An Analysis of the Fundamentals of Marketing (part 8)

Critical and Postmodern Approaches to Marketing 

by

Charles Lamson

Over the years, marketing has not been without its critics. Some of these are within the discipline of marketing and some are outside. From within, Hayes and Abernathy (1980) can challenge the view that the adoption of the marketing concept can improve the competitiveness of organizations. On the basis of empirical evidence, they have suggested that the implementation actually has undermined competitiveness.

Critics of marketing from outside the discipline include the influential economist J.K. Galbraith (1967), who argued that the marketing concept is nothing more than propaganda because its central argument, that business is responsive to the expressed needs and wants of customers is patently false. Instead Galbraith argued for what he called the revised sequence, the idea that big business is responsive to the expressed needs and wants of customers, is prudently false. Instead Galbraith argued for what he called the revised sequence, the idea that big business creates and manipulates demand. In this view the 'accepted sequence' encapsulates consumer sovereignty and the marketing concept; that all needs start with consumers; that the expression of such needs sends signals to producers who respond to this message of the market and the instructions of the consumer. the revised sequence in contrast refers to the reality asserted by Galbraith whereby producers condition the creation and satisfaction of needs and wants in the interests of the managerial elite. Advertising is especially important to the managerial elite as there is a need to create a ready market for the goods on offer. In response to the riposte that much advertising is informational, Galbraith sardonically replies, 'Only a gravely retarded person would need to be told that the American Tobacco Company has cigarettes for sale.' In Galbraith's view, the very idea of homo economicus acts as a powerful protection for the technostructure which hides behind the rhetoric of the sovereign individual as a cover for its wholesale manipulation of the market place. Others have built on this argument to argue that marketing plays an idealogical role in society by suggesting that everyone is equally free to buy goods, marketing masks the lack of freedom and existence of gross inequalities in society (Marcuse, 1964). Similar views have been expressed by academics working inside the marketing discipline (Brownlie and Saren, 1992).

Postmodern academics argue that there is no one true or authentic marketing approach but rather a range of different but equally valid perspectives. Postmodernism developed as a tendency in the arts, and more recently in the social sciences, which reflects upon, attacks and ironizes modern thought. Modernism is that set of ideas which developed during the European Enlightenment and which came to be embodied in concepts such as 'progress' and 'scientific rationality'. Postmodernism is a reaction against modernism to the extent that postmodernists do not believe that society gets progressively better through history, nor do they believe that science will provide such progress. They argue that modernist tendencies to believe that science can uncover deep structures of meaning are subverted by appearances and so they lend great credence to appearances. Postmodernists also attack the dualisms implicit in Enlightenment thinking, for instance between 'mind' and 'body' or 'male' and 'female' which traditionally elevate one term (the 'mind' over the 'body' or 'male' over the 'female') over the other. Postmodernism is concerned with deconstructing or dismantling such stable binary schemes of meaning and substituting a whole plethora of differences in their place. Put simply, postmodernism is concerned with challenging and undermining oppositions which many people take to be 'natural' and in demonstrating that these are cultural artifacts.

Postmodern marketing comes in a whole range of guises usually involving the use of irony, 'playfulness', critique and pastiche often rolled together into a seamless web. It is difficult to discuss postmodern marketing, not least because some of those who are labelled 'postmodern' do not subscribe to that view themselves. Brown (1995, 1998) adopts a joyful and ironic posture in criticizing gurus such as Ansoff, Kotler and Levitt, who are held high in the marketing pantheon. In upcoming posts, Brown attacks the totalizing tendencies of the subject and some of the 'mainstream's' most cherished assumptions.

*SOURCE: FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING, 2007, MARILYN A. STONE AND JOHN DRESMOND, PGS. 38-40*

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