Marketing theory and critique

Introduction

Marketing Theory began its life at a moment that was still fundamentally shaped by optimism about globalisation and an apparent stability of the liberal order. The conditions in which marketing and consumer culture are embedded have changed profoundly in the preceding decades. Economic crisis, digital transformation, and ecological breakdown have all contributed to an unsettling of widely held assumptions about markets, consumers, and the role of marketing. What has unfolded is not merely an expansion of the reach of marketing but a radical transformation in its scope and consequences. This includes the incorporation of millions of new consumers into global markets, the rise of China and India as consumer superpowers to challenge American and European hegemony, the consolidation of Big Tech into infrastructures of attention and desire, and the spread of consumer ideologies through the digital networks that now touch most of humanity. The development of critical marketing scholarship has accompanied these developments by providing a counterpoint to the more celebratory and progressive accounts. Rather than naturalising consumption as a universal condition, critical work has sought to highlight its exclusions, contradictions, and consequences by questioning the cultural, ideological, and political work of marketing.

Marketing critique

Marketing Theory offers a site where critical perspectives can be articulated and experimented with, alongside, and often in opposition to, more mainstream approaches. Rather than accepting consumers, markets and managerial practices as self-evident categories, these contributions interrogate their ideological construction and political consequences. They retain a consistent scepticism toward the universal claims of marketing and management while continuing to expand in theoretical breadth and methodological confidence.

By the early 2000s, the appetite for sustained critical engagement was growing and Marketing Theory provided a distinctive space where these voices could coalesce. From its conception, critical contributions were not merely marginal additions but equal partners in shaping its scholarly debate by showcasing and developing recurring themes that highlighted the pathologies (Fitchett, 2002), ideologies (Marion, 2006; O’Reilly, 2006), and subjectivities (Miles, 2004) of lives under capitalism. Early papers in Marketing Theory saw a cluster of contributions that established critical approaches as a recognisable strand within the journal. Burton (2002) articulated the possibility of a critical multicultural marketing theory, while Hill (2002) situated marketing within the cultures of poverty. Holbrook (2001) staged an aesthetic critique of the entertainment economy, casting consumption as a site of both alienation and pleasure. By mobilising the critical imagination, these kinds of approaches demonstrated how marketing could be interrogated not only as a set of managerial techniques but as a coherent symbolic and ideological apparatus. Critical approaches have since diversified in both style and subject matter with writers seeking to challenge the epistemic boundaries of marketing scholarship (Canniford, 2012; Rojas-Gaviria, 2021), while also deepening ideological interrogations of the structural contradictions in the neoliberal promise of autonomy through consumption (Carrington et al., 2015). Work throughout the 2010s consolidated a dialogue about Consumer Culture Theory with a sharper political edge (Askegaard and Scott, 2013). Cova et al. (2013) argued that CCT research which was gradually transforming into a kind of normal science, needed to move decisively beyond celebration towards a politics of consumption (Coskuner-Balli, 2013). More recently, marketing critique has turned its attention toward digital capitalism and algorithmic governance (Pellandini-Simányi, 2023). Coffin (2021) theorises “machines driving machines” to conceptualise algorithmic marketing as a machinic unconscious. Ahlberg et al. (2022) advance the notion of Terminal Marketing, diagnosing consumer exhaustion under conditions of pervasive digital commodification, and Bradshaw (2023) broadens the agenda further to encompass financialisation and the interrogation of the moral economy of money and debt.

These contributions demonstrate how the approach adapted its analytic repertoire to the shifting conditions of capitalism from cultural critique and ideology to include the body, the psyche, and platform capitalism. What persists is a commitment to making visible the exclusions, contradictions, and violence (Carrington, 2022; McVey et al., 2024; Varman and Vijay, 2018) of marketing and its various outer projections, as well as the interrogation of inner tyrannies through psychoanalytic (Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Nixon and Gabriel, 2015) and embodied analyses, which come together in critiques of digital capitalism (Lambert, 2018; Lambert et al., 2023). Marketing Theory plays a vital role in sustaining the possibility of marketing research as critique, creating the conditions for marketing to be treated as the object of interrogation rather than a project to be defended or a set of institutions and histories to be naturalised.

A consistent and powerful illustration of this theoretical questioning can be traced through a growing commitment to postcolonial and decolonial contributions, with markets and consumption being read through the lens of colonial legacies and subaltern struggles. Early interventions by Varman and Belk (2008) examine how subaltern consumers in India are simultaneously drawn into consumer modernity and depoliticised through its spectacle. More recent work by Arcoverde Moreira et al. (2025) interogates how the racialized self emerges through discursive acts of value construction, where identification, mutual support, and affective atmospheres of (dis)comfort shape Black women’s negotiated positions. What emerges is an ambivalent picture: consumption can open spaces for aspiration and dignity, but always under conditions shaped by (neo)colonial and neoliberal power.

The future of marketing critique, if it is to have one at all, will be determined by its capacity to engage emergent formations of power that stretch beyond earlier preoccupations with ideology, culture and subjectivity. Yet, the task of critique is increasingly precarious. Critical scholarship remains marginal within marketing, and within the business school it is undermined by the fetishisation of instrumentalism and the relentless pursuit of impact and metrics. These are not neutral developments but strategies through which neoliberal managerialism displaces oppositional scholarship, reducing critique to a non-threatening gesture (Brown, 2015). Such pressures are often exercised through the subtle, grinding methods of audit culture and performance measurement, yet they are also becoming more overt. In some settings, most notably in the United States, large parts of the social sciences have recently been subjected to systematic disinvestment, often to populist applause, signalling that the marginalisation of critique is not incidental but part of a broader cultural politics that seeks to delegitimate oppositional voices. While such developments are deeply unsettling for the affected communities, they also underscore the relative privilege long enjoyed by many academics, and suggest the importance of learning from scholars elsewhere in the world who have lived for decades with censorship, restrictions on academic freedom, and state oversight. Capitalism has always been adept at absorbing and redirecting critique, transforming it into a mechanism of renewal rather than disruption. Against this backdrop, critical theory itself risks appearing esoteric and increasingly judged as out of step with contemporary concerns (Felski, 2015). Yet, critically minded marketing academics have long negotiated these contradictions by cultivating pragmatic strategies of translation, aligning their perspectives with institutional demands for innovation while sustaining spaces where critique remains unsettling.

Consumer wellbeing

While mainstream marketing research has often assumed wellbeing as a downstream outcome of consumer choice or managerial intervention, contributions to Marketing Theory have consistently sought to problematise this to emphasise the exclusion, contradiction, and ambivalence that characterise the lives of many consumers. The early 2000s saw some of the foundational moves in this tradition by locating marketing within structures of deprivation, and making visible how consumer systems often exacerbate social and economic exclusion rather than remedying it. Several contributions challenge celebratory discourses of consumer sovereignty, showing instead how consumer cultures often trade on pain, cruelty, and symbolic violence, which is often dependent on conflicted consumer complicities (Cluley, 2015, Salzer-Mörling and Strannegård, 2007). These interventions exemplify a diagnostic critical stance that characterised much of the early wellbeing literature to call out how marketing is intricately implicated in systemic harm, marking out wellbeing and care (Shaw et al., 2017) as legitimate objects of theoretical reflection.

The 2010s saw the discourse consolidate and diversify, with a marked increase in contributions that combined diagnostic critique with more explicit normative commitments. The treatment of wellbeing has become more theoretically expansive, broadening into a frame that incorporates aesthetics, guilt, responsibility, and embodied vulnerability. Wellbeing scholarship seems to becoming confidently and explicitly normative, interrogating not only the consequences of markets for wellbeing but also the ideological regimes that redefine wellbeing as a matter of individual responsibility and digital endurance. Marketing continues to trade on happiness, satisfaction, and fulfilment, yet these promises are persistently undermined by contradictions of inequality, exclusion, and commodification. Wellbeing scholarship has consistently exposed these contradictions, insisting that the consumer is not merely a beneficiary of markets but also a subject whose welfare is shaped and often undermined. In this sense, the commitment to understanding wellbeing exemplifies the broader ethos of critical marketing. It does not take markets at their word, nor does it accept wellbeing as a simple outcome of idealised representations of consumer choice. Instead, it interrogates the aesthetic, embodied, and digital structures through which wellbeing is constrained and contested. What emerges is an evolving conversation that continually re-examines what it means to live well as a consumer, and whether (and how) marketing makes this more possible, or less so.

The future of studies into consumer wellbeing are likely to be shaped by ecological, technological, and ontological pressures that destabilise the categories through which marketing has understood the consumer, as well as questions regarding rights, responsibility and market access which are likely to remain stratified, racialised and unequal. Eco-anxiety and ecological grief already register the affective costs of ecological crisis, signalling that wellbeing must continue to be reconceived beyond the frame of individual choice (Vicdan et al., 2025). The growing presence of routine AI in everyday life is displacing agency from human subjects toward algorithmic systems, raising questions about precarity, autonomy, recognition, and the erosion of choice (Schwarz, 2025). Consumers may be compelled to cultivate flexibility and entrepreneurial adaptability in navigating these emerging conditions, yet the centrality of consumption to identity may itself be hollowed out by algorithmic infrastructures (Ruckenstein, 2023) taking the field towards a horizon in which wellbeing is no longer exclusively human but situated in multispecies and machinic assemblages and demanding precautionary ethics across life and nonlife (Birch, 2024).

Writing the histories of marketing

Marketing Theory creates a space where historical reflection is not simply a matter of chronicling great thinkers or canonical ideas, but a critical practice concerned with exposing the conditions that underpin marketing as both institution and discourse. Research through the 1980s and 1990s laid the groundwork by treating marketing history as an intellectual project of critique rather than only as documentary practice, and Marketing Theory remains a natural home for these retrospectives. These interventions question the self-evident appearance of marketing categories to diagnose the ways in which “markets” and “consumers” are discursively constructed (Tadajewski and Jones, 2020). Rather than positioning marketing history as a teleological march of progress, it opens up the possibility that histories of marketing could themselves be treated as ideological artefacts.

The late 2000s and early 2010s consolidated this momentum, embedding historical reflection within the growing field of Consumer Culture Theory. Askegaard and Linnet (2011) advanced an epistemology of CCT that traced its intellectual genealogy while foregrounding its historical entanglements with neoliberalism. Askegaard and Scott’s (2013) Reflections on Consumer Culture Theory foregrounds the paradox that historical narratives within consumer research often reproduce the same logics they ostensibly claim to critique. This illustrates how historical approaches are deployed not simply to contextualise marketing thought, but to reveal its complicity within broader structures of power, extend historical analysis into areas such as cultural memory, affect, and temporality, and broadening the scope of what a history of marketing thought can mean.

Adewoye et al. (2023) advance a critical account of Africapitalism, framing it as an historical project of marketisation that entwines philanthropy, development, and neoliberal ideology. By situating African economic imaginaries within both colonial legacies and contemporary neoliberal structures, they show how historical reflection can provincialise Eurocentric narratives of marketing thought and open up dialogue for alternative epistemologies to emerge (Jafari et al., 2012). These moves signal a broadening of the critical-historical horizon, connecting the genealogy of marketing ideas with questions about global inequality and epistemic justice. Contributors to Marketing Theory have consistently sought to interrogate, complicate, and relativise the history of marketing thought, insisting that it remains a contingent, constructed, and contested phenomenon open to ongoing revaluation (Delbaere and Slobodzian, 2018). What evolves, however, is the register and orientation of historical critique. The early focus on destabilising linear narratives has given way to richer and more diverse analyses of practices and epistemologies, which have then expanded into cultural and affective histories of consumption and more postcolonial critique.

Methodological reflexivity and critical theorising

Marketing Theory is a site where questions of method and epistemology are not treated merely as technical matters but core sites of critique and innovation. Methodological debate has consistently underpinned this critical orientation, evolving from early reflections on reflexivity (Gummesson, 2001), into epistemological debates within Consumer Culture Theory (Earley, 2013), and more recently toward posthumanist and machinic approaches. This trajectory illustrates how Marketing Theory has been an important place for researchers committed to keeping methodological reflexivity and plurality at the heart of marketing scholarship.

During the 1990s, marketing researchers began to grapple with the problem of reflexivity in more systermatic ways. Consumers could no longer be treated as stable objects of research but as reflexive agents embedded in interpretive systems. These early interventions paved the way for more radical reconfigurations of methods in the following decades. In the early 2000s, methodological debate expanded decisively through the influence of Actor Network Theory and practice-based approaches. Araujo (2007) challenged static understandings of markets, emphasising instead their continual enactment through practices, tools, and discourses. This perspective was developed further in the special issue on Market Practices and Forms (Araujo et al., 2008), and revealed contestation among and between supporters of different ambitions for the critical tradition by offering what is essentially a critical descriptive orientation that questions both abstract theorisation and managerialist instrumentalism.

By the 2010s, methodological questions in Marketing Theory were increasingly framed through the consideration and critique of CCT which had become a prominent intellectual strand and was well on the way to become normal science. Bajde (2013) engaged ANT to broaden CCT’s methodological imagination, emphasising the networks of power and materialities that shape consumption (Hill et al., 2014). These interventions consolidated the epistemological edge of critical marketing by demonstrating that methodology is always also an ideological choice. Axiomatic categories of the ‘market’ and ‘consumer’ are contingent on methodological presuppositions, and their theorisation need not be grounded in the conventions and assumptions of agentic subjects (Cochoy, 2008). In the 2020s, methodological debate has moved decisively toward posthumanist and machinic perspectives, highlighting the challenges these pose to research practices.

Marketing Theory continues to position itself as a space where the conceptual foundations of marketing can be rethought through engagements with philosophy and theory. Rather than treating theory as an ancillary tool, contributions frequently turn outward to borrow, translate, and sometimes contest ideas across the social sciences. This intellectual orientation has generated a distinctive pattern whereby theory is not simply applied to marketing phenomena but mobilised to interrogate the very categories of marketing itself. Rather than treating marketing theories and frameworks as progressive milestones in an accumulative science, they are exposed as discursive projects struggling for ascendancy. Patterson et al. (2008) frame the discipline’s tendency to embrace emergent theories as symptomatic of a field seeking novelty and validation, often at the expense of reflexive depth. Brown’s (2007) critique presents a challenge to Service Dominant Logic, exposing its universalising ambitions as a bid for disciplinary hegemony under the guise of integration, and Arvidsson (2011) outlines a call to revaluate the ‘ethics’ of value and value creation, arguably the foundational concept in marketing. Similar anxieties run through debates over CCT, casting doubt on whether it represents an emancipatory lens or a newly institutionalised orthodoxy, and Relationship Marketing is likewise problematised by O’Malley et al. (2008) and Blois (2010). The rhetoric of co-creation, celebrated for its participatory promise, is also stripped of its innocence. Cova and Dalli (2009) and Fisher and Smith (2011) each show how blurred categories of work and consumption disguise persistent asymmetries of power, rebranding exploitation as empowerment while embedding consumers more tightly within circuits of value production. Cornelissen and Lock (2005) crystallise this point by showing how the movement from theory to practice is a site of negotiation where authority is asserted and resisted. In this light, the history of marketing’s self-critique is not simply concerned the rise and fall of frameworks but about the ongoing struggle over who gets to define what counts as theory in marketing, whose interests it serves, and what kind of discipline marketing aspires to become.

Another prominent thread is the instrumental borrowing of grand theory to open up new lines of questioning about power, representation, and practice. One will find the legacies all of Paul Ricour’s ‘Masters of Suspicion’ well represented in Marketing Theory, together with their numerous metamorphic offshoots in various styles of postmodern, post structural, postcolonial and post social theorisation (Fırat and Dholakia, 2006). A common approach has been to position marketing against the canon of social theory, importing conceptual vocabularies as a means to resist reduction to managerialist agendas, and reflecting a critique of marketing orthodoxy as well as an aspiration to reposition the discipline within wider intellectual debates. Ontological and philosophical engagements are fostered alongside instrumental borrowings, where philosophy is not only used as a source of concepts but a provocation to rethink what marketing is. Reflexivity, interpretivism, and post-positivist critique converge to challenge the perceived epistemic authority of mainstream marketing science, with contributions foregrounded in the situatedness of knowledge, sometimes explicitly engaging science and technology studies or hermeneutic traditions, propose alternative standards of validity and rigour.

More recently posthumanist perspectives have gained prominence, marking a decisive turn from humanist concerns with meaning and identity to analyses of infrastructures, algorithms, and nonhuman agencies. New materialism, assemblage theory, and ANT have been mobilised to highlight how markets are enacted through technologies and networks (Franco et al., 2022). Work drawing on feminist theory has further reoriented the field toward relational ontologies that foreground entanglement rather than discrete agents. Here, philosophy provides both methodological provocations and political stakes, exposing how marketing participates in digital surveillance, datafication, platformization (Caliandro et al., 2024) and algorithmic governance.

Debates about methodological choices have calmed considerably since the paradigm disputes of the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the more extravagant versions of cultural relativism have now been largely discredited, in part a reflection of the wider scepticism with which the excesses of postmodernism are generally regarded now. Methodological diversity has flourished while the status of critical approaches remains relatively marginal. The fact that mainstream marketing and consumer research has been relatively content to concede a minor but recognised role to qualitative and interpretive methods only highlights that the critical project, however defined, was never primarily a methodological one. For the most part, proponents of different methodological approaches appear to now coexist relatively peacefully, albeit often as disinterested communities. The real issue around methodological choice is therefore not about future institutional acceptance but rather on the structural conditions of the research process. Shrinking research budgets and the lack of time required for the kinds of immersive, time-intensive inquiries that interpretive methods demand pose significant constraints on methodological practice. There are, of course, a wide range of innovations emerging around digital methodologies and the incorporation of AI. Yet, these developments often reflect not so much epistemological breakthroughs but mechanisation and acceleration of the research process, frequently under conditions of precarity where early career researchers find themselves displaced by technological substitutes. The politics of methodology, in this light, are inseparable from the political economy of academic labour.

Broader speculation about the future direction of theory development is less easy to diagnose. It is best understood not through anticipation of some dramatic rupture, but through a more reflective engagement with the intellectual legacies we already possess. In recent decades, few genuinely new large-scale theoretical formations have emerged. Critical scholarship continues to draw creatively on Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism and other traditions to explore fresh contexts and repressed voices. The rise and decline of postmodernism marked the last great flourish of theoretical exuberance and the proclamation of the “death of grand narratives” was destabilising and provocative, but in retrospect also aligned uncomfortably with wider orthodox efforts to diminish the visibility and power of social theory across the academy. Latour (2004) questions whether critique itself has ‘run out of steam’, not least because many of the progressive ambitions of social theory such as its suspicion of authority, its attention to marginal voices, and its scepticism toward grand narratives, have been seamlessly co-opted and redeployed by reactionary, conspiratorial and conservative agendas. Marketing’s own frameworks have largely reached a point of consolidation rather than conceptual breakthrough as well.

Under these conditions of Capitalist Realism, novelty for its own sake may be less important than the task of deepening, and reanimating the theoretical resources we have inherited. Few marketing researchers are trained philosophers and engagements with theory can be superficial at times. Yet, this should not be a source of defensiveness but an affirmation of what marketing critique does best, which is to borrow from theoretical traditions and use them diagnostically to illuminate the contradictions of marketing. Our task is not to eagerly and entrepreneurially await the rise of the next grand theory, but to ensure that our engagement with theory remains alive, keeping open spaces of imagination for a new generation of students and researchers.