Fundamentals_of_Marketing

■ ■ ■ ■
MARKETING: DEVELOPMENT AND SCOPE
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 ofneeds 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
ideological 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 (cf. Marcuse, 1964).
Similar views have been expressed by academics working inside the marketing discipline
(cf. 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 modernist 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
‘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 artefacts.
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 chapter 2 entitled ‘I coulda been a contender!’ Brown attacks
the totalizing tendencies of the subject and some of the ‘mainstream’s’ most cherished
assumptions. Brown (1998) continues this theme.
15 ■ ■ ■