Ideology for the 10 Billion

A Global Sweep

Demographers believe that at some point past mid-century, the population of our planet will reach a steady state of nearly 10 billion people (Cohen 2003; Lutz and Samir 2010). Regardless of color or creed, a translucent ideological veneer is spreading and enveloping the globe and would shape the minds and acts of the 10-billion humans on the planet. This is the veneer of marketing-think and marketing-speak, with origins in our academic discipline but now permeating rapidly into many social science disciplines (see, e.g., Lury 2009; Nickolai, Hoffman, and Trautner 2012).

For the last three decades, marketing ideology has proliferated. Ideas of “marketization” and “consumerization” have swept across political–economic landscapes, protests of Nobel Laureate economists notwithstanding (Krugman 2011). Such ideas have also silently and surreptitiously seeped into the substrates of daily life, popular culture, personal relationships, and even individual psyches (see, e.g., Greenwald 2010). As several authors in this special issue note, the preferred and prominent conceptual container of the new millennium that remixes, flavors, and widely disseminates the ideas of marketing and consumer desire is that of the “brand” (Kornberger 2010). Perhaps the recent economic crisis in the West signals the collapse of the neoliberal economic order and offers the biggest challenge to the spread of marketing ideology (Birch and Mykhnenko 2010). However, even in its current contested form, the global spread of marketing remains a powerful vector in the world around us.

Indeed, one of the most pervasive forms of globalization in the past three decades is the globalization of the socioorganizational concept of “marketing.” More than the idea of finance—whose globalization is visible mainly in the large financial centers—the idea of marketing has seeped into everyday discourses in all corners of the world. While the globalization of markets and business practices are studied widely, the focus of this special issue is to step back and look at the fundamental processes at work in the globalization of the very idea of marketing. This idea has permeated all global contexts—including those that appear to be outside the ambit of capitalist business.

What is Happening and Why?

Appeals to broaden the concepts and tools of marketing to spheres far beyond commercial ones were launched in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Kotler and Levy 1969; Kotler and Zaltman 1971). The intention behind such appeals was to bring the benefits of rational and systematic marketing planning as well as responsive, caring service to noncommercial fields. Historically, such fields tended to be bureaucratically managed but had just started to view their served constituencies in consumerist terms. In terms of popularizing marketing practices in the noncommercial world as well as in terms of academic marketing research work in noncommercial settings, such moves succeeded far beyond the expectations of scholars who initiated them (Fox and Kotler 1980).

What these pioneering scholars probably did not foresee is the tsunami of neoliberal ideology that was to follow. The relatively minor (in comparison to the massiveness of multiple decades of sociopolitical change—see Hacker and Pierson 2010) attempts by marketing practitioners and scholars to spread marketing ideas to noncommercial fields were folded in, indeed were engulfed by, the sweeping tsunami of neoliberal “reforms” (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). Marketization and consumerization no longer just remained “nice, rational, alternative” ways to add some humane elements to the stiflingly bureaucratic ways of operation of many organizations. Marketization and consumerization turned into imperatives of the ascendant neoliberalism, with punitive consequences inflicted on those who refused to fall in line. Conway and Heynen (2006) are trenchant in their critique:

No one, and especially no one running for political election or vying for brand impact, likes an idea or ideology that “disciplines, destroys, dehumanizes and destabilizes.” While the core impulses of neoliberalism are economic–financial, large and powerful institutions—the state, corporations, and noncommercial organizations—usually feel the need to put a softer, humane-appearing veneer on the hard, harsh, efficiency-seeking, ambiguity-intolerant juggernaut of neoliberal strategies and actions. Harvey (2005) has argued that there was a need to legitimize and disguise the limitations of neoliberalism as it failed to replicate the growth rates of the 1960s or the golden age of Keynesianism in much of the West. This is where the concepts of marketing come in handy. Starting in the late 1950s and particularly from the early 1980s, the practice and theories of marketing have striven to reshape marketing ideas and actions into soft, pleasant molds of customer focus, consumer orientation, market orientation, and even customer intimacy or relationship. The ideas from marketing provide the pleasing, silken swaths in which to swaddle the unflinchingly harsh financial–economic ideas of neoliberalism. Bedecked in the floral metaphors that marketing and branding provide, the advancing neoliberal behemoths look less like threatening army tanks and more like delighting Rose Bowl parade floats. Marketing theories and practices often provide a soothing layer of fantasy to hard-edged neoliberal agendas. And as Zizek (1989, 45) observes, “ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself.”

Marketing veneers provide legitimacy to neoliberal acts but they lead to “consumerization” of the target constituencies of the large institutions. The consumer role, unfortunately, is crassly transactional—the role image is not noble or lofty. Fields such as advertising and market research that are affiliated with the marketing profession have employed additional legitimizing logics that increase the centrality as well as (apparent) nobility of the consumer role. These affiliated fields realized by the mid-twentieth century that the democratic citizenship role—with a history going back to the enlightenment—had an unshakeable, built-in legitimacy. Leading members of advertising and market research fields worked assiduously to build equivalence between the consumer role and the citizen-voter role. Schwarzkopf (2011) writes:

Of course, such practices and philosophies aim at a “false fusing”—in reality, a deliberate confounding—of the equivocal consumer role and the well-established, rooted, legitimate citizen-voter role to create a mythical consumer-citizen role (the consumers vote with their feet and their wallets), a role that is more likeable (or at least more acceptable) than the crassly transactional consumer role. Indeed, the legitimizing qualities of deeply appealing and ennobling public notions of “democracy” and “citizenship” are being constantly foisted upon the transactional, usually private, and highly instrumental activities of the marketplace (Jubas 2007).

There is little that the consumer—as an individual or as a member of the household—can do to counter the intense demands of the ascendant consumer culture. We swim in the sea of commercial culture—and although the range of available anticonsumption, resistive strategies is growing—the analysis and interpretations of the roots of the phenomena discussed here must be sought at systemic, macro levels. This special issue launches such research explorations.

The Canvas of this Special Issue

Whenever there are variations in ideas, leanings, and inclinations, discussions of ideology become difficult. This is very evident, for example, in the electoral politics of the United States where sides with opposing ideas simply shut out communications from their opponents. Discussions of ideology of marketing are particularly arduous because the methods of marketing are often used to advance the preferred ideologies in various spheres such as politics, science, and art. The challenge is a reflexive one, similar to the one inherent in the phrase “Physician, heal thyself.”

In this special issue, this reflexive challenge is picked up by researchers who bring a range of longitudinal as well as geographical experiences and expertise to the task of examining ideological aspects of marketing. There are three competitively selected articles—by Martin Fougère and Per Skålén; by Sofie Bjerrisgaard and Dannie Kjeldgaard; and by Janice Denegri-Knott, Terrence Witkowski and Gina Pipoli. For the last article, since this journal’s editor is part of the author team, we used a separate review process—outside of Manuscript Central—to avoid conflicts of interest.

As special issue editors, we also invited four commentaries that were also subject to a review process. These are by Sidney J. Levy and Marius Luedicke, by Carolina Bandinelli and Adam Arvidsson, by Douglas Brownlie, and by A. Fuat Firat. These four essays are also included in the special issue.

Preview of the Articles

Fougère and Skålén draw on the notion of customerism (forceful organizational centralizing of customer needs and demands), a term that has been used previously, to “. . . differentiate . . . [their] analysis from mainstream marketing—which sees marketing as a neutral science—and put the emphasis on the power effects of marketing ideology in terms of subjectification of organizational members.” Their focus is on “how marketing ideology subjectifies marketers.” Fougère and Skålén view established theories and practice-prescriptions in the areas of sales management, marketing management, and services marketing through a multifaceted prism of power, based on the works of Michel Foucault. For each field of marketing theory/practice, Fougère and Skålén find that disciplinary power or pastoral power or an interplay of these types of power shaped/reshaped organizational practices and actors so that the centrality of the customer became an unquestioned tenet. With increasingly sophisticated interplay of power/knowledge, the coercive elements disappeared and organizational actors came to develop unshakeable, universalistic beliefs in customer-centrality—indeed they felt empowered as employees by subscribing to such universalistic (naturalistic) beliefs.

Fougère and Skålén are aware of Foucault’s (1972) rejection of the unifying principle of a discourse and his emphasis on dispersion in a discursive formation. Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 106-7) have insightfully suggested that although, “no discursive formation is a sutured reality and the transformation of the elements into moments is never complete,” hegemonic outcomes are possible. As power processes recede from view, and even from consciousness, there is a loss of reflexivity: the customerized ways of thinking and doing come to be regarded as timeless, natural, universal. Such loss of reflexivity is obviously problematic—precepts and practices become uncritical and may begin to do more harm than good. Fougère and Skålén therefore conclude that it “is important to encourage empirical research on marketing that can break free from the powerful grip of marketing’s customeristic normativity and ideology.”

In their study focusing on the increasing ecoconsciousness of the Danish chocolate maker Anthon Berg, Bjerrisgaard, and Kjeldgaard apply the Foucauldian notion of governmentality to the spatial configuration of markets and explore how global–local notions of spatiality are shaped through practices of global market research. Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard note that the “notion of performativity suggests that marketing research practices are not only descriptive or normative but also creative, in that they engage in processes of creating the reality they were set out to present.” The interplay of marketplace actors and marketing techniques creates the observed reality, and therefore the focus of this article “is on how various ideological representations of the market—most notably the myth of the global market—produce certain effects on the way in which market spaces materialize and simultaneously draw the contours of ideal organizational and consumer subjectivities.” Like Fougère and Skålén, Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard also employ a Foucauldian perspective, in this case of governmentality, to explore “how representations of glocal markets create specific interventions in the form of marketing tactics that subsequently have performative consequences for inter- and intra-organizational as well as consumer subject positions.” Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard provide an insight into the SignBank technique for visualization and interpretation of signs developed by global advertising agency DDB. They discuss how this technique can be used to link local and global signs and narratives and show the way such linking was done in the case of chocolate maker Anthon Berg. In the end, Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard find that the global/local ideological representations—very important to contemporary marketers—are not so much the result of tangible flows across national boundaries but of ideational flows across organizational boundaries. They conclude that “the formation of market mythologies takes place in deterritorialized transnational advertising practices and governs the marketing decisions of agency clients.”

Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard look at symbolic marketing processes connecting ideas about European chocolate consumers and ideas about primary cocoa producers in Africa—facilitated by idea processors and transmitters located in Asia or the Americas. Denegri-Knott, Witkowski, and Pipoli are interested in the knowledge flows in the field of marketing, linking advanced nations like the United States and the United Kingdom and the developing nation of Peru. In previous work, casting a subaltern gaze on the oft-unquestioned spread of marketing ideas, in practice and in academic work, some marketing scholars have positioned their research in postcolonial frames, such as writings by Varman and associates focusing on India (Varman and Saha 2009; Varman and Belk 2009). Denegri-Knott, Witkowski, and Pipoli cast an alternative gaze on how elements of marketing knowledge, particularly academic ideas, move from the advanced to developing worlds. In the context of Peru, these authors find processes of hybridization at play: marketing concepts of advanced nations intermix with those from Peru and, in some cases, local concepts emerge as more apt and popular than imported ones. Denegri-Knott, Witkowski, and Pipoli provide illustrations of translation, alteration, layering, mixing, subverting, and inventing of ideas about marketing strategies and practices through multiple empirical lenses trained on Peru: observing textbooks and lecture formats, exploring forms of marketing pedagogy, and focusing on marketing practices—especially those pertaining to the marketing of chicha music. The authors come to a view of hybridization that goes beyond that of simple interlayering and pastiche making, using global–local cultural elements:

Denegri-Knott, Witkowski, and Pipoli find, through the observed processes of hybridization, an emerging “Peruvian way” that is neither a pale and imitative image of the American marketing ideas nor a mystical and spiritual approach that is completely indigenous. Of course, such a view of hybridization is an important trope in postcolonial theory. According to Bhabha (1994, 160) hybridity in postcoloniality is characterized by “strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power.” Such views of hybridization occur also in other writings on marketing practices focusing on developing nations, even from India (see Bijapurkar 2007).

The previews so far have focused on the three competitively reviewed and selected articles. We turn now to four commentary pieces that were invited, subjected to reviews, and then revised for inclusion in this special issue. These reflective pieces add variety, add historical depth, and raise new questions concerning marketing and ideology.

The work of Sidney J. Levy has iconic associations not only with the use of signs and symbols in marketing processes (e.g., Levy 1959) but also with stage-setting writing (e.g., Kotler and Levy 1969) on which expansionary structures of marketing ideas were built from 1970 onward. It is therefore gratifying to include in this special issue a commentary by Sidney J. Levy coauthored with Marius K. Luedicke. Levy and Luedicke focus on the ideologies of marketing, that is, on ideologies observable in marketing activities and writings as they evolved over the course of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, and to the midpoint of the century, the ideology of marketing was driven primarily by imperatives of achieving efficiency (often in terms of lower costs) and efficacy (usually in terms of physical distributive reach) in the production and distribution of goods, in the growing economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan. In the first half of the twentieth century, while the sophistication of retail merchandising and advertising practices—symbolic practices—was growing, the marketers could be seen to be in a “service orientation . . . primarily facilitators and providers, executing a quartermaster function for society . . . marketing ideology seemed centered on the marketers’ noble pursuit of supplying . . . consumers with that they needed and wanted. Practitioners and scholars thus focused on improving the ability to produce goods beyond the level of subsistence, to make them available for exchange, to profit from the division of labor and its competitive advantage, and to use the new equipment for communication and distribution.” The second part of twentieth century saw two important dimensions added to the ideology of marketing—customer orientation and refined symbolic branding strategies. Functional aspects of marketing receded to lower, bedrock levels and symbolic aspects came to the top. Competition was rising (indeed becoming global) and the managed brand, with laser-like customer focus, became an essential part of marketing at leading corporations. As the twentieth century ended and the new millennium commenced, brand concepts gained tremendous symbolic and technological sophistication and spilled over widely across the globe and across sectors that were not commercial.

Carolina Bandinelli and Adam Arvidsson, somewhat along the lines of the opening paragraphs of this introductory essay, see a widening and deepening (spreading and seeping) impact of marketing on all aspects of life. They claim that the widening global spread of branded marketing is now complete—even street vendors in Bangkok have brand names. Beyond this totalized global spread, they go on to say . . .

They invoke the branded, trademarked term changemaker of Ashoka Foundation—a nonprofit organization promoting social entrepreneurship—and find that the idea of every (ambitious) person being a changemaker is spreading rapidly. For such folks, being and branding—or we could say (self) marketing and existing—are one and the same. Intense subjectivities come into play—often transforming the individual self takes up so much time and effort that transforming the society (the goal of the changemaker) takes a distant back seat. With proliferating changemakers, a “reputation economy” takes shape. Money flows into some changemaker coffers in the form of “impact investments.” Ironically, the rubric of admired, impactful change lies no longer in the transformation of the target social phenomenon but in the amount of money that flows in. Cognizant of, yet disturbed by, this state of affairs, Bandinelli and Arvidsson end with a plea for a more immanent measure of the impact of change-making activities.

The commentary by Douglas Brownlie taps into the ideological elements of practices that rarely get discussed in academic journals—the practices by which knowledge products of marketing, especially journal articles, are given legitimacy and “light of the day.” These are of course the reviewing and editorial practices. In Brownlie’s view, the entrenched ritualism and purported anonymous nature of the reviewing process basically shut out “the disciplinary space for the practice of reflexivity” in published research. In humanities and some social sciences, books are valued intellectual outputs and such processes are not opaque—the reviewing occurs after the publication of the book and is not anonymous. For greater reflexivity, marketing and managerial academic practices need to start treating books more seriously as intellectual outputs.

A. Fuat Firat echoes the concerns of some of the other contributors about the seemingly unstoppable rise of marketing and the ascendance of the consumer role in all aspects of our lifeworlds. Reviewing developments since the late industrial revolution, Firat writes:

Concluding Comments

Debates on the ideologies of marketing are commonplace. They mostly happen, however, in settings different from this journal—in social science and humanities disciplines (see, e.g., Aronczyk and Powers 2010), at coffee breaks at academic conferences, and in popular intellectual media (see, e.g., Sandel 2012). Given the very instrumental goals of the marketing discipline, there is little room given to discussions of marketing ideology in the academic journals of the field (for exceptions, see Brownlie and Saren 1995).

As the articles in this special issue show, ideology is not only a social category but also an intensely personal one. In the contributions represented here, for example, the treatment of ideologies falls in various genres: ideologies of marketing (Levy and Luedicke), marketing as ideology (Fougère and Skålén; Denegri-Knott, Witkowski, and Pipoli; Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard), and ideology as marketing (Bandinelli and Arvidsson, Brownlie, and Firat). The underlying personal dimension reflects how strongly an author feels about ideology in general. No matter what the intensity of feelings about ideology of the authors represented here, however, this special issue has created a collection of works that places ideology far more centrally in the discourses of marketing than earlier literature.

The issues underlying debates and discussions of marketing and ideology have become so central to contemporary life that, while special issues in specialized disciplinary journals such as this one are valuable, there is a need to move such discourses forcefully to the center stages of politics, economics, and moral philosophies. We conclude, therefore, with these words and questions from philosopher Michael J. Sandel (2012) penned in The Atlantic magazine: