Marketing in the Republic (part 2 - The Podcast)

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).