty that much of the ensuing text will disappoint because it often drops into a resoundingly un-reflexive discourse, concrete, unconsciously metaphoric (or metaphorically unconscious) and, at times, downright turgid. I enjoy textual play but I use it as a distraction from the modernist spirit within me which yearns for a sense of linguistic coherence, meaning and progress, however momentary or provisional. I want this book to contribute to the marketing field in an inclusive way by drawing more varieties of scholarship and research within a broadened conception of the empirical and philosophical scope of research in marketing. And naturally I advise a reconciliation of opposing viewpoints, a truce, a warm and fuzzy collective hug, a rapprochement in marketing and consumer research no less (Heath, 1992; Hunt, 1991a, cited in Foxall, 1995) as a rhetorical device to make textual space for my own idiosyncratic viewpoint. Inclusiveness is all very well but if it doesn’t include me then I’m not playing. I try to set out this broadened agenda by using a version of social constructionism as the main organising theme.

Social constructionism in the guise I present it here implies a challenge to the marketing academy. I feel that promoting a sense of self-consciousness in marketing research/writing carries with it an intellectual agenda for marketing studies. What I mean is that mainstream traditions of marketing writing tend to be cast within a self-referential logic, alluding unproblematically to a realm of marketing practice which lies in some place beyond the text. I feel that social constructionism as an intellectual position, as an ontological point of departure, can reveal this realm as a complex literary construction and in so doing can point to a viable intellectual agenda for marketing studies which is critical and inclusive. I want to use textual devices to point to the stylistic literary conventions and rhetorical devices which produce what I call ‘mainstream’ marketing thought and writing. I want to textually subvert these in a re-imaginary exposé of marketing’s intellectual, and anti-intellectual presumptions. I feel that pushing the social constructionist ontological position to the foreground can assist in a deconstruction of marketing thought which, while avowedly critical in tone and substance, amounts to a useful and constructive contribution to the academy’s efforts to promote marketing research and professional pedagogy.

The book conscripts quite a lot of the kind of marketing literature and research I label ‘mainstream’ into a story of marketing re-imagination. I claim no empirical correspondent for my ‘mainstream’ category, although I do claim that it can be characterised by the repeated use of certain rhetorical devices by marketing authors. Mainstream is just a word used occasionally in, erm, mainstream marketing research (e.g. Day and Montgomery, 1999, p. 6, in a Journal of Marketing special issue sponsored by the US Marketing Science Institute) to put to work a binary of inclusion/exclusion. In the above case Day and Montgomery (1999) write of an idea (it doesn’t matter which) which is not yet ‘accepted fully’ by ‘mainstream’ marketers. In the same article they set out an agenda for research in marketing which overtly promotes an exclusive (as opposed to inclusive) idea of marketing science. In this case Day and Montgomery (1999) privilege a nomothetic vision of marketing ‘metrics’. Marketing research should, they suggest, seek out and statistically support empirical truths which can form the declarative (or factual) knowledge base of normative marketing management science. I don’t wish to argue that there’s anything wrong with doing sums in marketing research. Hooley and Hussey (1994) draw on a long-standing concern with the quantification of marketing variables for marketing theory development (Howard et al., 1991) but advise that their use can be exploratory as opposed to confirmatory (Tukey, 1962). They suggest ten ‘commandments’ (following from Sheth, 1971, and Hooley, 1980) for exercising care in the collection and interpretation of quantitative data. And yet while using measured things as a basis for reasoning is neither more nor less of an interpretative process than inferring categories from qualitative data as a basis for reasoning, it (measuring) does necessarily entail an order of reductionism which closes down critique. Hence a quantitative paradigm for marketing research becomes an ideal vehicle for the very scientistic ideology which sustains the mainstream. Esoteric quantitative marketing science and popular text book normative marketing management principles act together in mutually dependent indifference. Neither cares about the other: few marketing courses or introductory texts have a serious quantitative element and marketing science can claim to have developed few, or no, secure, enduring or universal normative principles for management (Saren, 1999). Even the statistical and empirical grounds of mainstream marketing mainstays like market segmentation have been strongly criticised in terms of their own internal logic (Wensley, 1995, 1996; rejoinder in Saunders, 1995). But even the textbook versions of normative mainstream marketing which eschew the ‘esoteric mathematical approaches’ of specialist academic marketing statisticians (Mercer, 1996, p. 3) in favour of an insistent and decidedly odd phenomenological experientialism are couched within a quasi-scientistic discourse of cause and effect. I suggest that the enterprise of quantitative science in marketing ideologically supports the populist marketing discourse of practitioner-orientation even though said science has enjoyed less than remarkable success and, furthermore, is intellectually if not ideologically disconnected from the popular mainstream marketing enterprise.

In the end, quantitative methods in marketing research, and the interpretative methods deriving from the hermeneutic traditions, have one important thing in common: everybody is looking for findings. Or for insights, or just for something to say. People are predisposed to differing rhetorical stances with which to get attention. Holbrook and O’Shaugnessy, writing in the Journal of Consumer Research, agree that ‘all knowledge and all science depends on interpretation’ (1988, p. 398) and Foxall (1995) also criticises the tendency for marketing and consumer researchers (still, in spite of long-running and esoteric debates in the academic journals) to come out as post-positivistic interpretive researchers on the one hand or as objective natural scientists on the other. Foxall argues that ‘these exclusive views of the nature of science and interpretation ignore the subtle interrelationship of positivistic and interpretivistic inquiry in actual epistemological systems’ (ibid., p. 8).

But my own problematic depends on the view that a great deal of marketing research, writing and theory, especially its most popular and influential bits, remains ideologically bound to a rhetoric of natural science even though the way this is played out in terms of research methods and philosophies is often confused and contradictory. Inquiry is a contradictory affair but my feeling is that the contradictions in marketing operate within a guiding ideology which is subtle but pervasive and which is played out through language but, nonetheless, has practical institutional and intellectual consequences. Mainstreamism is the (often unconscious) use of this guiding ideology as a rhetoric to make claims and win power and legitimacy for one’s point of view. As for myself, I abhor such intellectual shallowness and political disingenuousness. In principle. But you see I’ve a living to earn, a career to forge, a professional identity to accomplish, mouths to feed, an ego to inflate and a Ford Maverick to fill with diesel, toys to buy and marketing scams to buy into (gotta catch ’em all), dreams to fulfil and people to serve, a house to paint and a holiday to pay for, educations to fund, cable TV and Internet bills to pay, pensions to save for, lifestyles to explore, identities to build through the acquisition of marketed brands, progress to socially construct, aspirations to aspirate: realisations to realise and fantasies to fulfil, and all through the marvellous myriad world of consumer marketing. I am, you see, trapped in the existential wildebeest of postmodern consumption. So for God’s sake buy this book because the last thing I need is to be emancipated (or perhaps emaciated) from this happy, hectic, hegemonic marketing lifestyle.

Mainstreamism, as I see it, represents that which is generally included in marketing writing, research and curricula in business schools, in the major marketing journals and in the programmes of certification of professional marketing associations. I will write rather a lot, no doubt too much, on what I call mainstreamism but now I want to mention just one example of exclusion in a piece of marketing writing I regard as mainstream. My example is only slightly unfair, but then critique is always unfair to somebody. Deshpande, in a piece about the future of academic research in marketing, writes, ‘In academia, postmodern writing often is directed at the putative vagaries of capitalism’ (1999, p.164). Deshpande goes on to argue that there is a need for better, broader, more cross-functional and cross-disciplinary research in marketing. His argument acknowledges marketing’s cross-disciplinary debts and calls for greater cooperation between researchers in marketing and those in other faculties. But this call is cast within a discourse of mainstreamism which re-asserts a narrow normative order for marketing and produces a zone of exclusion for marketing research. I think the comment above on postmodernism illustrates this discursive exclusion well. I like postmodernist writing in marketing and consumer research. I think the rhetoric of postmodernism offers a telling counterpoint to the rhetoric of mainstreamism in marketing. I think much that claims postmodernism as its literary legitimation is not very postmodern at all. As Brown (1993) acknowledges, the postmodern brand is extended to signify ‘naturalistic’ or ‘interpretative’ approaches in consumer research (Sherry, 1991) and with less integrity as a fashionable synonym for ‘new’ or ‘complex’ (as in Hackley and Kitchen, 1999: well, nobody’s perfect). But then I think much work that postmodernises its thesis owes a great deal to thinking which need not be classified as postmodern. William of Ockham himself might have blanched at the literary invocation of postmodernism to express psychological and linguistic insights which were insights long before the medieval monk razored his way through theological metaphysics. Economy of explanation is not a virtue widely recognised among postmodernists. But, then, one only has the vocabulary of one’s time, and postmodernist rhetoric exposes by contradistinction many logocentric, scientistic and other linguistic practices that have become so deeply embedded into the psychology of public and intellectual life that they are practically inexpressible in any other terms. But, nebulous though the meanings of postmodernism might be, I have never read any postmodern marketing or consumer research by authors who would take an anti-capitalist stance (except, perhaps, Hetrick and Lozada, 1994, at least in the first half of their article). While many social theorists would argue that politically active Marxism lies at the intellectual core of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, and that this in turn is a major influence on much postmodernist and post-structuralist thought, few of the pragmatic academics working in business schools would give much time to the idea that the writing of middle-class intellectuals could ever emancipate the proletariat (even if the proletariat were an identifiable category in an advanced economy). The Frankfurt School members who wrote a major treatise against the ‘culture industry’ of mediated communications (The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno, 1944) while ensconced in exile in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California (described in Callinicos, 1999, p. 253) displayed admirable pragmatism. I don’t cite this to damn by implication the intellectual achievements or sincerity of critical theory. I just mean that nothing is as emancipatory for intellectual work as material comfort, a sentiment apparently heartily endorsed by the Frankfurt School’s leader, Max Horkheimer (in correspondence reported in Callinicos, 1999, p. 248) when he wrote, ‘money is the best protection’. And so say all of us. One might argue that the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and Marxism are mutually inseparable as intellectual products (as do Hetrick and Lozada, 1994 as well as Callinicos, 1999), but it does not follow that all critique must be Marxist in spirit. Critical deconstruction was an intellectual virtue long before Marxism was thought of. Intellectual virtues can, I feel, stand apart from hegemonic cultural influences in some way. Perhaps lurking behind such a position is a transcendent Platonism which, on the face of it, seems out of keeping with postmodernism, and indeed with social constructionism. To work up an argument for intellectual virtue I guess you have to position intellectual values in some realm apart from language and culture. Or perhaps not. But certainly for many writers in social science ‘critical’ is a by-word for intellectual virtues which can be divorced from Marxism. Such a position is set out in the first half of a Murray and Ozanne (1991) article in the Journal of Consumer Research. Deshpande (1999) is, like many marketing academics writing in mainstream mode, textually constructing a marketing research/writing exclusion zone which defends one discourse against intrusions by another. Mainstream marketers can, Deshpande seems to be implying, safely ignore the rich insights and intellectual sophistication of postmodernist thinking because a simplistic historical line can be drawn from Marxism to critical theory and on to post-structuralism, and from there on to postmodernism. Deshpande goes on to concede that marketing as he conceives it in this article is founded on an ideological precept (ibid., p.167) (specifically alluding to Drucker’s much apostrophised aphorism about marketing being the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view (1954, p. 39)) which Deshpande reinvents as (wait for it) ‘customercentricity’. So instead of scientism we have neologism. Having tarred all ‘postmodern’ marketing writers with the same McCarthyite brush, Deshpande re-asserts what he admits is an ideological precept which, apparently, requires no further justification. So in this mainstream text marketing research-writing is produced not as an intellectual enterprise, as a scholarly endeavour or even as a science, but as an ideological battle against an anti-capitalist foe. Maybe this will sound like an over-interpretation to many academics in marketing, and perhaps it is (where would we be without over-interpretation?). But it does reflect a major theme that occupies me in this book concerning the uses of language to construct texts which reflect various interests, and not necessarily those of the authors.

In this book I also draw on a lot of what Brown (1995a, p. 139) calls ‘extra-marketing marketing’. This is the universe of scholarly analyses of marketing phenomena written by people who might well have an intellectual aversion for mainstream marketing management studies but whose standards of scholarship are ‘unsurpassed by anything academic marketing has to offer’ (Brown, 1995a, p. 139) (although Brown himself has done as much as any to remedy this). In a somewhat barbed compliment, militated by a much repeated admiration for his abilities as an expositor of excellence of postmodernism, Brown’s admiring but prickly friend Morris Holbrook claims that Brown’s ‘comic genius’ places him in a uniquely talented realm which reaches beyond marketing (Holbrook, 1999b, p. 194). I am also thinking of a lot of work done by people in business schools who choose to distance themselves from marketing, especially research done by consumer researchers who deny that their work need be relevant to or part of the marketing field (e.g. Belk, 1986; Holbrook, 1995a). I am, I admit, puzzled that consumer research academics (mainly American ones) seem to feel that they need to mark such a distinction. Certainly, Holbrook (1999a) draws on the most mainstream of mainstream marketing principles in the ‘introduction’ to his recent edited book on consumer research in order to establish a point of managerialist departure for consumer research. In quoting multiple Kotlerian definitions of foundational marketing concepts (pp. 1 and 2) Holbrook (1999a) is legitimising consumer research by positioning it as a research enterprise logically following from normative managerial marketing. Maybe Holbrook would argue that one can take both positions with equal justification depending on the audience (I certainly adjust my positions according to my audience). But I have never heard an argument in favour of disciplinary ghettoisation that I didn’t feel was overtly political. Furthermore, I’m not sure disciplinary distinctions can be drawn: surely scholarship is merely either good or bad? Its uses depend on people other than the authors. Isn’t marketing a perfect example of a research enterprise conceived as practical by design but falling (a very long way) short of this aim while other ostensibly non-useful scholarly fields such as classical studies are widely acknowledged to offer students a powerful intellectual basis for creative reasoning and astute professional judgement? But I’m more puzzled by marketing articles which (in Day and Montgomery, 1999) recite with gusto Hunt’s (1983) list of marketing research priorities as support for a ‘marketing needs more …’ argument but then present a nomothetic empiricist view of what theory can be. Such a view rules out of order any formulation of theory which could generate insights into Hunt’s (1983) questions regarding the behaviour of buyers and sellers, the context of commercial exchanges and especially the social consequences of marketing activity. I feel that it is not merely sentimental to claim that imagination, not measurement and prediction, has been the source of any theory worth having. Political boundary work seems to delimit agenda-setting arguments in marketing research so that the reasoning follows a circular path back to the beginning. Mainstream reinventionary rhetoric asserts that what we need to re-imagine, re-energise, re-intellectualise marketing is … well, more of the same actually.

So I sit here, hunched rheumatically over a hot keyboard in my dirty track suit, kids at school and nursery, their little tummies full with their morning cocktail of Ritalin, Bromide, Sodium Pentothal and Rice Crunchies in a gin fizz, wife at work doing the grown-up job, cats variously arranged on once clean but now hirsute furniture, and I’m squinting short-sightedly into the glaring screen of my improbably fast 75 mz Pentium desktop pc with CD player, coat hooks, leather upholstery, air conditioning and cruise control, and layered around me in crumpled heaps of paper are the literary introspections of hundreds of similarly saturnine scholarly solipsists. Is writing a monograph a short route to insanity I wonder idly as I think of all the authors present yet absent whose thoughts are strewn around mine. I suspect that I’m equally out of time with the conventions of the marketing mainstreamers, the pedagogically practitioner-focused anecdotalists, the consumer research interpretavists, the postmodern marketers, the neo-Marxian critical theorists and the existential-phenomenologists. I suspect that I’ll make few friends either among the gurus of marketing consulting, the arriviste marketing tyros or the big corporation marketing technocrats, and even fewer among the Willy Lomans of commercial America. If you’re a marketing person who is avowedly allergic to ambiguity, equivocal about equivocation, paranoid about paradigmatic pluralism and appalled by ostentatious and attention-grabbing displays of alliteration in a paler prose than Brown, then this book will confirm all your prejudices about the unhealthiness and sheer pointlessness of alternativism in marketing writing. Then you can locate alternativism with all the other ‘-isms’ of marketing on an unpopulated rock of mainstream marketing’s archipelagic gulag. If, on the other hand, you feel that the ideological mainstream influences in marketing research, theory and education are intellectually inhibiting, logically circular, philosophically naïve and politically disingenuous, not to mention managerially useless, then I hope you can have those prejudices confirmed by my book as well. In fact my aim is to please, nay delight, all my customers by satisfying your (latent) need for psychological affirmation through prejudicial confirmation. Your grasp of textual mainstream marketing’s oxymoronic principles and parodies of practice will be thoroughly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Marketing, ideology and an excess of reflex
• 2. Social construction and the tango rhythms of marketing method
• 3. All together now: what is marketing?
• 4. Mediated marketing and communications
• 5. Marketing’s birth, death, re-rebirth and re-re-resurrection
• 6. Tell me, George, where did it all go wrong?
• 7. Marketing and social construction: knowledge, critique and research in marketing
• Bibliography
• Index