Power in Marketing:

A Broadly Dimensional Approach

© John Desmond

First published, October, 2025

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design, “Feeding Frenzy” © Jean Hall

Chapter Three: Power in the Academy

Introduction

What might Adam Smith have made of modern marketing theory? As Smith wrote long before his vision of the marketplace began to take shape, it is not surprising that he did not foresee the need for a theory of marketing. Alive to the gross inequities perpetuated by the mercantile system of his day, he prescribed the operation of the price mechanism spurred by competition between a myriad firms coupled with government regulation as the means to discipline merchants that profited at the consumer’s expense. There is little doubt, given his comments on the power of the consumer, that he would have thought that in a competitive marketplace it would make sense for a firm to strive to serve the needs of its customers. What then might he have made of the development of a theory of marketing that takes for granted that questions pertaining to marketing and consumption should be viewed, not from the perspective of the customer, nor of society at large, but through the lens of the marketing manager in the firm?

Principles of economic liberalism, involving commitment to private property rights and freedom of choice for consumers are uncontroversial for the vast majority of academics who form the mainstream in marketing and consumer research, who despite recent reflection on this issue by some, continue to assume the viewpoint of business. While the naïve outsider might ask why, given consumption is the end of all production, is it that marketing does not operate from the perspective of the consumer, never mind why it exists in the first place, if markets operate so efficiently, it helps to have some idea of the peculiar way in which the academic study of the subject developed in the USA, particularly during the period of the Cold War that followed closely on the heels of the Second World War.

When one thinks about it, it seems obvious that the academic study of marketing would have developed from the perspective of the firm as, unlike the individual consumer who has neither the time nor the resources, firms have a vested interest in having their staff trained in the latest techniques, and possess the considerable resources to fund development and to sponsor research. While policy makers are likewise interested, the pockets of the state are not quite so deep as those of the corporate sector and in any event, those of the regulatory agencies have been almost sewn shut.

Power operates at different levels in the marketing academy within which the study of marketing is symbolically positioned close to the bottom rung on the ladder of management studies, which is in turn located at an equivalent point in relation to the social sciences. It thus comes as no surprise that like psychology, the academic study of marketing has sought to burnish its credentials by modelling itself on the image of the hard sciences. Conceptual developments do not just serve the purpose of better helping the firm to attune its offering to its customers. Given the traditional lowly status of marketing, critiques of the ‘marketing myopia’ of businesses that are run by engineers, technologists, accountants, or sales managers, and developments such as the marketing concept and Service Dominant Logic not only emphasize the centrality of marketing ideas but lend ideological support to enable marketing managers to leverage their position in the ‘C-suite’.

A paradox should be noted in that, as universities have become corporatised, so their executives, who generally continued look down on their academic colleagues in marketing, have been happy to pay a veritable fortune to big-time consultancies for advice from fresh-faced individuals recently graduated from their own schools of marketing. Reflecting on a book that discusses the growing commercialization of universities, Maurice Holbrook drew attention to another aspect, which is the irony that the academic values espoused by those who subscribe to the Journal of Macromarketing have been ‘undermined by the marketing ethos itself’ as it has progressively infiltrated the halls of academe, where some, ‘fairly ugly results tend to ensue’. Marketing academics who are critical of marketing practice must now contend with the ‘customerisation’ of students1 and the fact that corporations are now a major source of finance for research.

Paradigmatic Dimensions

Kuhn’s (1970) concept of paradigm, is a useful tool to explore dimensions of the field of power that has been employed by several academics in marketing,² as it helps facilitate one’s understanding of some of the key differences between mainstream, interpretive and critical perspectives. The approach builds on Burrell & Morgan (1979), who allot a theory to one of four paradigmatic groupings based on its location on two axes. The first axis differentiates mainstream and interpretive consumer research from critical accounts. The mainstream assumes that the capitalist marketplace is harmonious and beneficial for social welfare and confines itself to explaining consumer behaviour within this context, whilst critics focus on the marketplace as a source of inequality and conflict. The second axis, which concerns questions of objectivity and subjectivity, is formed by background assumptions concerning ontology, epistemology, human nature and methodology.

Ontology: Realism-nominalism

 Realists believe in the existence of a world that is external to our perception of it that is made up of tangible and relatively unchangeable structures.  Nominalists on the other hand argue that the social world is constructed by our perceptions, has no real structure and is made up of no more than names given by culture.

Epistemology: Positivism-anti-positivism

Positivism is associated with Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume. Positivism is anti-theological and anti-metaphysical. This is the approach which traditionally dominates the natural sciences. Positivism focuses on observation and experience and seeks to explain or to predict what happens in the external world by detecting regularities and causal relationships between elements. Anti-positivists on the other hand see the social world as relativistic and argue that actions can only be understood within the perspective of the participant.

View of Human Nature: Determinism-voluntarism

Sometimes also known as the structure-agency debate. Are human actions and identities structured and determined by culture and the environment, or are we autonomous and capable of free-will?

 Methodology: Ideographic-nomothetic

The ideographic argument rejects the idea that one can understand the social world from the perspective of an impersonal observer and insists that this can only be obtained through first-hand personal knowledge. This stresses a focus on case-histories and getting ‘inside’ situations.  Ideographic theorists do not assume that constructs have one obvious meaning but rather can signify different meanings depending on their relation to other constructs within an individual’s construct system (Kelly, 1955). Two individuals might belong to Extinction Rebellion because they each value sustainability, but when this is probed by the researcher “sustainable” proves to hold very different meanings for each. In contrast, the nomothetic approach is systematic and employs the same methods as the natural sciences, such as experimental designs.

The different paradigms in academic marketing are schematically illustrated in Figure 3.1. ￼Although the mainstream is dominant, it is important to recognize the existence of alternative voices in marketing and consumer research. While mainstream marketing and consumer research is modelled on the assumptions and methods of the natural sciences, alternatives tend to be based on knowledge of social or critical theory and the employment of interpretive methods. A solid grounding in statistics and mathematical modelling stands the mainstream researcher in good stead offering them access to the top journals from which the critical researcher, whose academic capital is derived from their understanding and deployment of otherwise abstruse theories and concepts, is usually denied access. That the academy is not a level playing field is partly because paradigmatic groupings are not just artificial theoretical entities but are living organisms formed by research communities. Given that relatively small groups form around specialisms, distinctive communal norms and camp loyalties cluster around the shared interests of those who attend the same conferences, forming friendships establishing mutual bonds of obligation by examining theses and reviewing the papers submitted by their peers. While benign relations can persist within a particular camp, there is no love lost between the two main camps comprising on the one hand the majority mainstream grouping dedicated to logical empiricism and the minority interpretive “community”. Despite the best intentions of editors, it is not unusual to hear a “mainstream” academic dismiss interpretive consumer research pejoratively as “woolly” and “unscientific” while from the other side references are made somewhat snidely to the theoretical superficiality of the mainstream and its, “Fast Moving Current Generalizations” (FMCGs), (Brownlie & Saren, 1995). In this context the persistence of “Consumer Culture Theory” as a continuing communal activity may owe more to a common shared antipathy of its adherents to the mainstream than to internal theoretical coherence.

Tribalism can lead to superficial engagement with the other side, leading to a simplistic rendering of assumptions and arguments that effectively reduce the other to a stereotypical caricature. For instance, Hunt (2001) complains about the frequent appellation of positivism by critics of the mainstream as a catch-all label to describe a narrow preoccupation with hypothesis driven research, involving experimental or questionnaire designs that fetishize causality, measurability and statistical validity at the expense of complexity, wholeness and richness of explanation. He argues that this is mistaken as the original positivists rejected causation because they viewed this as a metaphysical construct and were only realists to the extent that they regarded objects such as trees and rocks to have an existence that is independent of our minds. Elsewhere he describes six different understandings of realism (Hunt, 1991: 35).

Power in the Academy

Given that Robert Dahl, whose theory of power is discussed further in chapter six was concerned to understand the exercise of power in community politics, to what extent is it possible to apply key elements of his approach to the contexts of marketing and consumption? In his explanation power involves an overt contest between two ‘individuals’ A and B, each of whom draws selectively on bases of power in seeking to prevail over the other. Before addressing the most obvious question of the power of business relative to that of consumers, I wondered for a moment as to whether some academics might have better access to bases of power than do others? After all, mainstream academics ought generally to be better paid and to occupy more senior positions in their institutions than their critical colleagues because they ought to have access to a wider range of journals that are more prestigious. That said, the population of mainstream academics is larger, so perhaps it all evens out, and it is also important to bear in mind that even if it were the case that mainstream academics had better access to resources, one ought to avoid slipping into the fallacious assumption that those with more resources are necessarily more powerful than others. Nevertheless, I thought it interesting to conduct a brief illustrative exercise.

For academics working in research intensive universities, it is more than likely that hiring, promotion and salary advancement will be directly related to one’s perceived research impact. Writing over twenty years ago, Starbuck (2005) noted that even then, deans of business schools placed “extreme emphasis in so-called A journals” which led him to investigate whether the quality of papers published in these actually was any better than their more lowly counterparts.³ There are a variety of ways of measuring the impact of marketing journals, of which the most obvious is that employed by SCImago and Semantic Scholar based on the number of citations. Another approach is based on obtaining the opinions of a sample of members of the marketing community (Currie et al., 2023). While the rewards can be significant for those publishing in high-ranked journals conversely those publishing in lower-ranked journals can be penalised.⁴

While Kuhn’s concept of paradigm is useful in outlining differences, given that the vast majority of marketing academics are committed to the liberal idea of the market regulated by the price mechanism, one of the deepest divisions between them is not ideological but methodological, between those who adopt a rational instrumentalist, ‘hard’ science approach based on quantitative methods, and a minority who employ qualitative methods to explore the role of meaning, culture and identity in consumption. Another divergence is from the school of macromarketing which favours a more systemic approach to the subject.

￼

From the above, mainstream marketing academics have greater access to a range of highly rated journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science and JMR. Although it appears in the middle of the grid, a publication in the Journal of Consumer Research which is the premier journal in that field is an important step for tenure in the USA and accords status to those who publish in it from other countries. By comparison, avenues for critical scholarship provided by the Journal of Macromarketing, Marketing Theory and Consumption, Markets, Culture are in a different class.

The situation is complex as incentive structures differ from country to country. For instance in the UK, which is the home of Marketing Theory and of the current editorship of Consumption, Markets and Culture, it is not unusual for a critical academic to attain to the heights. However overall, as the Figure suggests the system is tilted towards rewarding the mainstream.⁵ Space is given over in chapter seven to discuss briefly how the loss of trust in academic self-policing in the neoliberal era and the institution of a system of metrics and citation analysis has led to claims of corruption and loss of confidence in research findings.

Mainstream Marketing

While the naïve outsider might ask why, given consumption is the end of all production, is it that marketing does not operate from the perspective of the consumer, never mind why it exists in the first place if markets operate so efficiently, it helps to have some idea of the peculiar way in which the academic study of the subject developed in the USA, particularly during the period of the Cold War that followed closely on the heels of the Second World War.

While historians and anthropologists have been at pains to point out that the roots of what we call marketing are not exclusive to one age nor to any one society, the USA achieved pre-eminence at centre of the academic field during the twentieth century through the establishment of business schools, teaching programmes and as the base for the leading journals. Although the history of consumption and marketing practices in other countries is becoming more widely known, the U.S.A. has for the past seventy years or so at least been the most widely studied consumer society which, through the medium of its powerful culture industries, has acted as a model for emulation for millions of aspiring consumers beyond its shores.⁶

While it is pertinent to ask why it was that the USA and not Europe became the centre for the study of marketing and consumer research, this question can only be touched on here. A key dividing line seems to be the historical antipathy and contempt for trade that prevailed in the higher echelons of European society compared to its enthusiastic embrace by Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville, who had earlier commented that in his native France, “there is none so aristocratic as a contempt for money”,⁷ later admitted on his visit to America in 1831, his astonishment to discover that its nascent democracy was not so much held together by classical republican bonds of civic virtue as by a shared belief in the pursuit of self-interest and the desire for money and wealth.⁸ Much more recently, the British management theorist Charles Handy also reported being struck by the unparalleled appetite in the USA for novelty, innovation, growth and job creation, as compared to Europe.⁹

While business schools were established in the USA in the early twentieth century, such was the perceived grubbiness of trade, that it was only in 1964 that the British Government established business schools on the American model in Manchester and London,¹⁰ whilst the garrisons lodged beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge held out against the rabble until the 1990s. A similar scene prevailed in France where, as Pierre Bourdieu (1988) describes it, the fields of medicine, law and the arts stood as entrenched bastions of middle-class values that sought to maintain a virginal spirit of theoretical purity that embraced the philology, clear of the sciences and especially the relatively new social sciences of economics, politics, psychology and sociology, which being applied were judged theoretically impure (ibid.: 122). In this context, the field of business studies was especially marked out as an object for disdain for threefold reasons; as a newcomer, as applied, and as tainted by its association to trade. Consider then the position of marketing in the academy, suffering not only the slights and slurs adhering to business, but marked out within business studies relative to ‘respectable’ fields such as finance and organization because of its associations in the popular imagination to boosterism, trickery and sleight of hand.¹¹

There are further questions, for instance, why mainstream marketing developed to consider exchange exclusively from the perspective of business, and why the dominant fraction of the mainstream sought to model itself on the “hard” natural sciences? Regarding the first question, it seems that the academic study of marketing in the USA might have taken a different path. For instance, Jones and Monieson (1990) describe the institutional approach developed by German trained economists from the University of Wisconsin in the early twentieth century. Wary of liberal market theory, they believed that the market is subject to distortion and inefficiency and were consequently interested to adopt the perspective of the policy maker to investigate the extent of consumer sovereignty. Their societal concern for equity and distributive justice has a long provenance, as testified by studies conducted amongst others, by Adam Smith and E.P. Thompson. For instance, in one study conducted in 1911 by Edward David Jones reported that marketing activity in retailing was inefficient, adding fifty percent to costs, largely due to advertising and “an overabundance of retail stores”.¹² Researchers also conducted studies of the dairy market and in particular into whether excessive margins were being made by powerful intermediaries in the supply-chain at the expense of farmers and final customers.¹³

Macromarketing, which focuses on the understanding of relationships between marketing and society also came to prominence from the turn of the twentieth century exerting a continual influence on the field until the 1950s.¹⁴ For instance, in one account from this perspective, “(m)arketing is not primarily a means for garnering profits for individuals. It is, in the larger, more vital sense, an economic instrument used to accomplish indispensable social ends.”¹⁵

While the academics at Wisconsin sought to adopt a disinterested view of the policy maker, Jones and Monieson (1990, 106-108) describe the development of an alternative approach based on neoclassical economics at the Graduate School of Business founded at Harvard in 1908 which was oriented from the start towards the needs of business and marketing management. Programmes were generally directed at students of economics or business and tended to adopt the aims and priorities of management, such that students were taught merchandising, pricing, advertising and distribution (Hunt & Goolsby, 1988: 40). Harvard thus played a central role in advocating the perspective of the firm and developing a bundle of techniques with which to educate a cadre of marketing managers who could fill the higher echelons of corporate America and by doing so no doubt, bring in some useful cash to the university coffers.

In what Wilkie and Moore (2006) describe as a ‘paradigm shift’ they date to around 1950, the focus of marketing moved definitively towards a professional managerial orientation. This shift solidified following publication in 1959 of critical reports by the Ford Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation which criticised business schools for admitting poor quality students, lacking qualified staff and in theoretical rigour. These reports had a chilling effect on research funding and led to a reconfiguration of management scholarship towards a more conservative model based on the natural sciences. An additional stimulus for this development was that at this time of the Cold War standoff with Russia linked to the “red scare” and fears of infiltration, quantitative methods were considered politically neutral and so safer to teach at a time of increased anxiety (Tadajewski, 2006a, 452). With the turn to a managerial focus the field of academic marketing grew rapidly from the 1950s as part as an overall increase in management education fuelled by large increases in MBA enrolments.¹⁶

For some of the above reasons mainstream marketing in the USA modelled itself on an especially narrow and constrictive vision of science by adopting a strictly realist, determinist, and nomothetic approach to its subject. Its core appeal was based on the pragmatic argument addressed to business that those firms which best serve the needs of customers will survive and thrive in the long run. The marketing concept was developed in the late 1950s, ostensibly because increased competition between firms at the time had led to growing recognition of the importance of a customer perspective. This argued that those firms thrive which better respond to their customers, by learning more about the formation of needs and how best to satisfy them. Hubbard et al. (2005) observed that from the 1950s to the 1990s, “every decade has witnessed some apparent progress in marketing’s development as a science yet paradoxically engenders more criticism that this rate of advance is not enough”. Given this, it is ironic that it was only in the 1990s, that attempts were made to operationalise and study the marketing concept.¹⁷

Marketing management sought to mould itself as a modern progressive enterprise that was different in kind to its wayward cousin, US ‘street-smart’ culture, whilst retaining on its fringe some of the latter’s evangelical elements. Keith (1960), and Bartels (1962, 1976)¹⁸ developed teleological schemes portraying a succession of ‘eras’ of marketing thought on an escalating ladder moving from a focus on production, to sales, and eventually to the holy grail of the marketing ‘revolution’, which placed the customer at the centre of all the firm’s activities. Mass consumption from the mid-1940s to the 1960s was fuelled by two related factors comprising an unprecedented boom in suburban house-ownership and the mass privatization of public spaces by suburban shopping centres geared towards mass consumption and profit maximisation (Cohen, 2003). While by then the marketing and advertising industries had grown in size and sophistication, the managerialist approach only truly came into its own at this time through increased expenditures on market research. The profile of marketing theory was raised by the proselytizing of ‘guru’s such as Peter Drucker (1958, 252), who modestly proclaimed that marketing was ‘perhaps the most advanced and certainly the most “scientific” of all functional business disciplines’, and Wendell Smith (1956), Neil Borden, (1964) and Theodore Levitt (1960), who introduced their students respectively, to concepts of, “product differentiation and market segmentation”, “the marketing mix’ and “marketing myopia’. However, it was through the development of the marketing concept, that the ideal of consumer sovereignty came to be enshrined as the centrepiece of managerialist marketing doctrine.

In developing the marketing concept McKitterick (1957) argued that the final customer should be considered as an end in themselves rather than as a means to profit. Why, one might wonder did he decide at this precise point in time to focus on putting consumer needs first, when two centuries earlier, Adam Smith had suggested that this was so obviously a fact that there should scarcely be any need to spell it out? For if the consumer is sovereign then the firm should ideally have no long-term interest other than to act in the customer’s interests. While Adam Smith conceived of a multitude of sellers vying for the custom of the consumer, McKitterick described a very different corporate landscape of oligopoly, where profit is ‘a basic condition that must be satisfied’¹⁹ but where maintenance of market share is at least an equal, if not a primary goal.²⁰ Given rapidly changing market conditions, he argued that working backwards from the end-user into the factory rather than from the production process forward to the user, would reduce dependence on production efficiency in favour of the required flexibility.

McKitterick (1957) was directly concerned with the issue of power, directing his argument at manufacturers who had tended to see their customer as the intermediary rather than the end-user. Given the oligopolistic situation he argued against price competition and in favour of research-led differentiation and new product development, noting with approval greatly increased expenditures on market research and a gradual shift in mindset that viewed the customer as an end rather than as a means to profit. Driven by an expanded workforce a decade after the end of the Second World War, whose incomes were rising, he noted the launch of a “flood” of new products to soak up discretionary income, ‘on what would be better for the customer rather than cheaper”²¹. A cynic might suggest that in an increasing situation of oligopoly, product differentiation and segmentation also distracted attention from a degree of collusion involving “orderly marketing”, or price-fixing, between rivals.

Theodore Levitt presented putative reasons for why McKitterick had been so exercised about putting customer needs first, by distinguishing the pursuit of short-run desire from long-term interest.²² Peter Drucker summarised this concern by stating, ‘Value and service first, profit later. Maximising profit, perhaps never.’²³ Levitt took a different tack to argue that firms, particularly those run by engineers, technologists, or sales people, could be motivated by a blind belief in the superiority of their technology, the excellence of their production process, or simply to get rid of products in order to maximise sales, rather than to ensure the long-run success of the enterprise by satisfying customer needs. Levitt introduced a moral dimension over and above McKitterick (op. cit.), to argue that short-term thinking is selfish and will ultimately have the consequence of threatening the survival of the enterprise. As well as the stick he also offered a carrot, that by implementing a system of self-regulation by disseminating a belief in the marketing concept throughout the organisation, the firm could fend off unwelcome intervention from the state.

Levitt also warned that marketing is no “do-gooder” treatise, but rather a “tough minded explanation, outline and example of how to serve yourself by serving the customer better” (Levitt, 1962: 8). Years later those closer to the street-smarts derided as ‘marketing perverts’ those they labelled “customer worshippers’ by straying too far onto the side of the customer without attending to the competition.²⁴ Jagdish Sheth and David Gardner (1982) described marketing as a subset of economics where the producer (whom they call the marketer) is the initiator, not the consumer. The role of market research in this context is more akin to the fisherman than the marine biologist, by seeking to understand consumer behaviour the better to influence and control it with greater effectiveness.²⁵

The Mainstream focus on Power

Two discourses arose in relation to power within the mainstream of marketing thought. Most ostensibly a literature developed to investigate power relations between actors in the supply chain. There also developed a wider discourse that centres on the power of marketing ideas. In relation to the former, authors had to sort out the role played by the customer in industrial markets, as the one who on the one hand is just one member of the channel organization, alongside manufacturers, distributors and retailers²⁶, while on the other, they are posited as the one whose overall satisfaction is the desired end of the combined activities of these other parties.²⁷ There were also calls for mutual dependency and away from a zero-sum understanding, as for instance, A may depend on B for technological knowhow, while B depends on A for marketing (Breier & Stern, 1969: 103). Bonoma (1976) asked for attention to the particular interactional system within which issues of trust, cooperation and conflict are placed. For example, in a unilateral system a strong source can impose its influence on a weak target, whereas parties to a transaction are more broadly equivalent in a mixed system.

The discussion of power in this rather narrow context was overshadowed by pressing threats to the discipline that quickly became apparent in the 1960s when marketing came under unprecedented attack.

The Trauma of the ‘Sixties

Products played second fiddle in the portrayal of the 1960s in Mad Men to the men themselves, half-drunk in a fug of cigarette smoke and misogynists to a man, driven by the front of their pants, in a world where the only word a woman could utter was “yes”. While the products also got an occasional look-in when Don Draper could be bothered to look above his trousers, Andrew Cracknell’s book about real life in Madison Avenue at the time is replete with tales of legendary campaigns for brands as diverse as Hathaway Shirts, Volkswagen, Avis, Xerox, Alka-Selzer and Braniff, some long-forgotten, and some still with us. Advertising agencies such as Doyle, Dane and Bernbach and Ogilvy and Mather surfed the high wave of the postwar boom in consumption of cars and a range of products designed to fit out the new suburban homes, and business was so good that they each went public, in 1962 and 1966, respectively.

In the age-old way that pride comes before a fall, marketers in business and the academy were caught completely off-guard by the spread of the counterculture, when public sentiment toward business, particularly big business and marketing turned from benign acceptance, to increasingly vociferous critique of its power, concern about the damage caused by harmful products to the environment, and the callous exploitation of consumers. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith directly attacked the marketing concept arguing instead for the “revised sequence”, that firms create needs and wants. Rachel Carson offered a shocking description of the effects of DDT on the natural environment; Ralph Nader described the callousness of big business towards the customers it purported to serve; while in one book Vance Packard called attention to planned obsolescence and in another, he anticipated the findings of subsequent behavioural economists, by drawing attention to the limits of consumer decision making and the multifarious, hidden ways in which marketers influence consumers. Collectively these works influenced the growth of a movement to represent the interests of consumers and in the USA, the government responded by massively increasing their regulation of business.

Marketing academics responded with obvious dismay to the flurry of charges levelled against business. Some contrasted a long-run customer-orientation to the evils of adopting a selling orientation, or of being product, process, or cost-centred. Others argued that business should move closer to the customer, whilst others adopted a more belligerent tone It was left to Peter Drucker to acknowledge that the rise of the consumer movement was shameful to marketing, that basically marketers had let their side down, that consumers saw manufacturers and marketers as people who simply could not be bothered to ascertain their needs and that there was a need to get back down to brass tacks and look at things from the consumers’ point of view.

The Societal Marketing Concept

Philip Kotler (1972) pleaded for restraint and understanding among marketers who were hostile to the rise of consumerism, arguing that it had come as a shock to all concerned. The nub of his explanation for the rise of consumerism hinged around interpretations of the marketing concept. In one paper he argued that while the business community had got the hang of the spirit of the marketing concept and while it was espoused by senior managers, line managers didn’t practice it faithfully. Kotler acknowledged social discontent, accepting that marketers had been hard on Ralph Nader and others, suggesting that their critique could be seen as being pro-marketing and beneficial to all parties because it helped balance the power of sellers. Kotler distinguished short-run consumer satisfaction of desire from long-run consumer welfare based on interests, producing a matrix that described four types of products; deficient products, that offer neither short nor long-term benefits; salutary products that have low immediate appeal but high long-term consumer benefit; pleasing products, which provide high immediate satisfaction but can cause social harm in the long-term, and desirable products that combine immediate satisfaction with long-run benefit. Kotler then argued that the marketing concept should be modified so that in addition to providing customer satisfaction and profitability, firms should act in the long run interests of consumers as the key to attaining long-run profitable volume. This meant that firms should focus on thinking of ways of reformulating products which ‘though pleasing, were also harmful to consumers’ long-run interests (for example tobacco which provides high immediate satisfaction but ultimately hurts consumers interests) such that they become more socially desirable.’²⁸

It is noteable that Kotler raised the question of interests, given that assessment of real interests forms a key part of Steven Lukes’ (2021) radical they of power, which is discussed in chapter eight. In retrospect, Kotler certainly had the wind in his sails at that time as his paper on societal marketing was just one of a number, that came thick and fast, some with collaborators, on broadening the concept of marketing away from tangible goods, towards the marketing of ideas, people and organizations (Kotler & Levy, (1969), an idea subsequently developed in his call for social marketing (Kotler & Zaltman, 1972), and for the adoption of a more expansive, generic concept of marketing (Kotler, 1972). Kotler & Levy, (1971) had earlier advocated demarketing as a reaction to “overfull” demand in times of temporary shortage, “unselling” the Vietnam war, and treating the environment as if it were inexhaustible, and Kotler (1973, 43) then advocated “countermarketing” as a response to “unwholesome” demand for ‘vice’ products such as alcohol, cigarettes and drugs and on the other hand for ‘conversional marketing’ where the market dislikes the object.²⁹ All in all, Kotler’s response to the ferment of the 1960s was thus for more, not less, marketing.

Social Marketing

One year before presenting his argument for a societal marketing orientation, Kotler had collaborated with his colleague at Harvard Gerald Zaltman, to make an influential case for social marketing (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971), which called for an expansion of marketing principles and technology to a range of social issues. The authors stressed that their article was playing catch-up with what was happening in practice, where marketing technology was being applied by charities, churches and government campaigns advancing social objectives such as reducing juvenile delinquency, warning of the dangers of smoking tobacco and highlighting the importance of wearing seatbelts when driving. One of the contributions made by Kotler and Zaltman was the need to think beyond advertising, to consider all elements of the marketing mix when constructing a campaign.³⁰

Kotler’s (1972) paper on the societal marketing concept stuck generally to the traditional understanding that the purview of marketing is market exchanges of goods and services between sellers and buyers. In contrast, the earlier paper by Kotler and Zaltman (1971) argued that social marketing can apply to every organization, whether economic or not. As Kotler pointed out in an earlier paper with Sidney Levy, “every organization performs marketing-like activities, whether or not they are recognized as such.” (Kotler & Levy, 1969: 10). Referring to the “oft-cited article” by Kotler and Levy, Alan Andreasan noted that, ‘it did not sit well with the marketing establishment… because marketing obviously only involved markets and this meant buying and selling”.³¹ Rather than restricting the application of marketing principles and technology to markets, Kotler and Levy argued that marketing should rather be thought of as principally involved with transactions and not just market transactions.

The generally accepted definition of social marketing was subsequently narrowed to describe the application of marketing technology to programmes that aim to influence the behaviour of the target audience in order to improve their personal and social welfare.³² In Social Marketing: Influencing Behavior for Good, as suggested in the title, Kotler and Lee (2014) are keen to differentiate social marketing from significations associated with “sales” and “manipulation” that persist in the public consciousness, describing the positive role of social marketing campaigns on a number of harms such as reducing tobacco use, wearing condoms in relation to HIV-Aids and wearing a bicycle helmet, to reducing guinea-worm.³³

Consumer orientation remains key to social marketing as the consumer (and by extension, the citizen) is assumed to be self-seeking; ‘The best way for me to get what I want is to convince you that it, or some configuration of it, or something that I am offering in exchange for it, is in your best interest.’ (Hastings & Saren, 2003, 310). Authors recognize that this involves relations of power, in that the consumer must have the power to rationally understand what is being asked of them and to have the ability to reject the offer. Hastings and Saren (ibid.) argue that a second strand that is built reflexively on the above evaluates the efficacy of applying theories developed in the commercial marketing context, such as exchange theory, to the context of social marketing. A third strand is concerned, ‘with analysis of the social consequences of marketing policies, decisions and activities’ (Lazer & Kelly 1973). This strand of social marketing has a critical edge (Hastings, 2009; Gordon, 2011), in that it can form the basis for a critique of the outcomes of the marketing actions of particular industries, for example by scrutinising the marketing of potentially harmful products such as tobacco and alcohol (Hastings & Saren, 2003: 313; Hassan et al. 2007; Hastings & Liberman, 2009). While the aim of this research is laudable, in their foundational article Kotler and Zaltman (1971) had already recognised the reality, that marketing technology can be employed by any organization, no matter for what purpose. The key question is, who decides what is in the consumer’s interest and what constitutes social welfare?

In hindsight, it seems clear that at that time of the debate between marketing academics over social marketing, they were likely unaware of the contemporaneous agenda of neoliberals to radically extend the purview of the market by introducing quasi-markets into areas that were then directly funded by the state, in health, education, social care, welfare and prisons.³⁴ By the 1980s, following the institution of the Reagan and Thatcher governments, marketing, whether social or not and economic neoliberalism seemed to fit like a hand into a glove. By the 1990s, by means of a story that has yet to be told, social marketing had relations with the neoliberal economic vision of the individual as entrepreneur of the self, and personal branding was born.³⁵

Relationship Marketing

For a time in the 1990s a buzz arouse around Relationship Marketing that developed initially within the context of business-to-business marketing, spreading subsequently to services marketing and beyond. For those in the USA Relationship Marketing may have had something of an exotic appeal in that it was developed by the Nordic School of who pinned the blame for poor marketing practice on a narrow focus by firms on manipulating the marketing mix. Some adopted a quasi-Marxist explanation by contending that this narrow focus resulted in a double alienation, firstly within firms, where organization members saw marketing as a specialist departmental function concerned with manipulating the marketing mix, rather than placing the marketing concept at the centre of its organization-wide ethos; and secondly, with the effect that the firm as a whole became distanced from its customer base.³⁶ Relationship marketing was then promoted as an antidote for this malaise, stressing the need to develop lasting relationships within firms and between the firm, its suppliers and its customer base.

Macromarketing

Macromarketing which was mentioned briefly above is described as one of the key fields of marketing, alongside consumer behaviour, modelling and marketing-management/strategy (Hunt et al. 2020). Its threefold aims were summarised by Hunt (1981), as the study of marketing systems, the impact and consequences of marketing systems on society, and the impact and consequences of society on marketing systems (Layton, 2007). Given this focus, in 1981, senior macromarketers who were rather disenchanted by the managerialism and individualism of the mainstream founded the Journal of Macromarketing and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing (JPPM), which continue to provide an open forum for discussion of issues from mainstream and critical perspectives (Hunt, 2021: 19). It is perhaps unsurprising that submissions to these journals can have a utopian flavour, given the injunction by George Fisk, the first editor of Macromarketing, that its task is to “save the world” (Fisk, 2006).

Power is central to the macromarketing debate around the question of the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP). Kilbourne et al. (1997) described the DSP as, “a belief structure that organizes the way people perceive and interpret the function of the world around them”…’so vaguely held that individuals are only vaguely aware of its underlying logic and the direction it gives to their behaviour.” (ibid.: 4). Motivated by concerns about environmental degradation, the authors decried the current marketing system as based on an unsustainable logic of ever-increasing economic growth and consumption. Moreover they contended that the DSP is pervasive, rooted in the liberal Enlightenment and manifest in neoclassical economics and politics, at the core of which lies a narrow, anthropocentric vision based on a misreading of Adam Smith. In this view marketing management elevates the satisfaction of individual wants and continuous economic growth as the highest values and a political system where the conception of negative freedom is reduced to the right to the unlimited acquisition of property, and the belief that technology will come to the rescue to solve problems created by unforeseen externalities.

In a number of papers authors who subscribed to a macromarketing orientation called for a shift from hyperconsumption to sustainable consumption. They suggested that the problem is not public awareness of environmental destruction, as even by the 1990s people were concerned about this. It was argued, rather optimistically some might think, that the scales would fall from the eyes of the public when the “relationship between technological, political and economic institutions and environmental deterioration” is made clear, when, “the change required to reach a desired state of sustainability will become more widely recognized and demanded.” (ibid.: 17). In response Dolan (2002) made the important point that in theorising the DSP, the authors could have better recognised the importance of culture. Schultz & Holbrook, (1999) also discussed the DSP, to argue that marketing strategy could be used to formulate alternative solutions based on the development of a mutual commons that will reverse the selfish exploitation of the planet’s scarce resources. They pointed to concrete examples such as the success of relatively small-scale collaborations between Merck & the government of Costa Rica and the establishment of the North American Redwoods commons (ibid.: 221).

Over subsequent years two relatively hard positions developed in the macromarketing literature between the Developmental School for whom the current marketing system is the solution to the question of sustainability and the Critical School, who see it as the problem (Mittelstaedt et al., 2014). To their credit, both of these Schools take global warming seriously as a threat to humanity and questions of sustainability as complex, comprising a “megatrend”, that simultaneously involves economic, political, cultural, philosophic and technological spheres of activity.

Those who locate themselves within the perspective of the Developmental School tend towards optimism by pointing to areas of progress engaged in by firms. On the other hand critics deploy explanations by Marx and Gramsci amongst others, to explain why the market/marketing system has been so slow to respond to the unfolding environmental crisis. For instance, a materialist explanation deriving from the later Marx contends that the economic base consisting of corporate capital essentially controls government policy (Schaefer & Crane, 2005). In contrast, McDonagh et al. (2018) draw on Gramsci’s more mobile concepts of hegemony and passive revolution to bolster their argument that a number of groups in civil society including consumers, have been co-opted by capital. Varey (2010) makes the clearest point for readers of the Journal,

Wrong thinking about life entrusts neo-liberal economics and capitalism to find the solution to how to live a better life. Wrong thinking in economics assumes humans as rational, selfish, maximizers. Wrong thinking in marketing uncritically takes the neoclassical market model and its neoliberal purpose. Transformative change is needed to combat and repair the degradation. For that we need to change our thinking about the problem and the means to the solution.

Dermody et al. (2021) struck a more optimistic tone by identifying new forms of ‘power-with’, or ‘people power’ emerging in the proliferation of novel forms of environmental activism through consumer and community networks that asked individuals to reappraise their perceptions of production, distribution and ownership and engage in re-use, repair and the purchase of pre-owned goods. This positive tone runs counter to a sense of powerlessness and lack of esteem linked to the lack of recognition that has been expressed by some macromarketing authors. Worried by the prospect that they might be having a conversation amongst themselves some have argued the need for macromarketing to connect with others beyond the discipline. George Fisk (2006) argued that policy makers in think-tanks, government and board rooms would benefit greatly from macromarketing insights, at the same time lamenting that macromarketing scholarship appears invisible even to fellow marketers (Fisk, 2006: 216). His call for political relevance was echoed by Mittelstaedt, et al. (2014) and by Prothero & McDonagh (2020), amongst others (Varey, 2010, 123). Given their knowledge of the threat posed to human existence by global heating, these authors are rightly concerned of the need for urgent action by policy makers and for crucial public support if the imminent threat to sustainable life posed by global heating is to be successfully confronted. While these authors have correctly identified the problem, which is a disconnect from spheres of influence involving think-tanks and related forms of political organisation, as is described further in chapter four, concern for such matters is now frequently disparaged in the public sphere as “Woke”; testifying to the fact that the space for political connection and mobilisation has since been colonised by a very different message which emanates from a powerful and extensive international coalition of right-wing interests.

Service Dominant Logic

Just as the mainstream seemed to be on the brink of disappearing, Service Dominant Logic (SDL) sauntered into town in order to save the day. Service Dominant Logic, modestly described as, the most significant development in modern marketing thought’,³⁷ is the term coined by Vargo and Lusch (2004) to badge their bid to refocus marketing away from a concern with value in exchange, to value in use. In doing so they seemed to be aiming to rid marketing of “stuff” altogether. While differences between use value and exchange value were also significant for Karl Marx, their explanation is quite different. Vargo and Lusch criticized the traditional assumption that marketing relates to discrete exchanges of tangible goods between separate agents where customers are thought of as operands, or inert targets for marketing campaigns and where value is created in manufacturing, from value in use, which conceives of the consumer as an operant, acting with agency and purpose to co-create their satisfaction, such that value is created only when a service is consumed. Following a rather patchy prelude for their argument, the authors outline and discuss eight fundamental propositions, which are summarized in Table One.

Problematically, the first, third and fourth propositions downgrade materiality in favour of the immaterial, arguing that matter is embodied with knowledge which is the source of all value and therefore, that marketing is ultimately about service provision.³⁸ Additionally, it is argued firms must recognize that value is only realised in use and that the consumer plays a vital role in co-creating their satisfaction. In this understanding, the role of the supplier is to provide customers with the resources necessary to generate value.

Table 2: Service Dominant Logic: Fundamental Premises (Vargo & Lusch, 2004).
Proposition | Brief translation
FP₁: Application of skills and knowledge is the primary unit of exchange | Discussion ranges from gift-exchange (Mauss) to commodity exchange (Smith)
FP₂: Indirect exchange masks the fundamental unit of exchange | Bureaucracy & hierarchy lead to distantiation of workers from customers.
FP₃: Goods are distribution mechanisms for service provision | Matter is embodied with knowledge. The product is a means to an end not an end in itself.
FP₄: Knowledge is the fundamental source of competitive advantage | Knowledge, not physical goods are primary.
FP₅: All economies are service economies | Distance their explanation from Adam Smith who had a narrow concern with manufactured output.
FP₆: The customer is always a co-producer | Traditionally customer and producer were ideologically thought to be separated in order to maximize manufacturing efficiency. This denies that the consumer is always involved in the production of value.
FP₇: The enterprise can only make value propositions | Marketing inherited the view that value is embedded in goods during the manufacturing process. In contrast a service marketing view argues that value is created only when a good or service is consumed.
FP₈: A service-centred view is customer oriented and relational | In arguing for the inseparability of the one who offers and the consumer.

Proponents have argued that Service Dominant Logic is “inherently ethical” as it is an integrated theory that offers the means to resolve ethical tensions that would arise from a traditional exchange-oriented marketing orientation, which can result in friction arising between employees, stockholders and customers.³⁹ For instance, co-creation of value presupposes a level of trust existing between business and customer. Additionally, by recognising that knowledge is a central aspect of competitive advantage, customers and service providers will be more transparent with each other.⁴⁰

Before concluding this brief discussion of the mainstream I should note the parallel between social marketing and Service Dominant Logic, which in my view can each be described as developments of neoliberal marketing thought that parallel those in neoliberal economics. Although there is scant evidence of any direct link between neoliberal economists and these neoliberal marketing theories, they share in common an aspiration to extend the scope of the subject to realms well beyond the exchange of goods and services, and they each blur the boundary between producer and consumer by envisaging the latter as an entrepreneur, who co-produces and even co-creates value.

Interpretive Marketing

By comparison to the mainstream ‘Quants’, those who associate within the interpretive camp have generally been drawn to understand the meaning of consumption, which is discussed further in relation to consumer research. At a more general level, a decades-long debate on the scientific status of marketing bubbled up in the exchange between Paul Anderson, who argued the case for interpretivism and Shelby Hunt, defender of logical empiricism.⁴¹ Anderson asserted that knowledge is relativistic, that rival paradigms are incommensurable, that observations are always theory-laden, that facts underdetermine theories, and that science cannot provide unbiased representations of the real world independent of theory. Hunt (1993) riposted that although there may be cultural differences in relation to colour, nonetheless, all humans recognize the same spectrum of colours; that paradigms may present different explanations of their subject matter, they are not rivals nor incommensurable in the sense that they make conflicting knowledge claims; that to assert that facts underdetermine theories ‘is not doomed by Hume’s problem of induction except by persons who misguidedly insist that one can never “know” without “knowing with certainty”; finally, that human perception is basically veridicable.⁴² Hunt differentiates objectivism from objectivity to argue that a fear of ethnocentrism should not deter the researcher from seeking the latter.

Such questions have since taken on a new significance in the age of social media and discourse on intersectionality, colonialism and Critical Race Theory. It is noteworthy that the the topic of intersectionality was received relatively recently into the marketing pantheon (Uduehi et al., 2024) (although the omission to mention the paper by Peñaloza (1994) was somewhat puzzling). The cultural relativist argument that the world-view of each culture is different has since developed the argument based on recognition of identity, that only someone who has actually experienced racism, sexism, gender or class discrimination, or all of these, has the right to speak about these experiences. In this context it is deeply ironic that Jonathon Schroeder and Janet Borgerson (2015), who have done so much to summon attention to the ethics of visual representation,⁴³ felt an ‘uneasy connection to Anita Sarkeesian who had received death threats following her appearance at the 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards. No strangers to controversy themselves, including pressure to abandon their research sexist and racist representations in advertising, following one encounter, Schroeder and Borgerson reported that, “we have never experienced such vile and continuously terrorising comments about our scholarly work, even though we know that feminist work remains inflammatory and threatening within the academy”.

Let a thousand flowers bloom?

Wilkie and Moore (2014) describe the launch of the two Macromarketing journals in the early 1980s as part of a more general trend when the number of research based journals in marketing doubled. In the heady days of the early 1990s, just as the majority veered off to explore the extent to which firms actually follow the marketing concept, a warmish reception was accorded on the fringes of the mainstream to articles on feminism, the body⁴⁴. and even to postmodernism.⁴⁵ Although some got their hopes up, these were pop-ups; as I see it this was a bit like when Sophie Dahl first featured as the first ‘plus-size’ model in Vogue and everyone thought the entire scene was changing, rather than as the prelude to her depiction in the subsequent notorious ‘Opium’ ad. Specialisation was further encouraged by formation of Special Interest Groups by the American Marketing Association, a development which, while offering benefits, had the effect of fragmenting the mainstream, to the extent that according to some its very existence was threatened.⁴⁶

Critical marketing

As the following is idiosyncratic, partial and biased, for a more balanced and more complete understanding I heartily recommend reading the summary of Critical Marketing in one or other of the excellent texts devoted to the topic.⁴⁷ However there is a difficulty in spotting the first work on Critical Marketing published in a marketing journal as there doesn’t seem to be an agreed definition as to what is meant by “Critical”. Although Dholakia (2012), sensibly argues that this is an impossible task, if “Critical” with a large C is understood to refer to the iconoclastic belief that marketing practices can work against the interests of consumers and of society at large, then it might be fair to say that there was a brief upsurge of critical arguments at the end of the 1980s during the phase of efforts to “rethink” marketing⁴⁸. Critical marketing found an institutional base through the foundation of Consumption Markets & Culture in 1997, followed in close order, by Marketing Theory in 2001.

Shortly thereafter there appeared the volume edited by Saren et al. (2007) which professed the rather optimistic aim to define the field of Critical marketing. Given that academics are supposed to engage critically with their field of study, what exactly did “Critical’ marketing entail? When seeking to define a field, the difficulty is that fields have ostensible boundaries. The editors decide that “Critical marketers” are different from run of the mill academics in subscribing to, “one of a number of radical philosophers in seeking to make explicit certain ideologies and assumptions (ibid.: xviii). One might interject that his does not so much delimit the field as open the gates to include post-modernism, post-structuralism and feminism, which have little to do with the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory. When Critical Theory is mentioned in their volume this is hardly illuminating; Adorno is mentioned just three times in total, twice in relation to motivation research, whilst Marcuse is referred to just once and misleadingly as a “Marxist” by O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy (2007: 193).⁴⁹ The volume strays further from the noble aim of its editors by including papers that have little relation to radical philosophy on topics such as consumer disadvantage, societal marketing and the marketing concept and sustainable marketing that could comfortably be accommodated within a mainstream compendium.⁵⁰ The upshot was that there was not very much that was “Critical” material in this book.

Tadajewski and Brownlie (2009) sought to develop a provenance for critical Critical Marketing by suggesting there was a longstanding “critical” element in marketing ranging from arguments by the Frankfurt School to “promotional culture” (Lazersfeld, 1941) and the “consciousness industry” (Kline & Leiss, 1978; Leiss, 1978). A difficulty for me is that whilst most of the ‘Critical’ authors mentioned who wrote about marketing, were not of it, in they did not associate themselves as part of the marketing community. This has continued Secondly, whilst the concept of “culture industry” influenced these and other scholars such as Andrew Wernick (1991), there has been disagreement about core ideas expressed by the Frankfurt School; for instance, both William Leiss (1976) and Jean Baudrillard contested the idea that marketing imposes false needs on the individual.⁵¹ Third, virtually every Critical Marketing scholar for the past couple of decades has professed some form of allegiance to the work of Antonio Gramsci, which is read in particular ways.⁵²

Tadajewski and Brownlie (2007) argue that following its older sibling, Critical Marketing might share with Critical Management Studies a commitment to theoretical pluralism, methodological pluralism and a non-performative stance. While the latter point is widely shared as we shall see others disagree with arguments for theoretical and methodological pluralism. They continue by asserting that boundaries for Critical Marketing require ontological denaturalization, epistemological reflexivity and a non-performative stance (Critical academics are suckers for long words). These are similar to the three elements mentioned by Horkheimer ([1937]; 1972)⁵³ to differentiate critical science; that the researcher to be cognisant of hidden coercion and be wary of taken for granted views of how society is structured as neither natural nor inevitable; that research should be self-reflective by recognising that the researcher is part of the object domain they describe, and finally, that theories are ‘reflectively acceptable’, in that one should not be working for the enemy. In my view these are much more easily said than done and I discuss them further below.

For Saren et al. (2007), Critical Marketing is a broad church united by collective opposition to the narrow reductionism, piecemeal focus and stultifying uniformity of the mainstream. They conceive of an approach that is inclusive and vibrant, perhaps like a coat of many colours, a melting pot for the exchange of diverse ideas, or as the furnace within which new conceptions may be forged? Others fret that flirting with a ragtag army of hermeneuticists, feminists, post-structuralists and the like dilutes the essential sap of Critical Theory, worrying too that analogous to the role of Devil’s Advocate, findings can be incorporated into and strengthen the subject of critique, the implication being that critical academics would be better off twiddling their thumbs and publishing nothing for fear of the possibility that their stunning insights might provide medicine to revive capitalism from its death throes.

For some distraction and amusement, I wondered whether there might be human correlates for conflicting tendencies between pluralism and purity: Gorbachev vs. Lenin? Mary-Robinson vs. Seán Mac Stíofáin? Geoffrey Howe vs. Margaret Thatcher? Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan? Benedict vs. Francis? The list betrays my hunch that what underlies these different positions can sometimes have as much to do with identity as with high-flown rationale and where there is identity, dissonance is not far behind.⁵⁴ Given that many of those who describe themselves as critical academics who are not stirred to action by vicarious ressentment are motivated by principle, or are simply contrarian, or both, calls to preserve the purity of a Critical marketing that never existed in the first place (Hetrick & Lozada, 1994; Bradshaw & Firat, 2012) can seem like herding cats, or whistling in the wind.

Given that Critical marketing is about … critique, where the mainstream tends to make minor adjustments or to build on previous work, there is a tendency by critical theorists to tear down the work of others. For instance, Hetrick and Lozada (1994) critiqued the theoretical purity of the emancipatory scheme developed by Ozanne and Murray (1991) and warned against the practical consequence that it would be absorbed into the mainstream, while others might have argued that the authors ought to have been given a medal for making it into JCR in the first place.

That Brownlie et al. (1999) tip their cap to the Critical Management Studies as one of the chief inspirations for Rethinking Marketing is not surprising given the lowly status of the marketing subject. Bradshaw and Firat (2007) lament that management theorists seem to “do” criticality so much better, making a heartfelt plea for a pure ‘undiluted’ form of Critical Marketing based firmly on Marxist foundations that will blames capitalism and all its works for the failure of the Enlightenment project to create,  

a social order that would enable all human beings to lead lives of dignity, equality and freedom to realize their independent wills and potentials to the fullest – and who think that the major reason for this failure may be the hegemony of certain interests based on capitalism’s class structure.  

A noble yet utopian sentiment, some might think, which leaves unanswered weighty questions as to whether a human being can ever truly be independent, or of how to balance demands for freedom from those for equality, which removes the burden of original sin imposed by Christianity from the shoulders of the individual and instead lays the font of impurity before the door of capitalism, howsoever modulated.  Leaning towards the radical humanism of the Frankfurt School, the authors discuss how over the years many have grown disillusioned with its focus on critique rather than on praxis. Arguing that the individual as consumer is alienated from their ‘true’ self,’ as they, ‘can only move from one market discourse to another’, the authors thus contend that this has nothing to do with their individual psychology, nor can one blame their emulative striving, but rather the engineering through mass culture.

There are resemblances and also an important difference between the above and the concept of the third dimension of power offered by Steven Lukes (2021), which is discussed further in chapter eight. The principal resemblance is that there is agreement that the willing compliance of the individual person to power is gained through the conscious or unconscious shaping of their very wants and desires. Another point of resemblance is the argument that the individual may become aware of such shaping by engaging in a reflexive process that enables them to reflect on their predicament and so release themselves from its vicelike grip. The literature on ‘Critical Marketing’ is replete with presumptions of an authentic self that is mystified and led astray through the wily charms of marketing, a self that must recognize its predicament if it is to emancipate itself (Murray & Ozanne, 1991; Hetrick & Lozada, 1999; Murray, 2002). However, where Critical marketing scholars, for all their talk of negative dialectics, are somewhat vague in specifying precisely how this authentic self might be constituted, Lukes scrupulously attends to the question of how to define authenticity, for instance, by considering and then ruling out identity in favour of real interests as the ground on which to base this compelling but nebulous concept. I should mention at this point that Holt (2002) seems wary of claims made about purported claims made about cultural engineering and the emancipated reflexive self, for example by describing the cases of Don and Paul as ideals of reflexive awareness who nevertheless cannot grasp the fact that they are also consummate consumers. The world has since changed to such an extent that social media, which was a rarity back then, is now awash with conspiracy theorists who are certain that they have seen the truth as they have taken the red pill. A “pure” Critical marketer might respond that such individuals require education in negative dialectics; maybe some did!

When considered with respect to Lukes’ concern with real interests the situation seems clear-cut when one considers the plight of the workers who manufacture Macs, I-Phones and fast-fashion. For instance, Varman et al. (2015) argue that instances of market violence are plentiful “if and when we are ready to recognise them”, focusing in their study of the practices by Coca-Cola in a village in India. However, as discussed in chapters two and eight, ideology is not necessarily the preserve of those who are somehow duped by capitalism. Although critical theorists ask that researchers should be aware that they are complicit in constructing the reality they describe, instances of reflexivity are thin on the ground. Given its pervasiveness and how it informs the ‘rightness’ of one’s point of view, given that there is and always will be a lacuna involved in self-reflection and understanding, one might be sceptical of the ability of reflexivity to penetrate the veil with which we surround ourselves, to paraphrase Burns, it is perhaps only on a blue moon that we can step outside of the frame of our conventional understanding to see ourselves as others see us.

Critical marketers have expressed concern about the lack of impact of their ideas in relation to their peers in the social sciences and the wider public. Dholakia (2012) argued that social scientists tended to be dismissive of marketing because it is seen as, ‘non-critical, excessively micro, and compromised by corporate ideologies’. Having said, perhaps all is now changed, at least in the field of consumer research, given the appearance of a paper on consumption ideology in the Journal of Consumer Research (Schmitt et al., 2022). But then again.

Consumer Research

Consumer research did not develop in the USA as a neutral social science but in the context of management education, with the aim of conducting research relevant to the needs of managers. The primary aim of the preeminent Journal of Consumer Research, (JCR) established in 1971 was not to defend consumers from the wiles of marketers, nor to inform regulators, but rather to inform marketing managers of the latest techniques. Until the millennium most research published in the journal was functionalist from an economic or psychological perspective.⁵⁵ In a marked change of tone editor-in-waiting John Deighton wrote that since its inception, JCR had been marked by an idealism, “that takes the form of a principled wish not to be a marketing journal. Why? Because, apparently, that's been tried… it seems that JCR was born from the belief that to study consumption with fidelity it helps to be free of the prejudice that the consumer is a form of prey and the scholar an agent of the predators”.⁵⁶ Just two years later he rowed back on these commitments to acknowledge that JCR’s sponsors, together with most of its readers and patrons expected, “that its consumer insights are useful to marketing and the regulation of marketing”.⁵⁷ In this context one can better appreciate the forces ranged against Pettigrew (2001) in founding the Journal of Research for Consumers, which aims counterbalance the focus on helping marketers by producing a journal that assists consumers. ￼

Mainstream Consumer Research

A few years after it was founded, the scientific credentials of JCR were criticized by an insider who complained of the proliferation of definitions to describe similar aspects of behaviour together with a reliance on self-reports and on correlational studies rather than experimental designs (Jacoby, 1978). From that time onward there was a shift towards quantitative studies involving experimental designs and individual decision making. Until the millennium most research published in JCR was deductive, hypothesis driven and quantitative, based on an experimental or questionnaire design coupled to a heavy focus on statistical analysis, with the overall aim of being relevant to the goals of management; an orientation still found in most standard texts on the subject. Dominant perspectives were borrowed from Rational Choice Theory that originated in microeconomics and the Information Processing (IP) approach in cognitive psychology which focused on attention, categorization, inference making, memory, attitude, affect and the role of heuristics and biases in choice behaviour. Perceived relevance to the marketing “practitioner” (I.e. manager) was an important concern; for instance one study that is typical of this approach was based on four experiments conducted with groups of US students to explore how context can affect consumer choices. The principal implication of the finding was that marketing practitioners could affect consumer preferences by manipulating the choice set of alternatives presented to the consumer (Dhar & Sherman, 1996).

Against the presumption that theory moves forward in a wave-like manner, evidence from a brief survey of JCR publications⁵⁸ suggests a piecemeal movement, due in part to the variety of topics and the necessity to formulate precise questions. Given scientific scepticism, even the most common-sense presumptions must be tested. For example, one might presume that experts who know a lot about a set of products will have a narrower range of acceptable prices in mind than will novices, as indeed was confirmed.⁵⁹ The focus on developing and testing models rather than propositions deriving from theoretical principles may also have contributed to a piecemeal approach. For instance, one fairly typical study sought to confirm the superiority of one price model over others using panel data.⁶⁰ Others tested support for a particular explanation. One study⁶¹ concluded from a series of experiments that product experience cues are more accessible to processing than product information cues, providing support for the Accessibility-Diagnosticity model,⁶² which in turn supports Prospect Theory.⁶³ Very occasionally, a study refutes previous research findings; for instance, the previously held general belief that brand promotions have a deleterious effect on brand loyalty⁶⁴, such that mere possession of even a rebate coupon enhances a consumers' preference for that good. ⁶⁵

While one might have expected consumer researchers to defer to the arguments made by the powerful Chicago School of Economics, the countervailing influence of psychology was manifested in studies over the decades that slowly chiselled away some of the key tenets of Rational Choice Theory so beloved of neoliberal economists. Key assumptions were subjected to criticism, for instance, that consumers act as proactive individuals with foresight to maximize their enjoyment,⁶⁶ finding to the contrary, that they are often willing to sacrifice real time enjoyment for the sake of variety.⁶⁷ Authors arguing from a psychological perspective critiqued the economic view that price is a decision variable reflecting objective budgetary sacrifice, basing their argument on the finding that consumers often interpret price information in a biased manner. ⁶⁸ Some argued for a shift away from causal reasoning to one focused more on learning,⁶⁹ whilst others espoused Constructive Choice Theory as an alternative to Rational Choice Theory.⁷⁰ While most findings are incremental, the author of one paper contended that his study refuted theory going back over twenty years, by finding that accountability as typically defined has two psychologically independent and sometimes conflicting components.⁷¹ Others pointed out that there was a yawning gap in the overwhelming focus on rational thought, pointing to the need to understand the crucial role played by the emotions in evaluation and judgement.⁷²

If this small sample is indicative of larger trends, then although there are signs of incremental change over time, perhaps because of its secondary, mongrel status, significant shifts in orientation do not seem to originate in the field of consumer research, but rather filter through from developments in the primary literatures in psychology and economics. For example, Prospect Theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1979) has had a significant impact on consumer research with over one hundred and fifty references in JCR. On the other hand it took decades for the significance of non-conscious processing to be recognised. It was only after an opinion piece by John Bargh (2002) was published to argue that most decision making occurs without conscious judgement that similar articles began to appear in JCR.⁷³ Indeed, an issue that deserves investigation is my feeling that for any major innovation, consumer researchers implicitly defer to those in other disciplines that have a higher status, by seeming to need the blessing of those on high in a ‘core discipline’ before they feel able to proceed.

Discussion

From the above very limited foray into the literature, one ventures to suggest one’s suspicion that as an applied discipline, mainstream consumer research has tended to borrow its central concepts from the core disciplines of economics and psychology, which it is loath to part with until it is authorised by changes within the core discipline. In light of this it is not surprising that researchers who are informed by the same mindset as their counterparts in core disciplines have been similarly blinded to the limitations inherent to their approach. This mindset has led research to focus largely on samples that are unrepresentative of the human population. Henrich et al. (2010) describe the vast majority of behavioural research as WEIRD, drawing its subjects from an exclusive pool of westerners who are educated and from industrial, rich, democracies. This is deeply problematic, because WEIRD subjects are atypical of the human population as a whole. Richard Downey prefers MYOPIC (Materialist, Young, Self-Obsessed, Pleasure-Seeking, Isolated, Consumerist and Sedentary).⁷⁴ In many JCR studies which used students as research fodder in exchange for course credit, the ethnocentric bias is such that authors did not bother to mention the country where the research was conducted but rather something along the lines of, “a mid-western university”. Relatedly, although some scholars have sought to correct the historical focus on marketing in the USA by discussing developments in Europe and elsewhere, this still has a long way to go.

There are other problems yet to be fully identified. One rather obvious issue is the overwhelming focus on the individual rather than the study of inter-individual and group behaviour. Theoretically, this fits with the individualist idea of homo economicus and homo psychologicus and methodologically it is much easier to aggregate individual data to explain group behaviour than it is to study the intricacies of group interaction.

Another example of a group mindset which may have been influenced by a peculiarly US notion of individualism relates to the stubborn adherence to a model of the consumer as a rational information processor. Researchers marginalized the role played by non-conscious processes in decision making to focus instead on the minimal role of deliberate, effortful processes in decision-making (Bargh, 2002: 281). The information processing model was itself derived from the powerful metaphor that the mind operates like a serial computer, which remains pervasive today. Here conscious and unconscious thoughts and algorithms comprise the software that runs on the hardware of the brain. This understanding, which informs the accounts of evolutionary psychologists can also limit investigation, by forgetting that humans have bodies and are emotional beings.

There is little discussion in the literature of publication bias, or the extent to which there is a tendency to publish positive rather than negative findings. Given very few replications are published it is difficult to challenge existing explanations and the majority of published papers either support or extend existing theory. It is noteworthy that in the field of psychology there has been a worrying lack of replication of some significant studies. Some caution that researchers should avoid making claims about effect sizes without considering the many causal factors that may influence these (Fern & Monroe, 1996).

A final question relates to the relevance of consumer research, or whether or not the scientific study of consumer behaviour feeds through into actual practice? In one study of the differences between practitioners, students and academics, Armstrong, (1991) first made predictions based on 105 hypotheses selected from studies published in JCR. Based on this he found that just over 58% of practitioners, just under 57% of students and about 51% of academics were correct and no group performed better than chance.

Interpretive Consumer Research

Given that the scientific status of marketing has been a matter of dispute for years, contested on the one hand by those advocating a realist and on the other hand, an interpretive ontology, one might assume from this that interpretive consumer research is on a par with the mainstream nomothetic orientation, when in fact it constitutes a small but active minority grouping.⁷⁵ The story began in the 1930s and 1940s with the flight into the USA from Nazi Germany of the psychoanalytically informed researchers Paul Lazersfeld and Ernest Dichter. Dichter (1960) criticized the widespread use of survey instruments commonly used at that time to gain insight into consumer motivations and instead used a variety of methods including observation and the construction of idiographic case histories based on depth interviews.⁷⁶ Sidney Levy who was also influenced by psychoanalysis was also amongst the first to critique the narrow focus on functionality and economic rationality that pervaded marketing thought in the 1950s. He argued in contrast that “people buy things not only for what they can do, but for what they mean (Levy, 1959: 118 – italics in original). Here Levy argues for a focus on understanding the social and personal symbolic meaning of goods and how these enhance a sense of self.

A similar argument was deployed many years later by Elizabeth Hirschman and Maurice Holbrook, (1982) in their critique of the dominant information processing explanation of consumer behaviour, arguing that portraying the consumer as an information processor or problem solver is too narrow, focusing too much on tangibles and insufficiently on symbolic meaning. Along with Levy their argument was to an extent influenced by psychoanalysis, for example when contending that the information processing perspective focuses overmuch on secondary rationalisations made by the consumer rather than on the unconscious primary process that seeks “fun, amusement, fantasy, arousal, sensory stimulation, and enjoyment” (ibid.: 135). While advocating the need to understand the consumer’s subjective experience, they argued against the psychoanalytic focus on the unconscious to focus instead on the preconscious as the seat of symbolic meaning, on the ground that this is amenable to exploration by indirect methods (ibid.: 136). Moreover, ‘(t)his experiential perspective is phenomenological in spirit and regards consumption as a primarily subjective state of consciousness with a variety of symbolic meanings’. (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982: 132).

For the adventurous types who went on the consumer behaviour Odyssey, described by Belk (1991), while their experience seems more akin to Easy Rider than to the travails of Odysseus, their road trip, which sought to use naturalistic methods to understand consumer behaviour for its own sake rather than to glean implications for managers proved to be influential, providing detailed accounts that revealed the variety and richness of experience. While providing many valuable insights, the focus on interpretation was not only interesting because it provided richer insights into meaning and experiences of consumption; it was alluring too for some who considered themselves as unconventional mavericks, the rightful heirs of the hippies to take a stand against the staid conformity of their be-suited colleagues. This lent interpretivism a rebel air as the critical counterpart to a mainstream besotted with endless discussions over correlation, regression and structural equation modelling. However, as their rebellion was more about a rejection of conformity than engagement with radical critique, it carried overtones of what Heath and Potter (2004) describe in The Rebel Sell.

Interpretive researchers also sought to broaden the understanding of advertising reception beyond information processing by arguing that it is insufficient to consider this simply as a form of information transfer but as a process that is saturated by meaning. For instance, Mick and Buhl (1992) focused on three Danish brothers who each attributed very different meanings to advertising materials to argue meanings are actively constructed by the reader in relation to their personal history and lifeworld. Linda Scott argued that music (Scott, 1990) and images (Scott, 1994) which were widely assumed to elicit direct affective responses in consumers should better be understood as forms of language subject to cognitive evaluation. McQuarrie & Mick (1996; 2003) developed this idea by focusing on the rhetorical figures used in advertising and the cultural competence required to understand them. Ritson & Elliott (1999) criticized the focus on the solitary subject of advertising and drew attention to the social context of advertising. Jayasinghe & Ritson (2013) further explored the social context of television advertising by studying the discourse and practices of groups of viewers watching in the home.

In developing explanations of consumer behaviour based on the group as a unit of analysis researchers were confronted with the important question of what manifestation to focus on, be it sub-cultures, communities, counter-cultures, cults, tribes, or movements? Schouten and McAlexander (1995) popularized subculture as a term to describe the shared commitment to the brand expressed by members of Harley Davidson Owners’ Groups (HOGs). While their approach was similar to that used by the critically oriented Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) (Hebdige, 1979; 1988), as pointed out by Holt (1997), where Hebdige discussed how Mod and Rocker subcultures emerged from a common working-class culture, using a range of commodities and locations as symbolic markers of their respective identities, the focus of Schouten & McAlexander is largely voluntarist and individualistic, downplaying collective influences such as ethnicity, gender and social-class.

Sub-culture was criticized as too narrow to describe the full panoply of collective consumption activities as it envisages a subaltern group with a common identity (Kozinets, 2001). While there are overlaps, the term sub-culture was replaced by the looser construct of brand community, “a specialized, non-geographically bound community based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand “(Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001: 4123). Brand communities have been described coalescing around brands such as Saabs and Apple Macs, (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001), Harley Davidson (Fournier et al., 2001), Apple Newtons (O’Guinn & Schau, 2005) and European car clubs (Algesheimer, et al., 2005) to name a few. However, just as sub-culture can be inappropriate to describe leisure activities that lack the depth of a shared way of life (Kozinets, 2001), so brand community can be criticized for its exclusive focus on positive relations and its failure to grasp the essence of real community which involves a deeply ambivalent oscillation between love and hatred of others. Given its blandness it is unsurprising that brand community has jumped to the mainstream where it is reduced to a cipher as a variable to be manipulated by marketing management (Jensen-Schau et al., 2009).

Interpretive researchers developed consumer acculturation research as a group-based explanation of the role played by commodities in migrants’ assimilation to their host culture (Reilly & Wallendorf, 1987). Research has since indicated that assimilation is an inadequate term to describe the more complex and ambivalent process where migrants sometimes overidentify with aspects of the host culture or of their home culture. In one study Mexican immigrants to the USA quickly acquired the commodity symbols of their host country such as clothing and cars but consumed these in ways that conformed with their Mexican origin (Peñaloza 1994). Researchers have explored the experiences of those with low economic and cultural capital within the same country, describing the bleak prospect faced by young women in a Turkish squatter camp when their dreams of success in the consumer society crash in the wake of their brute realization that they lack of resources to achieve them (Üstüner and Holt 2007).

From the above, like their mainstream counterparts, interpretive researchers have sought to develop knowledge by supporting and extending the results gained from previous studies and by critiquing others. Whilst providing a rich description it can be difficult to generalize from research because of the need to attend to context. Noteworthy are those rare studies that focus on important topics, such as the role of political ideology in consumption, (Crockett & Wallendorf, 2004), addiction (Hirschman, 1992), abortion (Patterson et al., 1995) and survivors of breast cancer (Pavia & Mason, 2004).

Consumer Culture Theory (CCT)

The moniker 'Consumer Culture Theory’ is misleading because it is not so much a theory, as a retroactive attempt to construct of a theoretical umbrella by Arnould & Thompson, (2005) around a diverse group of interpretive consumer researchers and their topics. It is a brand that forms a circling of the wagons around an otherwise disparate group united by a common enemy, represented by the overwhelmingly quantitative, nomothetic approach characteristic of mainstream consumer research. CCT is discussed here for the simple reason that most of the papers published under its banner are interpretive. However, as is discussed further below, there has been considerable epistemological stretch since the publication of the foundational paper by Arnould and Thompson (2005). This paper, which signalled a definitive shift in interpretive consumer research was written at the instigation of Dawn Iacobucci the then editor of JCR, who was keen to extend the journal’s diversity and provide legitimacy for interpretive research (Bode & Ostergaard, 2013; Dahl et al., 2015). Arnould and Thompson retroactively constructed four broad areas of CCT research relating to consumer identity projects, marketplace cultures, the sociohistoric patterning of consumption and mass-mediated marketplace ideologies and consumer’s interpretive strategies, stressing that any one study may contain aspects of all four themes. The inauguration of the CCT brand was welcomed by many who subsequently attended its annual conferences and doctoral programmes although it was not greeted with universal approval, particularly from critical scholars. The creation of CCT presented an interrelated three-fold problem from the outset relating to theoretical coherence, the legitimacy of its endeavour and the maintenance of community.

Theoretical Coherence

By comparison to those in the mainstream, perhaps the most difficult problem for the aspiring interpretive researcher lies in orienting oneself to a theoretical landscape that is complex, dense and often arcane. While knowledge of Kuhn’s (1970) paradigmatic scheme is not perfect, it provides the aspirant researcher with tools to gain some purchase on how to differentiate theories and to understand historical debates on the nature of marketing science (Tadajewski,2008, 2014). Arnould and Thompson (2005) ignored the 1980s paradigmatic debate between interpretive and mainstream consumer researchers. This omission is understandable because Kuhn (1970) argues that paradigms are incommensurable, as theorists working from different paradigmatic bases apply different standards. In this understanding to group theorists from different orientations under a brand name that implies a singular movement risks conflict, as theorists dispute the terms of reference, leading to incoherence, when irresolvable conflicts arise pertaining to key assumptions.

To begin with, CCT aligned its outlook with interpretivism. In their foundational paper Arnould and Thompson (2005) acknowledge that interpretivism is central to the birth narrative of CCT, originating in the Consumer Behaviour Odyssey (Belk, 1991). However, they state that the brand name Consumer Culture Theory actually refers to a “family” of theories that share the aim of exploring “the heterogeneous distribution of meanings and the multiplicity of overlapping cultural groupings that exist within the broader sociohistoric frame of globalization and market capitalism” (Arnould & Thompson, 2005: 868/869). While there is mismatch between the contents (theories) and the brand name (theory) this description generally accords with an interpretivist orientation. However in a later paper the authors explained that the philosophical diversity in “this research tradition” is better described as consumer culture theoretics (Arnould & Thompson, 2007b). The terminology is changed and the scope further widened when they argue that heteroglossia is the most appropriate term to describe, “the intersecting, overlapping and at times, conflicting polydiscursive constitution of CCT (Thompson et al., 2013: 150).

The shifts in direction which stretched the epistemological base of CCT to breaking point were largely provoked in response to criticism, which, given that the mainstream remains placidly untroubled by CCT, has come largely from within its own ranks One strand of critique argues that research on identity projects and consumer self-reports of their lived experiences is overly voluntaristic, painting too rosy a picture of the subject who is constructed by this discourse as a self-actualizing, autonomous agent, free of social conditioning. Critics also argued for the need to attend to how culture normalizes particular ways of self-understanding while marginalizing others (Moisander et al., 2009a) and questioned the ability of phenomenological interviews to address this (Moisander et al., 2009b). Askegaard and Linnet (2011) suggested a move away from a subjectivist epistemology to create a dialogue of “open reasoning”, between subjectivist and objectivist approaches to consumer research that acknowledges the limitations of sticking rigidly to either extreme. In their view this would enable the accommodation of a sociological frame of reference that situates these experiences within the structures of the market society in ways that “are not necessarily felt or experienced by consumers in their daily lives” (Askegaard & Linnet, 2011: 382). On the other hand in seeking to straddle two horses, the risk is that one falls between them.

CCT has been criticised for being ideological, promoting neoliberal values by accepting the given-ness of the market and ignoring power relations by accentuating the self-actualizing responsible individual consumer. Fitchett et al., (2014) complained that CCT acts a disciplinary device that stifles radical alternative movements (ibid. 399). Alongside the “cultural turn” they argue that CCT promotes neoliberal ideology by adopting an uncritical approach to the operation of the market as the optimum medium for resource allocation, proclaiming that individuals by acting in their own private self-interest, operate as the most efficient, just and legitimate basis for social and economic organization. From a paradigmatic perspective these authors view CCT from the radical view that society is conflicted, as it is riven by rival class interests. In contrast, in his reply to Fitchett, Askegaard (2014) adopted an integrationist stance, making the scarcely veiled comment that he could not understand how, given their trenchant critique of capitalism, some authors find work in business schools.

The above tensions within the CCT “community” help understand why its description by Arnould and Thompson has moved steadily towards disintegration, from a family of theories (Arnould & Thompson, 2007a), to theoretics (Arnould & Thompson, 2007b) and finally, heteroglossia (Arnould & Thompson, 2013). This latest explanation contended that the original epistemological orientation based on the experiential consumer had, “long given way to a multilayered CCT heteroglossia that features a broad range of theorizations integrating structural and agentic levels of analysis” (Thompson et al. 2013: 149). Moreover, nowadays the “well integrated CCT researcher has a ready access to the supermarket shelves of ‘many ontological frameworks’ such as practice theories, cognitive anthropology, structuration theory, Foucauldian governmentality, and Butler’s performativity approach”. (Thompson et al., 2013: 159). Such diversity invites the criticism that in such a milieux the aspirant researcher will become a jack of all trades and master of none. Thompson and his co-authors seek to reassure those, “interpretive practices of less well versed, novice, and/or peripheral members of the CCT community, the CCT heteroglossia still encompasses the discursive legacy of its formative humanistic/experientialist genesis (and corresponding verificationist epistemology) (Thompson et al., 2013: 160). In this paper they do discuss paradigms, arguing that the paradigm debates of the 1980s were different to those from the early 1990s and shifted again in the wake of the formation of the CCT brand. Given the proliferation of theories and concepts it might be objected that heteroglossia is another way to describe the Tower of Babel.

Legitimacy

Pragmatism was central to the institution of CCT, as a means to improve the chances of success in the academic job market for interpretive researchers. The foundation of CCT was described in such terms by Arnould and Thompson (2005) as a move from research to realpolitik prompted by the failure of earlier interpretive researchers to secure its status in the marketing academy. They later proclaimed the success of CCT as “a recognized paradigmatic category” (Thompson, et al. 2013). The “Catch-22” is that when one is recognised by the mainstream, one can no longer be regarded as standing critically outside of it. Given that consumer research is not classed as a social science but as a management discipline, there is a related tension between pragmatism and idealism. Holbrook and Grayson (1986) ask what is more valuable, to work in the interests of marketing management or pursue consumer research for its own sake (Holbrook & Grayson, 1986: 380). More recently this is presented as the choice to work “on pure research, untainted by links to commerce or power structures of the academy’ (Ostergaard & Bode, 2016: 392).

One of the main criticisms of CCT is that its legitimizing pretensions are antithetical to radical scholars who worry that their commitment to “groundbreaking, innovative, radical and sometimes even weird research” will be traded in for the accumulation of symbolic capital and academic respectability (Bode & Østergaard, 2013). There is a perhaps unsurmountable divide between those who wish to for a degree of integration and consensus in order to boost the symbolic capital of CCT and those for whom radical transformation is a primary concern (Fitchett et al., 2013; Cova et al. 2013). This is exacerbated by problem that as the originators of the concept Arnould and Thompson seem bound to defend it, acting not only as apologists but as legislators, thereby establishing a hierarchy.

Community

When evaluated in relation to the framework described by Burrell & Morgan (1979) the “family” relation of CCT is tenuous, as its members differ in fundamental ways, such that one member of the “family” is committed to exploring the positive role played by commodities in fulfilling consumers’ desires for meaning and identity, whilst another seeks the imminent demise of consumer capitalism, whilst a third is concerned with the poetic meaning of consumption. That said, research traditions are not so much defined by the publications that are their excreta but by the living community that determines what is interesting and worthwhile to research and publish. The interpretive community in consumer research, recognizing its dissidence from the US mainstream, was welcoming of others also considered oddballs (Bode & Østergaard , 2013). In the 1990s conferences organised by the ACR in Asia and Europe enabled the exchange of ideas, although these were tinged at times by a patronising colonial sensibility by those from the ‘home’ country. Towards the end of that decade open and vibrant exchanges occurred in three conferences that took place at St. Malachy’s Retreat Centre, Belfast, organised by Stephen Brown, Anne-Marie Doherty and others (see for example, Bell, Brown & Carson, 1996). Although a wide variety of interests were represented, exchanges were largely convivial, although there was no pretence that attending constituted a likeminded group. Thus there existed a community of scholars who found these ventures stimulating and continued to attend them but with no wider interest beyond that.

The differences between these earlier ventures and CCT are threefold. Firstly, while the “retreats” these were transient affairs CCT has become a long-standing institution. Secondly, CCT is bound to its originators who are now its apologists who took up the gauntlet (perhaps the poisoned chalice) proffered by Iacobucci. While they may strive to avoid ethnocentrism, it is inevitable that their worldview is moulded by their own experiences Which makes one wonder what will happen to CCT when they depart the scene; will this be like what happened to the Rolling Thunder tour? Third, these legislators had a specific goal that was pragmatic and strategic, to enhance the job-prospects of CCT scholars. Of the community that forms around CCT conferences, many are only loosely identified or even hostile to the strategic “community” that is manufactured by its legislators.

General Discussion of Interpretivism

To what extent does interpretive consumer research form a separate paradigm to its mainstream counterpart? In a review of the field Deighton et al. (2010) describe two main categories of consumer research comprising psychologically informed experiments, and qualitative research papers, which, “put the disembodied heads of consumers, which are the focus of the psychological studies, back on their bodies, situate them in a culture and moment, and so provide a rich contextual understanding of consumer behaviour”. They thus assume a complementarity that recognizes that they each approach the subject from different directions. Occasionally, as discussed above, concepts such as “brand community” appear to traverse the boundary. But is the interpretive construct “brand community” the same as the “brand community” rendered as a variable for quantitative study? Do these two conceptions share similar ontological and epistemological assumptions and a similar view of human nature? Additionally, many interpretive studies are appended with interpretive frameworks, that within a positivist frame, would be described as models specifying cause-effect relations.

Ontologically, nominalism is a defining criterion for interpretive research and in line with this those advocating introspection or existential phenomenological explanations share a concern to preserve the life-world of the subject. To facilitate this they argue the importance of obtaining a pure record of subjective experience that is uncontaminated by the presuppositions of the researcher. Some argue for the superiority of introspection, cutting out the need for an interlocutor, as the researcher reflects on his or her own conscious experience, by, “tracking, experiencing and reflecting on one's own thoughts, mental images, feelings, sensations, and behaviors” (Gould, 1995, 719).77 Introspection has been criticized, not least for seeming to assume that self-reflection provides direct access to consciousness in the face of evidence to the contrary, when it is known that perception is subject to a range of cognitive, attributional and memory biases.78 Added to this, to speak of introspection is to tacitly endorse the idea that consciousness is inside the head and the world outside (Zahavi, 2008). Interpretive interviews carry their own dangers; Gould (1995) warns that, “the truth of a consumer’s experience cannot be obtained by transporting an outside researcher into that consumer’s mind (ibid.: 721). This is especially problematic when, as Goulding notes (1999), researcher and subject are from radically different milieu. Given that the researcher’s values play an important role in the overall interpretation presented to the reader, reflexive awareness is encouraged as an antidote to overcome this problem.

A more serious question is whether “phenomenological” interviews are in accord with phenomenology? Returning to the article by Hirschman and Holbrook (1982), this was influential in promoting a turn towards a more phenomenological scientific style and as a precursor to the development of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). Thompson et al. (1989) had earlier adopted the trappings of Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) focus on experience but rejected its substance, in favour of what they describe as an existential-phenomenological approach to recovering the lived experience of the consumer. As mentioned above, this presents the difficulty that “phenomenological” interviews separate inside from outside and privilege the former inner experience. Zahavi quotes Merlau-Ponty⁷⁹ to highlight that for the phenomenologist, “(i)nside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (Zahavi, 2008: 27). It can be argued that the existential phenomenological approach developed by Thompson et al. (1989) resolves antimonies such as inside/outside and the Cartesian separation of mind from body. Indeed these researchers discuss how mainstream consumer research perpetuates such fallacies. True to the interpretivist spirit they advise the researcher to bracket their presuppositions so as to ensure that the data is pure and uncontaminated. They describe the phenomenological interview as an idiographic method that proceeds by collecting first-hand accounts. The researcher is alert to figural patterns, paying particular attention to words that relate to the body. The interview then moves beyond description of individual case histories towards thematic analysis of a set of interviews on a given topic, using groups to validate whether descriptions are based on data. They discuss their research into shopping behaviour which identified themes of restriction/ lack of restriction, organization /disorganization and completeness /incompleteness. In a subtle distinction that may well be lost on mainstream researchers, they justify thematic analysis on the grounds that it is not to provide generalisability but rather to aid in interpretation across a more diverse set of experiences.

This idea of the phenomenological interview is shared by many social sciences and is by no means exclusive to consumer research. However philosophers from Husserl to Derrida have criticized this approach, by arguing that phenomenology is a form of transcendental philosophy and not empirical psychology (Zahavi, 2008). In this view phenomenology is not concerned with the psychological question of how a pre-existing reality (objectivity) is subjectively apprehended by psychical beings but is rather concerned with the question of what it means for something to be real and objective in the first place and in particular with the transcendental questions concerning the very condition of possibility for manifestation. (Zahavi, 2008: 667).This distinction is key, because if the core aim of phenomenology is to understand what it means for something to be taken as real and objective in the first place, then interviews with consumers will yield next to no knowledge of the processes at work. For instance, although interpretive researchers criticize the Cartesianism of the mainstream and claim to have included the body in their own work, their accounts are no less so by their exclusive focus on the discourse produced from the conscious reflection of their participants. Because we do not have direct access to our own experience and given the centrality of non-conscious automatic processes, what we consciously experience is not a good guide to what is really going on (Metzinger & Gallese, 2003). Classical phenomenology is not just another name for a form of psychological self-observation but rather seeks to reflect on the conditions of possibility of experience and cognition.

Moreover, by seeking to apprehend these conditions of possibility, phenomenologists such as Dan Zahavi (2008) and Shaun Gallagher (2006; 2013) recognize the limitations of phenomenological interviews and widely cite experimental evidence in support their respective arguments. Unlike CCT theorists they do not shirk from admitting findings from experimental research into the operation of pre-verbal engagements that can be described as cultural. The narrow way in which CCT theory construes culture in relation to discourse which is linked to its traditional antipathy to nomothetic research precludes such engagement and thus seriously undermines the phenomenological quest.

CCT subsequently drifted from its original interpretive orientation to include a multiplicity of perspectives including post-structuralism which makes different ontological and epistemological presuppositions. As a result of this diversity not much is written today about extending our understanding of culture through interpretive schemes such as the experiential phenomenological approach once enthusiastically advocated by CCT researchers.

How successful has the CCT “community” been in achieving its core aim? It is telling that in their editorial reflecting on CCT in Marketing Theory, the editors reflected almost entirely on a genealogical discussion of its membership network to the virtual exclusion of its contribution to theory (Askegaard & Scott, 2013). One crude measure is obtained by using Google Scholar to count CCT-oriented publications in JCR. This indicated that sixty-three such articles were published between 2005 and 2018. It is noteworthy that Russell Belk has published thirty-five papers in JCR.

While there are benefits to adopting an interpretive approach, Dolan (2002) warns against cultural reductionism. For instance, it is a mistake to think of sustainability in purely cultural terms to argue instead that one can adopt a relativist epistemology and a realist ontology. Culture and meaning are important, but they ignore the crucial materialist dimension, that objects, including us, are made from stuff, and that in relation to sustainability, materials must be extracted, fabricated, used and disposed of and transported at several points in the process. He raises the nominalist spectre of Bishop Berkeley who wisely ignored the injunction to …. The naturalist fallacy – to reduce the multiplicity of the real inchoate reality we are immersed in to the cultural signifier of “nature” is to commit a “naturalistic misunderstanding”.

Critical Consumer Research

This is not considered here in detail given that much already been discussed above in relation to macromarketing and Consumer Culture Theory. In relation to fetishism, Leiss (1976) and Jhally et al. (1985) argued that fetishism is now quite different to what it was in the time of Marx. Their definition of fetishism as any representation of political economy such as the market, that refers to it, or them, as autonomous, is in line with Marx; however their explanation, which focuses on the symbolic meanings transferred onto products through advertising is not quite so structural. Kline and Leiss (1978) had previously charted the development of this change from the early 1900s onwards, describing how marketers made extensive use of market research to refine the meanings they gave to brands to ensure that these resonate with the meanings valued by the target audience. Goldman (1992: 31) argued in this vein that commodity fetishism is never more appropriate than in relation to advertising, where objects are imbued with human characteristics, while humans only appear as properly human when associated with the appropriate commodity signs. Others point out that advertising, although important, is just one aspect of the complex communicative context of fetishism where the product label and logo also act as vehicles to enable identification as is the design of the product itself and the place in which it is offered for sale (Miles, 1998).

While Marx’s argument about fetishism is structural, the above arguments about the role of symbolic meaning communicated through advertising point back towards the subject who identifies with this meaning. Billig (1999) turned the heat away from structure and onto the subject by conjecturing that fetishism might occur as the result of repression, as “willed forgetting” of disturbing material. The problem with this is that while Freud associated repression with the curtailment of the pleasure principle, far from repressing enjoyment, marketing actively seduces consumers into constant engagement in the insatiable pursuit of pleasure. However, Billig concluded that fetishism seems to be neither conscious nor unconscious but is rather a kind of willed, collective unmindfulness, in which case repression may provide an apt explanation. However Cluley and Dunne (2012) were unconvinced by this argument, suggesting that narcissism provides a better psychoanalytic explanation of fetishism. According to them the consumer may know full well that the trainers they want to buy are made in sweatshop conditions but they act as if they are not aware. In their view Individuals in the role of consumers continually disavow the knowledge of the harm that their consumption causes through compartmentalization, by foregrounding their own satisfaction and pushing down the adverse unwelcome consequences of their actions on others. They contend that fetishism is a particular form of disavowal that is apparent in contexts where our desires and wishes come into conflict with what we know to be true. In their rather bleak summation, the field of consumption is as much about about depriving and harming others as it is about satisfying our needs; “we perpetuate the suffering of others through our consumption we give vent to the narcissistic side of ourselves we want to deny, which we generally repress, obtaining sadistic satisfaction in the process “as an expression of other-abasing self-love” (ibid.: 253).

Others highlight the fetishism that they argue is endemic to the organization of academic research on consumption in cultural studies and consumer research. It has become fashionable to argue that we now live in a consumer society, as if there were no production anymore. Authors in cultural studies and consumer research celebrate the consumer as an active agent who derives aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment from their consumption of commodities, fashioning identity by playing on the keyboard of commodity signs. Angela McRobbie (1997) critiqued those authors who treat consumption as separate from production, who celebrate the pleasures derived from fashion and ignore the misery of fashion production, especially for women. Billig (1999) criticizes the later work of Jean Baudrillard (1987), which he argues is fetishistic by promoting the notion that electronic communication networks are somehow immaterial, thus ignoring the conditions of those workers who toil to extract the necessary rare-earth elements necessary to production and the conditions of the workers in factories such as those operated by Foxconn. On this basis fetishism is inbuilt into the structure of academic discourse, apparent in dedicated journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology that concretize the analytic separation of production from consumption to focus on the enjoyment of affluent consumers and by ignoring the immiseration of the worker..

Fitchett et al. (2014) focus on the political context, or rather the lack of discussion by contending that , “it is virtually inconceivable to imagine the historical evolution of consumer research and cultural-turn research in particular, independently of the political choice of the period…yet the creation myths of CCT rarely acknowledge this ‘context’ at all.’ The authors point to compartmentalization, that consumer researchers have focused on the realm of consumption as somehow encapsulated and insulated from politics, despite the massive consequences political decisions have had for social and individual life resulting from the privatization of state-owned assets and the outsourcing of services, together with the promotion of the much vaunted neoliberal conception of the individual as entrepreneur of the self.  However, when the doyens of Consumer Culture Theory argued the need to study  “a broader range of consumption experiences and practices” (Thompson et al., 2013, 155), they provided no hint that they might have this broader picture in mind which is key to understanding, as,

It really should be no surprise to find that when taxes and government were cut, state owned enterprises were privatized and markets were deregulated, one consequence was that people experience more aspects of daily life as choice making individual consumers, that more aspects of economic activity are mediated via commodity relations and markets appear to be free and liberated contexts in which to pursue and enact newly possible market-type behaviours and subjectivities.

 Questions pertaining to financialization and the machine which were mentioned in chapter two may also be of interest to critical marketers. Ewen discusses how the finance sector played a central role in the development of markets in the twentieth century, describing the allure of consumer credit for consumers who were promised that they could realize their dreams right now, only to be subjected to the disciplinary power of constant indebtedness. Dholakia (2012) provides an overview of the growth of finance capital in the USA from the instalment plans of the early 1900s to the maxed-out credit cards today.

Postmodernism

It should be stated at the outset that there is no such thing as postmodernism, but rather of postmodernisms, a family of explanations that collectively proclaimed the death of the Enlightenment project of 18th century which has failed in its quest towards achieving a progressively more ethical, rational, technological and unifying social order. Authors describe a world turned upside-down; Instead of progress, there is eternal return; in place of wholes, there is fragmentation; rather than depth, there is the incessant play of surfaces; where simulacra replace reality; dominated by visions of dystopia rather than utopia. That these ideas are associated primarily with “post-structuralist” French philosophers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jack-Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigiray, Helene Cixious, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is no accident, due to the influence of the social ferment that gripped France in the period around 1968. These ideas were complemented by Americans such scholars such as Daniel Bell, Judith Butler, John Fiske and Frederic Jameson. However the basic strands of postmodernism can be traced back to structuralism and the work of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, the Frankfurt School and others.

Although the original works of postmodernism date back fifty years, it was not until the 1990s that these ideas became prominent in the social sciences, eventually finding their way to the subjects of management, marketing and consumer research. Postmodernism can be bewildering to the reader due to the number of authors, the fact that they do not tend to acknowledge each other, the sheer variety of concepts and the density of explanation.

Stephen Brown (1995, 1998) who became the face of postmodernism in marketing was faced with the onerous challenge to (ironically) weave a coherent narrative from multiple strands that proclaimed the end of modernist ideals of rationality and progress and of a society rooted in the stability of class-structure where meaning was given by one’s employment. Brown describes the shift in postmodernity to forms of self-production in the realm of consumption in the marketplace amid the play of signifiers, coupled with an overriding sense of ennui experienced by the individual immersed in the depthless superficiality of commodity culture. Below I use the categories devised by Dick Hebdige (1995: 185-207) who suggests that postmodernist authors can at least agree on what they are against; firstly they are against totalisation; secondly, they are against ideology and finally, they are against utopian ideals. I add a fourth item to this list, which is that postmodern authors are against grand schemes of ethics for which they substitute the idea of the localised practice of individual responsibility.

Against totalisation: Postmodern theorists resist any attempt to totalize or to universalize, for instance by assuming that there is an essential human nature or destiny. This is related to their argument that scientific knowledge cannot be value-free but is always infused with power. This built on the suspicion of positive science voiced by critical theorists such as Lukacs and Marcuse, who argued that this operates in the interests of increasing efficiency through the progressive extension of technological rationality. The basis of modern science is that it does not tell a story but reveals the truth about the state of the world. The Enlightenment basis of this is that the knowledge produced by science will free humanity from the grip of servitude t superstition and ignorance. The corollary to this is that academics have the freedom to venture as they see fit without fear of sanction to explore questions they find interesting. In The Postmodern Condition Jean Francois Lyotard (1991) employed Austin’s idea of performativity to argue that the idea that education should aim for the emancipation of the individual through the development of autonomous critical thought, has been reduced in the postmodern era to training in the skills demanded by the market and the autonomous individual has been replaced by the disciplined, biddable individual described by Foucault.

Elizabeth Hirschman (1985) was one of the first to evaluate the assumption that consumer research is value-free. She found instead that this is deeply influenced by the attitudes, personalities, ideologies and values of authors who are predominantly male and middle-classs. In a further article based on an analysis of papers published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Hirschman, (1993) sought to demonstrate the dominance of male ideology and how, despite arguments for consumer sovereignty routinely presented in marketing textbooks, the academic literature portrays marketers as having power over consumers. Bristor and Fisher (1993), made similar points, for instance, when arguing from a post-structuralist perspective argue that the subjugation of women is naturalised in everyday language, when women were described with respect to their marital status as “house-wives”, or “career-women”, terms not used to describe males. The adherence of consumer research to the goal of increasing the control of the marketer was evident in the longstanding practice for papers published in JCR to devote a special section that outlined the “managerial implications” of their research. This fuels the suspicion that what matters is not the truth of a particular finding but whether or not this knowledge is useful for marketing professionals. The link between knowledge and truth was abandoned by many economists in the years following Milton Friedman's (1953) argument that economists should give up the quest to understand behaviour as all that matters is that this can successfully be predicted.

A related issue raised by Campbell Jones (2003) in the context of organization theory is relevant in the context of consumer research, “It is almost as if theory is done outside… and the best we can do is to raid these other sources (badly most of the time)” (Jones, 2003: 514). This question has still to be posed, let alone answered in a consumer research journal, but one suspects the answer will be that theoretical contributions and developments from economists, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists will always weigh more heavily than those that come from within the discipline. Since Lyotard (1991) first wrote about performativity, the university has been almost entirely reduced to a business-machine, subject to ever-increasing monitoring of staff and control by managers. The value-free production of knowledge is further compromised through the undue influence of powerful governmental and industrial interest groups that have a stake in what “knowledge” is published… and what is not. Added to this the governance of prestigious academic journals, has come under question, some of which have been severely compromised.

Against Ideology. Hebdige (1996) discusses postmodern theorists’ rejection of teleological, or purposive explanations, rooted in the Enlightenment belief that the application of rational principles to the world’s problems will result in continuous progress towards emancipation. They reject all theories of progress from Hegelian and Marxist dialectics to Norbert Elias’s explanation of the “civilising process” and modernist arguments that humanity is on a trajectory towards a more enlightened and pacific future. In place of these they substitute Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return and a never-ending present. One can trace intimations of this anti-teleological turn to de Saussure’s argument that the meaning of a term is not given, but is arbitrary, based on its synchronic position within the language system and in Lacan’s further argument that the signifier has precedence over the signified. Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard developed the radical implications of such arguments by separately arguing that the postmodern scene involves the construction of hyperrealities where the model takes precedence over the real thing. Umberto Eco describes the fascination with hyperreal environments ranging from replicas of medieval castles to theme pubs, which strike the observer as somehow more authentically real than the real thing, which is tawdry by comparison. Baudrillard further develops the concept to argue that nowadays it is ubiquitous for models to precede and generate what we take to be reality. He argues that the Marxist notion of the expropriation of surplus value is outmoded, as value is now created through the production and exchange of hyperreal simulacra, from avatars to futures markets. In one of his texts Baudrillard asks what if it were possible to produce a map that precisely covers all of reality, such that to all extent and purposes the map is reality? This came to pass in the runup to the first Gulf War, when the US military used high-quality satellite phot-reconnaissance to construct an exact digital map of Iraq which was used not only to simulate the invasion and to monitor this in real time. Such developments informed Baudrillard’s later pronouncement that the Gulf War did not take place. He certainly had a point, given not only that the war was fought by one side on a simulated landscape but also that for those not involved, it was entirely constructed as a media spectacular.⁸⁰ Baudrillard was prescient, because technology today, never mind those that are just over the horizon, is capable of simulating a war or indeed any form of “reality” one might wish for. However, it can be argued that his statement was hyperbolic and went too far, disrespecting multiple sources of evidence to the contrary and the memories of those who suffered and died.

Hebdige (1996) mentions another aspect of Lyotard’s’ argument based on Kant’s work on aesthetics which distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful refers to the pleasure derived from the harmonious and orderly aspects of artwork that provide pleasure, while the sublime refers to an unformed wilderness that inspires awe and terror in the viewer. The manicured golf course at Augusta might be thought of as an example of the beautiful, whereas that of a terrible and threatening untamed wilderness, perhaps of the Moon or Mars, might be described as sublime. Lyotard argued that modern theorists focused on the harmonious, controllable realm of the beautiful to the exclusion of the sublime and that identification with the beautiful has fuelled the presumption that fullness of knowledge can be achieved. Indeed those individuals who have controlled society such as Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin and Mao assumed a stance of omnipotence, just as their counterparts today, Jinping, Trump, and Putin, who identify themselves as the embodiment of Reason, “we are the proletariat”. Writing in the shadow of Auschwitz and the atom bomb postmodernists are committed to an aesthetics of the sublime that is beyond the beautiful, which points to that which cannot be contained which is monstrous and unthinkable. Elements of the sublime appear in Lacan’s concept of the Real that is beyond signification and in Derrida’s concept of the aporia, which highlights the self-contradictory nature of human discourse.

Against Ethics: From the above it seems clear that questions of morality are of key importance to postmodern theorists. That said, they are against formalised expressions of ethics such as deontology and utilitarianism. Why so? Jacques Derrida and Zygmunt Bauman were influenced by Emmanuel Levinas⁸¹ who argued that rather than working in the interests of morality these formal schemes actually create distance between the moral parties. There is no room here to summarize Levinas’s explanation, but in my view its core is that humans first and foremost have a responsibility towards the moral ‘face’ of the other. This sense of moral responsibility is not acquired but conferred from birth, but it is then squeezed out as we learn to follow our self-interest.

Conclusion

My initial reason for writing this chapter was to try gain grasp on the overall academic subject no matter how feeble or rudimentary that might be, because one can judge better when one knows something about the context. I have a few preliminary observations. Firstly, while from the perspective of critical researchers the marketing mainstream is conservative, by comparison to its sister field of economics, marketing journals have published research that has been broadly critical of neoliberal assumptions. Secondly, although critics are sceptical of the generally individualist and celebratory image of consumer culture portrayed by interpretive scholars, rich descriptions of the practices of flesh and blood individuals are interesting as cases in their own right and can also provide resources for subsequent researchers to reflect on and critique. Arguments about the narrowness of scope of the subject remind me of the comment made by an eminent marketing scholar that I came across years ago, but can’t now remember where, that marketers study consumers in the same way that fishermen study fish, rather than as marine biologists do.

Marketing and consumer research is a broad church that has welcomed ideas arising in fields with more academic capital such as economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and the arts. My hunch is that this is openness which provides rich ground for the cross-fertilisation of ideas, is linked to the mongrel status of a discipline that continues to suffer from an inferiority complex in relation to its more prestigious peers.

The mainstream seems to be slowly awakening to its ideological biases and positioning and it is encouraging that journal editors have stated their intention to adopt something akin to a neutral social scientific approach to the subject by recognising that research that was once purported to describe universal aspects of marketing and consumption behaviour has been almost overwhelmingly linked to a ‘Northern” perspective which focuses overmuch on individual consumption and on a particular conception of that individual. On the other hand, as mentioned in chapter eight, criticisms of the narrowness of the subject date back over fifty years and there is urgent need for change.

That this chapter is long and tedious, is a sign of my naïve optimism when I started out to write it. It was only when I decided that enough was enough and I had to complete it and get on with my life that I became aware of its many omissions, not just of authors whose work I esteem but of entire subject areas.  Now these omissions press on me. I ought to have discussed subjects and individuals who have been marginalised by the mainstream and indeed subject areas and individual idiosyncrasies can meet head-on in the dedication of some to their subject.  Here I am thinking in particular of Robert (Bob) Grafton-Small, a dedicated essayist who developed his unique style of expression in the lineage of James Addison and George Orwell, and also Gordon Foxall who developed intentional behaviourism. It would been interesting too to include discussion of ‘street-smart’ views of marketing which are hostile to all things academic, at least if my interview with “guerrilla marketer” Orvel Ray Wilson was anything to go by.  It is fair to state that our (as yet unpublished) interview didn’t start out too well, “Okay DOCTOR SIR, what do you want to KNOW?”, growled Orvel, displaying an “hospitable” knuckle-crunching, hyper-masculinity characteristic of a certain breed of male from that benighted country. That said, we did manage to have a reasonable discussion and Orvel was of course, generous to a fault, handing  me copies of his book and videos on my departure. 

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¹ Varman et al. (2011) used Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ as a frame to explore this. They mention in this context that their empirical study, ‘uncovers processes through which market subjectivity is fostered among students as they strive to become responsible, active, and entrepreneurial subjects’. I can’t resist stating that in my experience students have always been expected to be active and responsible! Perhaps I am wrong. Send comments on a postcard to …

²The concept of paradigm has been used by Arndt (1986), Hunt (1991), Murray & Ozanne (1991), Goulding (1999) and Tadajewski (2014). Sheth et al. (1988) provide an alternative scheme which provides a good description of the historical development of mainstream consumer research but downplays on critical perspectives.

³ The results of his study confirmed his initial hunch that it makes no sense to judge articles solely on the journals in which they appear.

⁴ See Appendix One for the Table of results.

⁵ Substantial rewards can be gained from publishing, especially in top-flight journals. Although I couldn’t locate a specific study of marketing and consumer research, one paper, which focused on a US Business School found that authors received increments of up 3.5% per article (Allen et al., 2016). Another rather dated study found that for those publishing in a top-rate finance journal the present value of an article was worth between $19,000 and $33,0000 to the author (Swidler & Goldreyer, 1998). A more recent US study found that a highly cited article can increase salary from 2.8% to 8.9% (Faria & Mixon, 2021). Incentives have been reported to be particularly high in China where publication in a top-flight journal can yield a reward equivalent to one’s average yearly salary while articles in top science journals can be up to twenty times that (Quan & Chen, 2017).

⁶ As Rob Wills pointed out in a letter to the London Review of Books, (LRB 15th August 2024. Page 4), so-called “soft-power” can have a hard edge. He mentions the Blum-Byrnes Agreements of 1946 included as part of the agreement to ending French war debt to the USA, which stipulated that “local” French films could be shown for four weeks within each quarter with the remaining eight weeks being open to competition from American films. Wills notes that this was a great way of spreading “the American way of life” .

⁷ De Tocqueville, A. (1961). Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macmillan, 1861). Vol. 1. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/tocqueville-memoir-letters-and-remains-of-alexis-de-tocqueville-vol-1

⁸ “I do not even know of a country where the love of money holds a greater place in the human heart and where a deeper contempt is professed for the theory of the permanent equality of property…. the majority lives in perpetual self-adoration; only foreigners or experience can bring certain truths to the ears of Americans.” De Tocqueville, A. (2012 [1835]). Democracy in America, Eduardo Nolla (ed).James T. Schleiffer (trans.) Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012). Vol. 1.https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/democracy-in-america-english-edition-vol-1

⁹ Handy, Charles, (2001). Tocqueville revisited: The meaning of American prosperity. Harvard Business Review.https://hbr.org/2001/01/tocqueville-revisited-the-meaning-of-american-prosperity

¹⁰ Hansard (1964) Business Schools, (London and Manchester Universities). HC Deb 11 May 1964 vol 695 cc38-43. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1964/may/11/business-schools-manchester-and-london. Accessed 18th March 2021

¹¹ The context is different in each country. In the USA for instance academics had to secure the academic integrity of the discipline against the practices of “street-smart” marketers. My understanding comes from an unpublished interview I did in 2004 with “guerrilla marketer” Orvel Ray Wilson who greeted me with the sneering words, “Hello DOCTOR”, making it clear how little he thought of academics! In my view it is understandable that there are very few references to “street smarts” in the academic literature, firstly because of their antipathy to the academic fraternity and anything that smells intellectual, and secondly because to mention “street smarts” involves summoning the bad old days of the peddling of patent medicines and so on.

¹² Jones & Monieson, (1990, 105)

¹³ See Tadajewski & Jones (2014) and Kavanagh (2014), for more detailed discussion.

¹⁴ Wilkie & Moore, (2006, 224),

¹⁵ Breyer, 1934, 132, in Wilikie & Moore, (2006, 225).

¹⁶ Wilkie & Moore, (2006, 225).

¹⁷ Kohli & Jaworski, (1990); Jaworski & Kohli, (1993).

¹⁸ There is a religious sensibility evident in Robert Bartels (1962: 10) linkage of the twentieth century development of marketing to the Revelation of St. John the Divine (Shaw, & Tamilla, 2001: 162).

¹⁹ McKitterick, (1957: 29).

²⁰ Ibid., 34.

²¹ Ibid., 32.

²² Philip Kotler (1972) made the same distinction over a decade later.

²³ Drucker in Bialkowski (2000, p.3), from Uslay, Morgan & Sheth, (2008). The authors rightly seek to reinstate Drucker as one of the formative influences on the scope and direction of the subject.

²⁴ Quote is from Davidson & O’Reilly (1987). See also Ries and Trout (1985) on marketing warfare.

²⁵ I included this quote from a paper I wrote back in the 1990s called ‘Marketing: The Split Subject’, but can’t for the life of me find it. Apologies therefore to the original author.

²⁶ E.g. March & Simon, (1958).

²⁷ Beier and Stern (1969), mention March and Simon (1958) in the former sense. Within marketing theory it was perhaps only with relationship marketing and service dominant logic that these two subject positions (customer as one element, customer as end) were reconciled as they theorise the customer as the producer of their own satisfaction.

²⁸ Perhaps the chief executive officers of the tobacco companies were out that day and failed to get his message.

²⁹ A fairly recent example of this is the decision made in 2018 by American sports retailer Dick’s to stop selling assault-style weapons and raise the age to buy guns to 21, as a result of which 62 employees resigned. In 2020 the company further announced plans to stop selling firearms in half its stores.

³⁰ Kotler & Zaltman, (1971, 10).

³¹ Andreasen, (2003: 294). Reference is markets refers to the argument by Luck, (1969).

³² Andreasen, (1994).

³³ Kotler & Lee, (2014, 3).

³⁴ Bartlett & LeGrande, (1993).

³⁵ See Peters, (1997), Lair et al. (2005) and Gorbatov et al. (2018).

³⁶ Grönroos (1994).

³⁷ Tregua et al., (2021). The authors note that V&L’s paper had been cited 14,000 times by 2018. They also note, somewhat depressingly, the very few papers that challenged what to me is its seriously flawed logic and argument.

³⁸ I find this statement curious, requiring further explanation. Think of your body. Does it make sense to say that your mind embodies your body? Perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that it informs it. A pertinent question is the extent to which knowledge (mind) separable from the body it informs? This is a subject for debate that the authors do not venture into. Campbell et al. (2013) highlighted the massive material infrastructure that is required for the provision of services, which today is obvious in the development of massive datacentres to support the Artificial Intelligence.

³⁹ Abela & Murphy, (2008).

⁴⁰ Abela & Murphy, (2008: 44).

⁴¹ See for example, Anderson, (1983; 1986); Hunt, (1990; 1993), Peter, (1992), Kavanagh, (1994).

⁴² Quotations above are from Hunt, (1993, 82-84).

⁴³ See for instance, Schroeder & Borgerson, (2005); Borgersonn & Schroeder, (2018).

⁴⁴ For instance, three great papers were published side by side in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, by Bristor & Fischer, (1994), Peñaloza, (1994) and Joy & Venkatesh, (1994). In particular Peñaloza, (1994) challenged prevalent beliefs about gender and raised issues that only surfaced over twenty years later.

⁴⁵ Brown, (1993).

⁴⁶ Wilkie & Moore, (2006, 206). The authors note that there were 49 marketing-related journals in 1997.

⁴⁷ See for example Tadajewski & Brownlie, (2008, 9-19).

⁴⁸ See for instance, Firat and Dholakia 1987; Murray and Ozanne, 1991, Hetrick and Lozada 1994; Murray et al., 1994 and Ozanne & Murray, 1995).

⁴⁹ Marcuse might be better described as fashioning his own theory based on a synthesis of Hegel, Freud, Marx and the Utopian philosophy of Ernest Bloch, seeing Marx’s theory as in need of constant revision (Kellner & Pierce, 2014).

⁵⁰ Adorno is mentioned three times in the edited volume in relation to motivation research and Herbert Marcuse just once.

⁵¹ Some people can get sniffy when they spot a reference that is more than a couple of years old and especially fifty or more years old as irrelevant, as times have moved on. Reading over Leiss (1978) again just now reminds me that life can turn full circle. Leiss (1978) contrasted the ‘reified consciousness’ of those ideologues of early capitalism who presented the market as the universal application of a natural law that demanded obedience, with the gradual acceptance of government intervention and state-managed capitalism, which ‘made this reified consciousness obsolete’ (Leiss, 1978, 42).

⁵² Consider for instance, Thompson & Haytko, (1997); Murray, (2002); Holt, (2002); Nolan, (2002).

⁵³ See Hetrick & Lozada (1994, 549) for reference.

⁵⁴ Bradshaw and Firat (2007) refer to The Cult of MacIntosh by Belk and Tumbat (2005) to argue that the fourteen Mac users interviewed are examples of fetishism and reification - basically that these individuals had fallen for the Apple hype that MacIntosh is ‘hip’ and anti-capitalist to a degree as opposed to the staid conformity of Microsoft. For Bradshaw and Firat this fetishism of the object also involves the displacement of sentiment that should have been directed against the Market. Turning this back on the “Critical” marketer, what if their stance was also “purely” motivated by style and differentiation from their more staid counterparts? A different explanation of what is going on in both instances offered by Heath and Potter (2004) is that the fundamental dynamic at work in both situations is not cultural engineering from above but mimesis.

⁵⁵ Murray and Ozanne, (1991, 131) outline a paradigm structure where interpretivist and objective approaches fall on the side of “order”. They assign ethnomethods ethnography, hermeneutics, semiotics and literary criticism to the subjective dimension and cognitive psychology, role theory, structuralism, exchange theory and

⁵⁶ Deighton, (2005).

⁵⁷ Deighton, (2007).

⁵⁸ Conducted by the author. A spreadsheet of findings is available on request.

⁵⁹ Source: Kalyanaram & Little (1994).

⁶⁰ Source: Briesch et al., (1996).

⁶¹ Source: Park, Mothersbaugh & Feick (1994).

⁶² Source: & Lynch, (1988).

⁶³ Source: Kahneman & Tversky, 1979,1982),

⁶⁴ Source: Kotler & Armstrong, (1996)

⁶⁵ Source: Sen & Johnson, (1997)

⁶⁶ Source: Arndt, (1986).

⁶⁷ Source: Ratner et al.(1999).

⁶⁸ Source: Alba et al., (1999: 110).

⁶⁹ Source: Van Ossalaer & Alba, (2000)

⁷⁰ Source: Allen, (2002).

⁷¹ Source: Simonson & Nowliss, (2000).

⁷² Source: Pham et al., (2001).

⁷³ There is also a need to recognise the replication crisis in this area which has affected the credibility of some research. That said, there remains a large body of work that supports the operation of non-conscious processing and indeed of a dynamic unconscious.

74 From Culture and Cognition Reading Group. https://cultureandcognitionreadinggroup.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/blog-post-title-3/ Accessed July 2019

⁷⁵ Maurice Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman managed to an extent to walk both sides of the street by publishing respectively, ten and six articles and book reviews in the Journal of Marketing; Russell Belk is listed for two.

⁷⁶ Motivation research played an influential role in the 1950s, enjoying many publications in the Journal of Marketing. See for example, Britt, 1950; Woodword et al., 1950; Blankertz, (1955) and Peters, (1957).

⁷⁷ Authors have provided a number of insights. See for example, Gould, (1991, 1995),Wallendorf & Trucks, (1993), Campbell, (1997), Holbrook, (1995; 2017); Wohlfeihl & Whelan, 2012).

⁷⁸ Dozens of examples can be found on Wikipedia, “List of Cognitive Biases’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases. Accessed August 2019.

⁷⁹ Merlau-Ponty, (1962: 407) - See reference in Zahavi.

⁸⁰ See McKinley, C.A.S. (1996) When the enemy has our eyes, esp. pp. 30-35. https://spp.fas.org/eprint/mckinley.pdf

⁸¹ See for instance, Levinas, (1961).