Inside Marketing Practices, Ideologies, Devices

The intensification of marketing activities in recent years has led the public to become much more aware of its role as consumers. Yet, the increased visibility of marketing materials and associated messages in everyday life is in contrast with the often little understood inner workings of the marketing profession itself, despite the widespread recognition of marketers as key agents in shaping the face of global capitalism. Inside Marketing offers a theoretically informed critical perspective on contemporary marketing practice and its growing cultural, economic, and political influence worldwide. This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of business, history, economic sociology, and cultural anthropology, to analyse the inner workings and outer effects of marketing as a material social practice, an ideology, and a technique. Their work raises some important and timely questions. How has marketing transformed the pharmaceutical industry and what are the consequences for our lives? How does marketing influence the way we think of progress and modernity? How has marketing changed the way we think of childhood? And how does marketing appropriate the creativity of consumers for profit? This book offers scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners a theoretical and conceptual understanding of how marketing works as a cultural institution and as an ideology.

Introduction. Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices. Part I: Studying Marketing Differently. 1. Marketing as a Monstrosity: the Impossible Place Between Culture and Economy. 2. The Uses of Use Value: Marketing, Value Creation, and the Exigencies of Consumption Work. 3. alt,"Market-things insideagt,": Insights from Progressive Grocer (United States, 1929-1959). Part II: Marketing as Performance: Tools and Devices. 4. Convoking the Consumer in Person: The Focus Group Effect. 5. Marketing as Surveillance: Assembling Consumers as Brands. 6. Consumer Segmentation in Practice: An Ethnographic Account of Slippage. 7. The Making of the Sensuous Consumer. Part III: The Political Economy of Marketing Practice. 8. Modeling Blackness in Civil Rights America. 9. Customer Co-Production from Social Factory to Brand: Learning from Italian Fashion. 10. Flipping the Neighbourhood: Biopolitical Marketing as Value Creation for Condos and Lofts. Part IV: The Diffusion of Marketing Ideology and its Effects. 11. Commercial Epistemologies of Childhood: 'Fun' and the Leveraging of Children's Subjectivities and Desires. 12. Broadening the Marketing Concept: Service to Humanity, or Privatization of the Public Good?. 13. Neoliberal Experiments: Social Marketing and the Governance of Populations. 14. Mapping the Future of Consumers. Part V: Afterword. The Marketing Reformation Redux.

Detlev Zwick is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. Before coming to Schulich, he was a visiting scholar at Aalborg University in Denmark and a visiting professor at American University in Washington, DC. His research on the cultural politics of marketing and consumption practices has been published widely in marketing, communication, media culture, and sociology journals, as well as in several edited collections. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Rhode Island. Julien Cayla is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian School of Business (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) and a Visiting Associate Professor at Euromed Management (Marseille, France). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, where he majored in marketing and minored in cultural anthropology. His dissertation examined the way companies learn about culture in the context of their interactions with advertising agencies. This work received the prestigious Alden Clayton Prize, as well as the Sheth Foundation Prize. In his research, he draws on anthropological theories and methodologies to study global marketing issues. His research on global marketing has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of International Marketing, the Handbook of International Marketing and Advertising, and Society Review.

The enduring contrast between the pervasive presence of marketing and the lack of empirical studies on its tools and practices has prevented us from understanding its effects on society. Inside Marketing fills the gap. Because they chose to follow marketers at work, contributors of this book show us how societies are ineluctably transformed into market societies and ordinary citizens into insatiable consumers. A must-read for anyone who worries about our future.