Marketing E-Book

Kevin Mellet

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 241

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Marketing involves a wide range of professions, activities and tools and it plays an increasingly important role in our lives.  But what exactly is marketing and how did it come to assume such importance?  Who are the marketing professionals, what exactly do they do and what influence do they have in our economy and society?

Over the last forty years, sociologists have studied marketing and analysed its practices, techniques and consequences, producing a formidable body of knowledge about the nature of marketing and its impact.  This book provides a concise account of these contributions and an introduction to the most important sociological concepts for understanding marketing such as consumption, the market, the organization and culture.  Mellet presents marketing not just as a set of techniques but as a pervasive social activity performed by different actors in specific contexts according to particular rules and views.  He unpacks the activity of marketing, showing who marketers are, how they think, what they do and how they shape and construct not only markets but also the world we live in.

Written in a clear and accessible style, this book is the perfect introduction to marketing from a sociological perspective and it will be used on courses on marketing and the sociology of culture.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Towards a sociology of marketing

Presentation of the work

Notes

1 Which sociology, for which marketing?

The impossible sociology of a professional group

Marketing as cultural and behavioural engineering

Marketing as work

Business and marketing management

Conclusion

Notes

2 The consumer in the eyes of the marketer

Marketing and sociology: a common history

Consumer surveys Consumer profiles

Conclusion

Notes

3 Empire of signs

Working (with) qualities

The circulation of qualities

Qualities versus qualities

Conclusion

Notes

4 Markets as organizations

Organizing market spaces

Managing customers

Reorganizing the market so as to innovate

Conclusion

Notes

5 Morality and marketing

Between morality and the market

Marketing as a political instrument

Marketing in a different way?

Notes

Conclusion

Marketing as a collective reality

Marketing as an institution of capitalism

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Boxes

Chapter 1

Box 1.

Attempt to identify marketing professionals based on statistics from the Bureau …

Chapter 2

Box 2.

Marketing and experimental psychology

Box 3.

Redefining social classes

Box 4.

Geomarketing

Chapter 3

Box 5.

Prices, from labelling to dynamic pricing

Box 6.

Viral marketing

Box 7.

Is advertising effective?

Chapter 5

Box 8.

What is responsible marketing?

List of Tables

Chapter 1

Table 1.

Marketing professionals

Chapter 3

Table 2.

Advertisers’ communication expenses (IREP, France, 2019)

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion

Index

End User License Agreement

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Marketing

A Sociological Approach

KEVIN MELLET

Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

First published in French as Sociologie du marketing © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2023

This English translation © Polity Press, 2025

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6570-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024947185

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

Donald MacKenzie provided the initial impetus for this book by opening Polity’s doors to me. My warmest thanks to him. At Polity, I particularly benefited from the attention and professionalism of John Thompson and Elise Heslinga, as well as the excellent translation work done by Andrew Brown. At my French publisher, La découverte, I am grateful for the involvement of Marieke Joly and the Repères collection team. The writing of this book, first in French, then in a largely revised version in English, benefited from the direct and indirect involvement of many people I cannot name. The thorough proof-reading and sympathetic criticism of the six anonymous reviewers who examined the French and then the English manuscripts was especially invaluable. At the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, I am fortunate to be a part of an exceptional collective environment and I am enriched by ongoing conversations with fantastic colleagues and friends. I am particularly indebted to my students at Sciences Po, and especially those in the Sociology of Marketing course, for their enthusiasm, questions, and criticism.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Pauline, and my children, Adèle and Alban, whose loving support animates its every page.

Introduction

When we look at the occurrence of the word ‘marketing’ in the titles of recent articles in the daily press, we can only be struck by the particularly split nature of the image it conveys: ‘Tissot says youth-oriented marketing has paid off’ (New York Times, 7 November 2023); ‘Can Oscar fashion be more than marketing?’ (New York Times, 13 March 2023); ‘Is the metaverse just marketing? The metaverse doesn’t quite exist yet. But the hype still matters’ (New York Times, 11 February 2022); ‘Sandy Hook parents press gunmakers to stop marketing weapons of war to kids’ (The Guardian, 4 January 2024); ‘Mothers should beware unethical marketing by formula firms’ (The Guardian, 31 August 2023); ‘How did Barbie do it? Warner’s head of marketing on creating a “pink movement”’ (The Guardian, 28 July 2023); ‘The truth about “local” food in US supermarkets: “It’s a marketing gimmick”’ (The Guardian, 5 June 2023); ‘For viticulture, environmental marketing is not a dirty word’ (Le Monde, 27 February 2023); ‘The “sneaky” marketing strategies of infant milk manufacturers to discourage the use of breastfeeding’ (Le Monde, 8 February 2023); ‘The death of Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz, undisputed king of marketing’ (Le Monde, 24 October 2022). The same search on other press titles leads to articles dealing with the use of AI and deceptive designs to manipulate consumers, the persistence of gender stereotypes in advertising, and the promotion of cryptocurrencies by celebrities on social networks.

Marketing conveys an ambiguous image. When associated with visionary entrepreneurs or spectacular business successes, it appears in a positive light. It can even, where appropriate, be put to the service of ‘causes’, such as the environment, although one still needs to point out that it’s not ‘a dirty word’, or a ‘gimmick’. But marketing is more often presented as a form of ‘sneaky’ manipulation of consumers, or as a means of getting them to consume products harmful to their health, or to society. When it is not deliberately misleading, it just suggests a prioritizing of circulation figures over quality, a simple disguise to cover the absence of content and value, but nevertheless likely to propagate problematic cultural representations such as the degrading image of women conveyed by certain ads.

Towards a sociology of marketing

Accusations laid at the door of marketing are nothing new. They echo older criticisms, mainly of advertising, and found particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In an article entitled ‘Criticizing the critics of advertising: towards a sociological view of marketing’, published in 1981 in the journal Media, Culture and Society, the sociologist Michael Schudson took a critical look at the main critiques of advertising and marketing, critiques popularized in the United States and Europe by the writings of Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith.1 Packard believed that marketers had developed a set of sophisticated techniques, drawing on psychology and social sciences, to take over the minds of consumers and push them to buy this or that product.2 As for Galbraith, he argued that the very existence of advertising and marketing demonstrated that the needs and desires of consumers were artificially manufactured by producers.3 In other words, demand is not the expression of the preferences of autonomous consumers, but a mere emanation of suppliers who wish to sell their goods.

According to Schudson, these criticisms were based on romanticized, or simply false, descriptions of both the functioning of the professional worlds of advertising and their ability to act on consumers’ behaviour and preferences. Considering the fragile basis of these criticisms, he proposed developing a sociological approach to marketing, which he defined as an activity consisting of discovering what consumers want and adapting products, distribution, packaging, and advertising to their needs and desires. Drawing in particular on the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s work on consumption, he underlined the importance of paying serious attention to the cultural and symbolic dimension of goods, and of questioning the role of advertising and marketing in the shaping of cultural representations associated with consumer goods, taking it as axiomatic that this role is necessarily limited. The idea of a critique was, however, never very far from Schudson’s mind, since the objective he set for the sociology of marketing was to empirically evaluate the contribution of advertising and marketing, as a system of cultural and symbolic production, to materialist aspirations and mass consumer culture.

This question has not lost its relevance. Our society is more than ever a society of consumption and abundance, characterized by a rapid flow of ever-new goods produced, marketed, and consumed. Furthermore, the material production and flow of goods are identified as a major source of ecological imbalance and the depletion of planetary capacities. This naturally leads to questions about the contribution of marketing and advertising, among other factors, to the maintenance of this dynamic.4

Schudson’s proposal led, a few years later, to the publication of his study of advertising, described as a system of cultural production that played a role in the development of an aesthetic and an ideology described as ‘capitalist realism’, by analogy with Soviet realism.5 His book describes in detail the organization of an advertising agency, tracing the multiple constraints that advertising professionals face in their activity, which consists of interesting a generally inattentive public and satisfying riskaverse customers (the advertisers); the whole process contributes to making the advertising business an ‘uneasy persuasion’, as the book’s title puts it.

But the perspective opened up by Schudson implicitly raises the question of understanding marketing – of which advertising is only one facet – as an economic and social activity, the professionals who carry out this activity, and their knowledge and their tools, quite apart from marketing’s function as a producer of cultural representations. What does the work of marketing professionals actually consist of? Who are they? How are they organized? What are the means implemented by ‘supply’ to manage, if not create and manipulate, ‘demand’? What power do they have, in their company and in the market? How is their activity regulated? How should it be?

The present work hopes to provide some answers to these questions, and with this aim in mind provides a sociological analysis of contemporary marketing activities and issues. The perspective developed will set marketing at the intersection of productive organizations, markets, and society. It positions contemporary marketing within the long history of productive and market techniques and economic expertise, and sheds light on the effects produced on these activities by the growing use of new digital data.

Presentation of the work

We can say it loud and clear: since Schudson, the sociology of marketing has developed. It has even prospered well beyond the initial project that he had formulated. The progress made, in terms of knowledge, is considerable. The objective of the present book is to provide a clearly argued presentation of this literature. There is in fact no synthesis of the sociology of marketing that does justice to the contributors who in recent decades have produced information about marketing based on sociological surveys. True, there are several studies that bring together original contributions to the study of the professionals, experts, and structures that organize and operate markets,6 but they do not provide a complete overview. In contrast, there is an abundance of general surveys of consumption.7 These works often constitute the best available introductions to the sociology of marketing, because they generally contain a chapter or two dealing with the role of producers in consumption, and the role of supply in the development of products’ qualities and the organization of market coordination.

I propose to view the sociology of marketing as based on three movements, developed in the five chapters that make up this work: its place in questions of general sociology; its commitment to an empirical approach; and its consideration of questions of values.

First, at the risk of tautology, the sociological study of marketing can be seen as an attempt to examine it based on sociological questions. It is therefore by identifying these questions, and the role that marketing analysis plays in their resolution, that we can characterize the sociology of marketing and position it in relation to other approaches. The first chapter tackles this issue by examining both marketing and its sociology.

A second distinctive feature of the sociological perspective, applied to marketing, is that it examines the phenomenon using its analytical tools. From Schudson’s early investigation in an advertising agency to recent contributions on the uses of algorithms and big data technologies by marketing professionals,8 the sociological analysis of marketing, with rare exceptions, assumes the form of predominantly qualitative field surveys which provide sometimes very detailed descriptions of what its professionals do. The sociology of marketing thus considers and analyses marketing as a set of technically equipped productive activities that draw on expert knowledge and must be grasped in situation, as close as possible to practices and organizations. I propose, following this approach, to examine marketing, its professionals, and their tools based on what they develop and manipulate in their activity. If they are often accused of ‘manipulating’ people (consumers), in reality this is rare, and when they do so, it is within the framework of closely supervised systems – such as the focus group, a market research device that aims at bringing together consumers in the flesh, and that seeks not to produce manipulations, but, on the contrary, to generate expressions free of any influence (see chapter 2). Most of the time, marketers only manipulate people indirectly, in the form of graphics, figures, lists of ‘touchpoints’, advertisements, and various promotional platforms. We must therefore start from what marketers manipulate, very concretely, in the course of their activity, and also study how the people they manipulate react, because nothing ensures that the touchpoint, the potential customer, or a customer exposed to a promotion will react according to the script. What are marketers ultimately manipulating?

First, they conceive and manipulate knowledge. Marketing knowledge is the foundation of the expertise of its professionals, their legitimacy, and their power. This knowledge has interesting properties. It is conceived partly in the social sciences (historically, psychology and sociology; more recently, the computational social sciences) that serve as a basis for developing knowledge about the economic and social world. This knowledge relates to markets, to competition, to the state of business, and above all to consumers. It is in fact a matter of producing and enriching representations of consumers that can be of practical value in the company, as close as possible to production. This knowledge is produced from various apparatuses of knowledge, and then circulates in the form of reports, data tables and graphic representations, segmentations, fictional portraits (‘personas’), ‘insights’, elements of language, and so on. It cannot therefore be detached from the materiality that it acquires in its production, and from the different translations to which it is subject when it is put into circulation.

Second, marketing professionals produce and circulate signs: brands, logos, slogans, narratives, advertising materials, and so on. Semiotic production (the production and manipulation of signs and symbols, of words and images) is very central, and lies at the heart of productive activity, whether it concerns consumer products with relatively (but never completely) standard attributes, or it concerns singular, unique, and refined goods. A large proportion of marketing skills – brand management, product marketing, and marketing communication9 – concerns the production and circulation of signs, to the point that marketing can sometimes be seen as a semiotic production detached from the essence, and true content, of things, and criticized for this reason. The interest of the sociology of marketing is to show the organizational depth necessary for the production of signs, the materiality of these signs, and the centrality of this signifying productive activity to the way companies connect with their markets.

Third, marketing professionals manipulate management tools. In the hands of company marketing department managers, these tools are used to direct in-house teams in charge of branding and product development, launch and promotion. They are also used to guide the actions of external service providers, such as market research firms and advertising or public relations agencies, and to control the actions of downstream players, such as retailers, in charge of product distribution. In this way, management tools ensure that the many players involved in the supply chain are aligned with the objectives traditionally associated with management: performance, control, and measurement.10 But, just as crucially – and almost by definition in the case of marketing – these tools aim to control and monitor customers, potential customers, and anonymous consumers who, together, form demand. Customer relationship management (CRM) software simultaneously guides and supervises the work of marketing and sales teams, and monitors and addresses customers according to the transactional data fed into and ingested by the marketing information system. Managing teams and resources manage the market and demand: this is essentially the task assigned to marketing as a management system. We will be looking at the marketing management toolbox, and at those in charge of it, so as to, in the words of anthropologist Kalman Applbaum, ‘own the market’ and not just sell the product.11 In so doing, we will question the ways in which this managerial apparatus, which today incorporates digital technologies, big data, and algorithms, reconfigures the organization, content, and modes of assessment of the work, trades, and expertise that we view as part of marketing.

Thus, I identify three types of objects that marketing professionals handle in the course of their activity: knowledge, signs, and management tools. These different objects are studied in depth in chapters 2, 3, and 4.

Finally, the sociology of marketing invites us to question the place of marketing in public life. Indeed, another distinctive feature of the sociology of marketing is that at the heart of its analysis is a discussion of what economists call ‘externalities’.12 ‘Classic’ critical approaches to advertising thus set out to identify, and denounce, its harmful (and supposedly powerful) effects on people’s culture, psyche, or even autonomy. As it becomes more empirical, the sociology of marketing takes a more pragmatic turn. It shifts focus and adopts a more analytical look at the way(s) in which marketing is deployed at the border between market and non-market spheres. Within the sociology of marketing, several streams of research investigate the relationship between economic value (that which marketers ‘create’, if we follow the established definitions of marketing that see it as a form of ‘value creation’)13 and values (what people value, individually and in society) – a relationship whose tensions it seeks to analyse. These approaches are discussed in chapter 5.

Notes

1.

Michael Schudson, ‘Criticizing the critics of advertising: towards a sociological view of marketing’,

Media, Culture & Society

, 3 (1), 1981, pp. 3–12.

2.

Vance Packard,

The Hidden Persuaders

(London: Penguin, 1991 [1957]).

3.

John Kenneth Galbraith,

The Affluent Society

(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998 [1958]).

4.

Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier, ‘How does affluent consumption come to consumers? A research agenda for exploring the foundations and lock-ins of affluent consumption’,

Consumption and Society

, 1 (1), 2022, pp. 31–50.

5.

Michael Schudson,

Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society

(London: Routledge, 1984).

6.

Luis Araujo, John Finch, and Hans Kjellberg (eds),

Reconnecting Marketing to Markets

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Michel Callon, Yuval Millo, and Fabian Muniesa (eds),

Market Devices

(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Franck Cochoy, Joe Deville, and Liz McFall (eds),

Markets and the Arts of Attachment

(London: Routledge, 2017); Detlev Zwick and Julien Cayla (eds),

Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

7.

Ian Hudson and Mark Hudson,

Consumption

(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2020); Daniel Miller,

Consumption and Its Consequences

(Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Joel Stillerman,

The Sociology of Consumption: A Global Approach

(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2015); Alan Warde,

Consumption: A Sociological Analysis

(New York: Springer, 2016).

8.

Thomas Beauvisage et al., ‘How online advertising targets consumers: the uses of categories and algorithmic tools by audience planners’,

New Media & Society

, 26 (10), 2024, pp. 6098–119; Baptiste Kotras, ‘Mass personalization: predictive marketing algorithms and the reshaping of consumer knowledge’,

Big Data & Society

, 7 (2), 2020: doi: 10.1177/2053951720951581.

9.

Marketing communication brings together the set of means used by a company to address consumers: advertising in the media, direct marketing, special offers, the organization of events, sponsoring, public relations, and so on (see

chapter 3

).

10.

Ève Chiapello and Patrick Gilbert,

Management Tools: A Social Sciences Perspective

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

11.

Kalman Applbaum,

The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning

(London: Routledge, 2004).

12.

Michel Callon, ‘An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology’,

The Sociological Review

, 46 (1_suppl), 1998, pp. 244–69.

13.

Here is the ‘official’ definition of marketing, as approved by the American Marketing Association in 2017: ‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large’ (see the AMA website:

https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing

/).

1Which sociology, for which marketing?

The objective of this first chapter is to present the different ways in which sociology views marketing. Without favouring one definition over another, let us note that marketing is of interest to sociology insofar as it is a constructed social reality: an organized activity involving material resources and human labour, backed by infrastructures, devices, and standards. But the sociological surveys which have investigated the different dimensions (or professions, or functions) of marketing, for forty years or so, have always done this within the framework of general theoretical debates in sociology.

Identifying these theoretical discussions allows us to clarify two things: first, the sociological approach, which can be ‘positioned’ (to use a marketing term) within specialisms in the social sciences that take a close or more distant interest in marketing; and, second, marketing itself, since (depending on the preferred analytical perspective) the very definition of marketing is likely to change. At the end of this chapter, we will have three definitions of marketing, as they emerge from the three main ways in which sociology envisages this subject: marketing as cultural and behavioural engineering; marketing as work; and marketing as management and strategic direction in the company.

The impossible sociology of a professional group

Before embarking on this approach, one clarification is necessary. As this is a work on the sociology of marketing, its professionals and their tools, the reader has the right to expect that it will analyse a clearly delimited professional group, one that could be called marketers and might be the subject of a sociological treatment in terms of the sociology of professions – in the same way that there is a sociology of doctors, bankers, and small traders. Such a project quickly comes up against a brute fact: despite attempts to form a professional group – based on professional associations such as the American Marketing Association, founded in 1937 – this field is particularly characterized by the multiplicity of professions and skills found in it, and the diversity of places where they are practised. On the one hand, ‘marketing departments’ of large companies bring together marketing directors, product managers, brand managers, customer relations specialists, and even research managers. As Kalman Applbaum points out, there is certainly a coherence in career paths within these large capitalist bureaucracies: ‘Within corporations, there exist specifically named marketing departments where people trained in this specialty ascend a semifixed ladder from consumer market analyst to product manager to brand manager to category manager to vice president of marketing.’ What’s more, the job mobility of marketing executives testifies to the ability to transfer marketing management skills from one sector to another: ‘A marketer of potato chips can easily switch to being a marketer of computers – a move describing that of CEO of IBM Lou Gerstner, formerly of PepsiCo (ever a “chip man”, it is said).’1 So, if it makes sense to speak of a ‘marketing profession’, this is largely confused with the organization of marketing departments in large companies, and the managerial logics that underpin them (see below). On the other hand, in addition to the above-mentioned specialties, other marketing specialties are likely to be deployed in these companies, among retailers, or among their multiple service providers: designers, packagers, merchandisers, pricing managers, sales promotion managers, marketing database managers, creative directors, strategists, media planners, direct marketing specialists, event organizers, and consultants with various specialties. And what are we to do with data marketers, product owners, growth hackers focused on the rapid growth of digital companies, business developers, user experience (UX) designers in charge of designing websites or mobile applications, and the many other neologisms created to designate emerging or changing marketing professions? Should we also include engineers, lawyers, logistics experts, sales directors, and accountants who have received training in marketing and practise it in their activity, or even extend our analysis to small business owners and self-employed people who, on a daily basis, carry out marketing? The toolbox of the sociology of professions could be of only marginal use within the framework of a sociology of marketing. So we shall not take this path, at the risk of frustrating readers who might expect a sociology of marketing to provide solid data on the social group of marketing professionals, their number, their salaries, and so on. (For an attempt at this, see box 1 and table 1.)

Box 1. Attempt to identify marketing professionals based on statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (United States, 2019)

Using employment statistics from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), it is possible to identify jobs and professions that can be linked to marketing. Marketing professionals belong to different professional groups: management executives (marketing directors, sales and advertising managers); middle managers and operational functions (mainly research managers and ‘marketing specialists’); arts and media professions (designers, merchandisers, public relations specialists); and finally, although in a more debatable way (depending on whether or not one considers that the commercial function is a sub-field of marketing), sales and customer relations professions. (Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook.)

Table 1. Marketing professionals

Employment (000)

Mean annual wage ($000)

All occupations

139,100

56

Management occupations

7,947

126

Advertising managers

22

148

Marketing managers

270

154

Sales managers

390

148

Business and financial occupations

8,387

81

Market research analysts and marketing specialists

690

74

Meeting, convention, and event planners

110

56

Arts, design, entertainment, sports, an media occupations

1,858

64

Commercial, industrial designers

30

76

Merchandise displayers

135

34

Public pelations specialists

245

72

Sales and related occupations

13,120

46

Retail salespersons

3,660

31

Advertising sales agents

110

68

Telemarketers

118

31

Marketing as cultural and behavioural engineering