What is Marketing? A technology of discipline that wants to render everything.

Marketing, according to traditional definitions, is a matter of discovering what consumer needs and wants are, anticipating how they are about to change, and then orientating the entire business outlook so that it directly responds to, and preempts, these needs and wants. This conventional understanding dominates the study of marketing.

There is nothing erroneous about approaching marketing in this way, however it may reduce the scope through which we understand what marketing is and the role it takes in our daily lives. Adopting this conventional approach assumes that we are managers in corporations, or are about to be managers, and we need to learn a series of practical techniques that will allow us to set about these tasks. However, if we step back from this urge to think of marketing as a practice for us to master, and instead ask what difference marketing makes to the world, what kind of lives we can lead when there is so much marketing logic, then the subject becomes more interesting and even more relevant.

Marketing, to be sure, is everywhere. To look at an urban street is to see advertisements, people wearing branded clothes, branded cars, shops that beckon us to go and purchase things. In this sense, marketing is like an oxygen that we are always breathing. As we breathe in marketing, we absorb marketing logic. Marketing, therefore, is not just outside of our bodies. Marketing is also, I argue, inside us and increasingly becomes not just something that we do, or that is done to us, but also something that we become. For example, we might think of ourselves as a type of brand that must survive in competitive markets, we would therefore want to invest in ourselves whether it be in the form of wearing good clothes so to stand out, investing in our education in the hope of further reward or exercising our bodies so to look attractive to prospective employers and lovers in the marketplace of daily life. Of course, we might have always have wanted to do these things; the point is that marketing gives us a new vocabulary for making sense of these tasks, a new sense of urgency and sense of risk as we pursue them, and a new grid of value as we order them as priorities.

Marketing is part of government too. Observe how, in the current British election, politicians seeking election must stay "on message" (reads as maintain a consistent brand narrative), engage in advertising and other forms of promotion. Knowing the political will of the nation is also a type of market research and those politicians who know their market best of all are promised the spoils.

Marketing, then, is everywhere and marketing is everything. Or, put more cautiously, marketing is something that is seeping its way everywhere and increasingly looking like the logic that underpins everything. Marketing, therefore, is a process of saturation. Marketing ought to be thought of as a technology. It is a technology because it is a tool that transforms and renders whatever it is applied to. Marketing, we might also say, is a process of disciplining. It tells us how to act, how to see the world and, just like any business that fails to maintain its customer focus, assures us that we will be punished for failing to cohere our practices and our bodies with the unforgiving logic of competition. Marketing, therefore, is the term that we give to the process through which we adapt ourselves and become rendered according to the so-called "reality of the marketplace". Marketing also determines our sense of time - if you ignore marketing and refuse to be disciplined, then you live in the past and for this you will suffer. Marketing, then, is a process through which we can catch up with time and, if we are very good at it, marketing will allow us to access the future and to shape it before our competitors get there. Consequentially, imagine marketing as a machine in which you input a variety of outdated ideas and concepts and then they come out the other side, in a new realm of time in which everything has become re-defined according to a different logic. Marketing is a technology that renders us; it is a technology that re-shapes and re-defines the meanings through which we understand the world and adjusts our sense of time.

As we study marketing in a university, we can observe how the university itself is actively re-shaped and re-imagined in marketing's image. Below are examples of traditional university terminology as they become rendered by the technology that is marketing:

Pre-Marketing Logic                           Post-Marketing Logic    
University                                            Brand
Student                                                Consumer
Education                                            Service Experience
Lecturer                                               Service Provider
Tuition Fees                                        Career Investment
Degree                                                 Career Asset
Student Social Events                           Networking Opportunity
Fellow Students                                   Competitors or Co-Producers
Student Presentations                            Corporate Pitches
Campus                                               Knowledge Hub
Research                                             Innovation
Intellect                                               Knowledge Worker
Subject Content                                    Transferable Skills
Study                                                   Employability Skills Investment
Alumni                                                Brand Community

Does this technology result in an improvement or dis-improvement of education? Is it desirable, or even possible, to step outside of the logic of marketing? What other terms become transformed by marketing technology?

MA Marketing Camp - 2014

ice

Research in a Globalised World: Possibilities for Postcolonial Thought and Practice

Friday November 21, 6:00 in Room 261 in Senate House

All Welcome

This event recognises that the field of marketing plays a significant role in the reproduction of neo-colonial power relations in the current world order. While business scholars have recently become more reflexive and critical of the ways that both theory and practice are implicated in the dissimination and entrenchment of market hegemony globally, postcolonial theory has yet to become a part of that critical assessment. Speakers and participants will reflect on the value of postcolonialism as a body of theory and a mode of political critique in order to enrich the studies into the subjects of interest to marketing scholarship, such as globalisation, modernity, cultural diversity, migration, ethnicity, etc. and also to interrogate some normative frameworks and approaches to research within the discipline. 

Keynote Speakers: Guliz Ger, Bilkent University, Turkey & Nirmal Puwar, Goldsmiths, University of London

Interlude provided by Foivos Dousos / F89, Royal Holloway

Panel Discussion chair: Alan Bradshaw

Discussants: Olga Kravets, William Large, Guliz Ger, Hara Kouki & Nirmal Puwar

For further information see https://www.facebook.com/events/565951580217776/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming

Details of previous camps can be found here: 2013, 2012, 2011. 2010 was on the topic of Marketing and Music (speakers were Adam Dorn, aka Mocean Worker, Gretchen Larsen, Robert Cluley) and 2009 was on the topic of Marketing and Advertising (speakers were Chris Hackley, Michael Sayeau and Finola Kerrigan). 

John Schouten's Lecture on Consumer Ethnography at Aalto University

Focussing on consumer culture entails developing alternative ways of not just understanding consumer behaviour but also ways of approaching questions of accessing consumers and getting to know consumer behaviour. Whilst the mainstream of marketing research fixates on lengthy questionnaires and focus groups, increased attention now attends alternative methods such as ethnography that draw from more diverse fields like anthropology. These alternative methods allow us to develop heightened awareness of how consumers are not just purchase decision-makers who can be influenced by strategic marketing communication, but are people who organise and give meaning to their daily practices, performances and rituals of consumption, be they mundane or extraordinary. These alternative methods can be thought of bringing colour to a subject that typically insists on black and white understandings.

John Schouten, of Aalto University in Finland, recently outlined how consumer ethnography functions in his excellent Inaugural (or as the Finns seem to call it Installation) Lecture. Professor Schouten's lecture helpfully introduces many of the core assumptions behind consumer ethnography but also reminds us that, at the heart of such inquiry, is recognition that consumers are people who are creative and fascinating. As he puts it, "there are no uninteresting people, only those who we haven't got to know" and so consumer ethnography, he explains, can be thought of as opening up "windows on ... really interesting places in people's lives". Schouten concludes "for me ethnography provides some of the elements of romance and discovery that make life interesting". Accordingly he says for him "science is one part fact finding, one part puzzle building, one part crusade and one part telling a good story".

At Royal Holloway we study John Schouten's ideas and encourage our students to develop their own consumer ethnographies for their dissertations and other projects that are conducted over the course of studies. More broadly we encourage students to invest creative energy into their studies and to discover that same spirit of romance and discovery.

Royal Holloway Faculty Discuss Research on Sustainable Consumption

Click here to follow the link. From the Centre for Research Into Sustainability at Royal Holloway

New MA Consumption, Culture and Marketing begins at Royal Holloway

Royal Holloway has welcomed 22 students from 10 different countries onto a new programme focusing on marketing, consumption, culture and society.

This interdisciplinary MA brings together teaching and scholarship in Marketing and Sociology. Students will study core courses in ‘Consumers and Brands’, ‘Sociology of Consumption’ and ‘Consumption Research Methods’. They will also choose from a range of elective courses including ‘Identities, Consumption and Difference’, ‘Children and Consumption’, ‘Marketing Communications’, ‘Marketing, Society and Technology’ and ‘Consumption, Markets and Cultures’.


The programme director, Dr Vicki Harman said: ‘We are delighted to welcome these new MA students to Royal Holloway. We hope they will enjoy taking a critical approach in order to examine the nature of consumption in society’.


Welcome events include a trip to the Museum of Brands in London.

Tony Pecotich Doctoral Consortium (39th Annual Macromarketing Conference, 2014) 

Chair: Olga Kravets, Alan Bradshaw, and Alexander Reppel 

This year's Doctoral Consortium presents a great line up of scholars, coming from diverse research and disciplinary backgrounds and at different stages in their academic careers, to discuss with doctoral candidates what has been, is now and is to be their macromarketing research. We aim to make this consortium open and participatory; each session will include short talks by the invited speakers as well as the participants' discussion (Q&A, reflections on own research, critical interventions, and such). We also introduce a roundtable session to give all participants an opportunity to debate if/how macromarketing can contribute to our understanding of the political-economic present and ponder over the value of & challenges to the macromarketing scholarship within the contemporary world. 

13:00-14:20

Macromarketing: the state-of-the-art

Terry Witkowski, Cliff Shultz, and Gene Laczniak

14:30-15:50

Markets, Societies, and Inequalities

Norah Campbell, Ali Jafari, and Eleftheria Lekakis

The intellectual and political stir around Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" with its 'groundbreaking' assertion that "capitalism produces inequality," has pushed "inequality" to the front pages of major publications and made it a matter of public debate. This session picks on this heightened public concern with the inequalities and reflects on the macromarketing inquiry in relation to the critically engaged research on inequalities, particularly the intersection of economic inequality and other systemic injustices, disadvantages, and marginalizations, produced, reinforced, and perpetuated in/by markets & marketing.

Tea/coffee break

16:15-17:30

Roundtable: Markets-in-Everything and Implications for the Commons

Track A: Marketisation of water, nature, spaces, etc. (led by Georgios Patsiaouras) 

Track B: Marketisation of information, knowledge, heritage, arts, etc. (led by Chloe Preece) 

The idea behind this session is to collectively bring to 'the table' (the marcromarketing agenda) and make discussable issues around current cases of marketisation & marketing, from the appropriation and trade in users’ personal data and indigenous know-how by social media & pharmaceutical companies to the struggles over sales of and access to water, shorelines, public infrastructure, & national heritage sites by communities around the world. This session is an opportunity to break out of our academic comfort zones and use popular debates as an opening to "provoke" critical thought and (future) research. 

17:40 - 19:00 

Macromarketing: ‘What is to be done?’ and other Critical Questions

Alan Bradshaw, James Fitchett, Sukhdev Johal, and Olga Kravets.  

19:00 -- Dinner (optional and at your own expense)

This workshop is FREE to attend. In order to apply, please contact Olga Kravets at kravets.olga@gmail.com

Bringing With Us the Plague

Faculti Media asked me to summarise a recent research paper, "Bringing with us the plague: Consumer Research as a Machinery of Zoomorphicism", published in the Journal of Marketing Management. Click through the Faculti Media logo below see: