The Dark Side of Marketing Communications Critical Marketing Perspectives

What fuels capitalism and what stops it from collapsing? Does marketing communications support and sustain the economic and political status quo? This book is not about describing the ways in which businesses can optimize the messages they put across or about adding to the marketing communicator’s toolkit. This book argues that marketing communications plays an increasingly important role in bolstering contemporary capitalism. Drawing on conceptualizations of the ‘market’ from political economy and sociology, it focusses on five logics that underpin and sustain the form of capitalism in which we live: the logic of competition, the logic of sustainability, the logic of individualism, the logic of objectivity, and the logic of distraction. It does this by exploring those arenas which are increasingly dominated by the communicative activities of business: sport, CSR, social media, statistics, and entertainment. Bringing theories from marketing and consumer research, sociology, cultural studies, technology and media studies to bear on marketing communications, this book is necessary reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics who wish to understand the broader role of marketing communications in the reproduction of contemporary capitalism.

1. Introduction: Where are we now? 2. Decoding the market logic 3. Sport: Winners, logics, and the logic of competition 4. CSR: Corporate utopias, wishful thinking, and the logic of sustainability 5. Success, status and the logic of individualism 6. Social progress, economic decline, and the logic objectivity 7. Boredom: Digitised ‘24/7’ connectivity and the logic of distraction 8. Afterword: How does this end?

Tim Hill is Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bath, UK. Pierre McDonagh is Professor of Critical Marketing and Society at the University of Bath, UK.