Marketing refers to practices that sellers of goods and services use to acquire or retain customers. Marketing is also the name of the scientific field that researches those practices to make them more successful. Advertising agencies and marketing departments utilize their knowledge and market research to create effective marketing campaigns, while various forms of media and advertising are employed to accomplish that goal.     

Marketing encompasses a wide range of activities, including market research to uncover insights, branding to establish identity, advertising to promote offerings, and customer engagement to foster loyalty. Marketing uses insights from psychology, not only to reach people, but to control them.

In this entry, we will focus on the wider consequences that marketing has on society, culture, and the economy.  

                     Marketing, Consumerism, and Capitalism

Jean Baudrillard, in the books Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Fatal Strategies (1983), describes the social world as dominated by the media and the explosion of the image. In modernity, copies or models represented real objects or events, while in the postmodern era, that is, in the era of "simulacrum", copy or simulacrum produces reality, objects, and events. The performance of the representation is abandoned. Television and marketing are invading all the intimate processes of our social life, while reality collapses into hyperreality. "Dedifferentiation" means that there is no difference between news and entertainment, marketing and culture. Society consists of a large, phantasmagoric superstructure of signs and images with which the individual has neither an objective nor an alienated relationship.

James Coleman explores the impact of modern corporations on American society in his book The Asymmetric Society (1982). He believes that corporations, due to their great economic and legal influence, have drastically reduced the importance and social capital of families, neighborhoods, and churches. Corporations are increasingly influencing the destinies of individuals. With the help of marketing and mass media, corporations spread consumerism and selfishness, which are in conflict with the norms of solidarity and selflessness developed by the family and the neighborhood. The impact that corporations have on individuals, society, and the environment is usually negative, and individuals are not able to oppose them, so the role of the state in limiting the power of corporations should be increasing. The role of sociology in the fight against the growing negative role of corporations must also be significant, especially in the field of research, by informing the public about the results, and by preventing corporate abuse of sociology.

In Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord studies the transformation of society from one organized around the production and consumption of goods, to a society organized around the consumption of spectacle. The society of the spectacle is created by the hegemonic integration of the media and consumer culture. In that society, institutions socialize people and produce artificial social relationships through images. In this created world, there is a void between consumers and producers, while the social world can only be experienced through the accumulation of spectacle. The spectacle becomes fully present in social life and loses its connection with goods. In the society of the spectacle, life is reduced to consumption, and social status becomes tied to certain logos and brands. The spectacle exercises social control, not by force, but by destroying creativity and creating consensus on collective desires. Financial institutions, corporations, urban planners, and architects, as well as marketing experts, use magazines, advertisements, films, and other media, through which they create images and spectacles that produce conformism and normalize domination. To overcome the society of the spectacle, it is necessary to destroy that society and replace it with a more humane alternative. This new society will be characterized by creativity and organic relationships between people. Squatting, writing graffiti, and taking over public and abandoned spaces are tactics for fighting against the society of the spectacle.

In the book The New Industrial State (1967), John Kenneth Galbraith argues that in the modern age, large corporations are led and controlled by employed bureaucratic technocrats, while owners have less and less power. The technocratic non-proprietary elite, which Galbraith calls “technostructure”, exert actual control over corporations, and they primarily strive to survive, thrive, and maintain independence, while being less interested in profit maximization. Management, marketing, and connections with politicians are key resources of this group.

In his book The State in Capitalist Society (1969), Ralph Miliband challenges the idea that power in capitalist society is divided between a large number of groups fighting among themselves. Instead of this pluralistic view, he advocates and proves the view that the ruling class possesses a great concentration of power, and that it has a decisive role in creating ideology and politics. He believes that the ruling class has control over state institutions (police, army, judiciary, central and local government, and state administration) and that through the control of these institutions, that class maintains its power. The ruling class is made up of those who possess economic power and who use that power to take control over state institutions, in order to maintain that economic power and stabilize capitalist relations. Miliband also studies how this type of ideological legitimization is implemented, and especially pays closer attention to the important role marketing has in that process. Marketing spreads ideological legitimization of capitalism in several ways: capitalist corporations use marketing to portray themselves as those who work for the common good, not for their own selfish interests; advertisements associate products with generally accepted positive values ​​and emotions; marketing spreads the ideology of consumerism to the masses.

Henry Lefebvre explores the process of alienation in his four-volume book Critique of Everyday Life (2014). In these books, Lefebvre studies everyday life, which is not banal but represents a direct product of a society governed by consumerism and the bureaucratization of life. Every day life is the best indicator of how the capitalist mode of production has shaped modern society. Bureaucratization and consumerism have impoverished and taken away authenticity from everyday life. Capitalism, marketing, and the liberal-democratic state have created a "bureaucratic society of organized consumption". On the other hand, everyday life contains the seeds of resistance to such a system, because it preserves the collective memory of alternative practices and supports the development of strategies and movements that challenge the existing social order.

                   Marketing in the Age of Globalization

In Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992), Roland Robertson introduced the notion of "glocalization" into sociology. This term refers to a situation in which the expansion of global culture is taking place, but, at the same time, local traditions are being preserved, as well as a concurrent and related process of specific transformation of global trends, in order to more easily fit into local culture. One of the examples of glocalization is the spread of nationalism as an ideology, which originated with modernization in the West and spread across the planet, but which is operationalized and contextualized in different ways in each local culture. Another example cited by Robertson is the global market for goods and services and the spread of consumer culture. Although the market for goods and services is becoming more and more global, and consumer culture (consumerism) is spreading to all parts of the world, the global market is adapting to specific local markets. The production and marketing of many goods and services, sold globally, are adapted to local tastes and consumer habits. The notion of glocalization tends to overcome the debate between those who believe that homogenization is taking place and those who believe that heterogenization of the world is happening. What often happens is a combination of homogenization with heterogenization and universalism with particularism.

In No Logo (1999), Naomi Klein studies the business of global corporate brands, production conditions, marketing tactics, and the ideology of consumerism. She critiques the rise of consumerism and its role in shaping modern culture, particularly concerning branding and corporate power. She argues that consumerism is no longer just about purchasing products; it's become about buying into an entire lifestyle and identity created by corporations. Klein explains that companies increasingly focus on building strong brands rather than producing tangible products. These brands create emotional connections with consumers, selling not just a product, but a narrative and an aspirational way of life. Klein emphasizes how corporations use advertising, sponsorship, and celebrity endorsements to reinforce their brands and embed them in every aspect of our lives.

References:

Baudrilard. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (2016, in French 1970);

Coleman. The Asymmetric Society (1982);

Debord. Society Of The Spectacle (2021, in French 1967);

Galbraith. The New Industrial State (1967);

Klein N. No Logo (1999);

Lefebvre. Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text (2014, in French 1947, 1961, 1968, 1981);

Miliband. The State in Capitalist Society (1969);

Mills. White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951);

Robertson. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992);

Sassen. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991); 

     -     Globalization and its Discontents (1999).