Marketing Theory

This paper introduces the special issue. Using the work of Connerton (2008) as our prism, we examine the role of amnesia in marketing theory, stressing its positive and negative benefits. Key Words • amnesia • critical marketing studies• structuring of marketing theory

In this paper we analyze the role of marketing in the construction of what can be called the hegemony of development. Through an investigation of the marketing practices of the pulp and paper industry in South America and the resistances that are articulated by a range of civil society actors against the expansion of this industry, we problematize marketing as a political and contested discourse and practice. By using Laclau and Mouffe's (1985, 2001) theoretical framework, which is centered on the concept of `hegemony', we highlight the crucial role marketing plays in the social and cultural legitimation of the highly controversial development of the pulp and paper industry — regarded as one of the most polluting industries in the world — in South America. We build on existing `critical marketing' literatures to critique marketing's role in spreading `development' practices around the world, and we introduce Laclau and Mouffe's theories to the marketing field in order to understand better the way marketing helps to produce `development' as a hegemonic discourse in a particular social and cultural field. In this way we contribute to a growing understanding that critical marketing research is not only about exposing and analyzing the discourses and practices that drive consumption. Rather, we see marketing as an ontological discourse and practice that is crucial for the cultural and social legitimation of the development of entire industries and economic spheres.

Marketing is a relatively young discipline and mainstream marketing education pays little attention to the discipline's development and history. While on the sidelines of the discipline there has been some criticism of the lack of a historical understanding of marketing's development, marketing too often produces theory without appropriate regard to past marketing theory. This paper considers the case of the `most important' paper on marketing theory in 2004 with reference to a leading marketing writer from the 1950s and 1960s. It finds support for the argument that the 2004 paper brings little novelty over the 1965 book to which it is compared.

Social class is one of the most fundamental dimensions of social organization, influencing almost every aspect of our lives, including market-mediated consumption. Despite this situation, the topic has a chequered history in marketing and consumer research. Significantly, a research program initiated by W. L. Warner in the 1930s in the United States, which emphasized the multifaceted nature of social class and highlighted concepts such as status, social networks, social comparison and class distinctive attitudes, was abandoned for over 30 years. Only relatively recently, consumer researchers (Allen and Anderson, 1994; Holt, 1998) revitalized this type of approach by highlighting the usefulness of Bourdieu's (1984) theory of social class and taste in explaining consumer behaviour. Strong parallels exist between the old and newer research programs, including similar conceptual underpinnings, matters of emphasis, and empirical findings. An intriguing question arises: `Why the hiatus in the study of social class in the consumer research field?' To answer this question, we examine the history of social class in marketing and consumer research.

The thought surrounding my controversial introspective paper (Gould, 1991a) has formed a critical genealogy of its own. Here, I revisit the paper's writing and then consider readers' responses, including my own. In so doing, I find that the idea of erasure adapted from Derrida (1997) best describes what has emerged, namely a process of ignoring what I said or effacing/recasting it when ignoring was not possible.

Despite the extraordinary advances in biology in the 20th century, along with the infusion of Darwinian theory across countless domains of human import, marketing and consumer scholars have doggedly forgotten, rejected, or ignored that consumers are biological beings shaped by a common set of evolutionary forces. Accordingly, this collective amnesia has yielded disciplines that largely focus on the disjointed and incoherent cataloguing of empirical findings, all of which operate at the proximate level. A complete and accurate understanding of any biological organism requires that it be studied at both the proximate and ultimate (in the Darwinian adaptive sense of the term) levels. Hence, at best, marketing and consumer scholars generate incomplete accounts of Homo consumericus and at worst they provide erroneous theories that eventually fall by the epistemological wayside. Should the collective amnesia persist, marketing and consumer scholars will further contribute to the sinking of our discipline into the abyss of irrelevant sciences, disconnected from the revolutionary work that is being conducted within the natural sciences.

The world's best marketers are blessed with a peculiar inventiveness that stems from experiencing the world as a novelty, which is why the marketing discipline in general has a good memory for forgetting. In this paper then, we contend that amnesia in marketing academia is perfectly healthy, and indeed functions as a key component of our creative, ideas-laden discipline. We argue that the marketer's natural inclination towards erasure and renewal, towards always wiping the slate clean, should be encouraged, not cured. In marshalling the evidence in favour of forgetting, we pull apart the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, demonstrate how forgetting is integral to the academic sensibility, and question how much of the marketing literature is worth remembering in the first place.

In this paper I selectively reflect on the contents of the special issue, focusing on the structuring of the academy and the society in which we operate. I examine the epistemological structuring of marketing in relation to what counts as a contribution to knowledge, the effects of the way we use particular theory to sensitize ourselves to the wider world, and how this theory in turn restricts how we think about marketing theory and consumer practice, especially in less `developed' countries.