by Kevin Mellet

Marketing, which brings together a vast range of professions, know-how and devices, extends its hold over us. But what is marketing? How has it been constructed, disseminated and imposed? Who are its professionals, its specialists? How do they influence both the economy and society? How are the relationships between marketing and society evolving? What is the responsibility of marketing in the ecological crisis and what could be its possible role in the environmental transition? These are some of the questions addressed in this book, which offers a synthesis of four decades of sociological research on marketing.

What is the sociology of marketing about?

Marketing is a theoretically overinvested object. From its inception, it has been the subject of a theoretical investment both on the part of marketing theorists, who intended to delimitate their discipline and codify its practices into a set of stabilized and transmissible knowledge and from “critical thinkers” who gave it a central place in their thought systems. Paradoxically, this theoretical overinvestment has led to the obliteration of marketing as a set of concrete, instrumented and organized practices, operated by professionals in companies, administrations or NGOs, but also by individuals (to promote themselves or sell second-hand items on the internet).

The starting point of this work is that numerous studies, in sociology, but also in anthropology and history, have taken marketing, its experts, their tools and their organizations, as the object of empirical investigation. In fact, the sociological examination of marketing practices, people and organizations has emerged as part of three distinct scientific discussions.

A first conversation revolves around the characterization of the firm and the nature of business as organizational phenomena. Indeed, marketing is above all a form of organized action within companies – and in particular large companies with a marketing department. Historically, marketing as a scientific discipline and marketing as a managerial phenomenon were established at roughly the same time[EH1] , in the United States at least, between the 1920s and the 1950s. Marketing was asserting itself against engineers, but also against salespeople. It built its legitimacy by embodying consumers within the firms, by speaking on their behalf, and by claiming in this capacity to be able to determine the direction of business.

The second discussion concerns culture. In reaction to the critical theory inspired by the Frankfurt School and the critique of the consumer society, which present marketing and advertising as a kind of cultural engineering that has succeeded in constructing an artificial culture around mass consumption, research in cultural anthropology and cultural sociology has, since the 1980s, taken an empirical interest in the activities of cultural intermediaries. Surveys carried out in advertising agencies and marketing departments have shown the constraints, uncertainties and difficulties surrounding the work of these intermediaries. As part of the cultural turn, marketing and advertising have been studied as a set of ordinary, essentially routine and organized activities that consist of manipulating and moving about various ‘cultural’ objects. Marketers are experts in linking products simultaneously to economic and cultural categories.

From a different perspective, sociologists have become interested in marketing as part of conversations on the nature and functioning of markets. The development of economic sociology initially aimed to occupy a space left vacant by neoclassical economic theory – the study of concrete markets – and to critically question contemporary developments in economic theory.  The economics of information certainly places the question of quality at the heart of the analysis of market coordination,  but it struggles to provide a satisfactory treatment of it: when buyers face uncertainty about the quality of products, as in the emblematic case of used cars (the famous ‘lemons’, studied by George Akerlof), the market risks collapsing without the support of systems such as brands, labels, certifications, or trust networks. It is precisely these valuation devices, and more generally all the infrastructures and mediations which contribute to the definition of market values, to market coordination, and to the formation of prices, that have been taken as objects of investigation by the sociology of markets. At the center of this approach is ‘market work’, the work deployed by actors to carry out, ultimately, market transactions. Market professionals (and non-professionals, such as amateur critics and product reviewers), quite literally, carry out ‘marketing’: they establish and operate markets. In the 2010, as part of the field of “market studies”, these market sociologists have been joined by marketing scholars who were eager to reconnect marketing to markets (see Reconnecting Marketing to Markets, eds. Luis Araujo, John Finch and Hans Kjellberg).

What do marketers do?

Strictly speaking, marketing is not a profession, even if there are marketing managers and marketing analysts–you need to include packagers, advertising specialists, merchandisers, pricing, brand and product managers, and a myriad of specialists who carry out actions that are part of marketing. Marketing is better understood as a set of activities, at the interface of organizations, markets and consumption. These activities mobilize knowledge, instruments, tools and also people. Where do they draw their power from?

The first source of marketers’ power is their knowledge of consumers and consumption. It is not so much a question of knowing so to manipulate or to influence consumers, but rather a way to have an influence on the organization’s decisions, to be able to tell the product development team what consumers are thinking and what they will want. The marketer justifies his or her role by liaising with engineers and other creators of raw products, saying, ‘your product is very innovative, it’s great, but on the other hand, no one will know how to use it, no one will find it attractive, so now we need to work together’.

The second source of marketing power is its power over signs, over semiotics. The power of marketing lies precisely in its ability to produce and create brands, to associate these brands with images, as well as narratives. This capability to handle signs is very powerful, because companies are very powerful in their ability to produce signs, to disseminate them through various marketing channels. But this power must also be considered as limited in its ability to act on consciences, if only because ‘advertising is propaganda, but everyone knows it’, to paraphrase US sociologist Michael Schudson. What does this mean? It means that marketers must convince an inattentive public, consumers who are not dupes, and who sometimes deploy strategies to avoid and dodge advertising and marketing.

The third main source of marketing power is its power over the organization of markets. When you browse the shelves of a supermarket, you are put in a situation where you can exercise your free will, your sovereignty as a consumer, since you are offered the possibility of choosing between different goods. But this offer is also worked out: if your product is positioned in the middle of the shelf, it will statistically have more sales than if it is at the very bottom, at ground level or at the very top, and difficult to access. Front and end displays create small biases, one might say, in the consumer’s sovereignty; and these small biases on the whole are part of marketing’s expertise. By making it very easy for clients to subscribe to a service and by making it cognitively expensive to unsubscribe, merchants develop capture strategies.

Marketing in the Face of the Ecological Crisis

To conclude, I would also like to use this work to invite readers, academics, students and practitioners to reflect on the place of marketing and its professionals in the environmental transition. On the one hand, marketing is being singled out and accused of promoting consumption by influencing consumers, promoting consumerism and organizing the massive disposal of new goods. On the other hand, marketing, alongside communication, is presented as a set of expertise, tools and practices that could be reoriented towards the promotion of sustainable practices and put at the service of virtuous economic models.

The environmental issue indeed affects marketing professionals as well as professionals in organizations, companies and administrations in general. The responses provided, which will certainly develop in the future, are varied: mobilization campaigns aimed at promoting more responsible forms of consumption, greening of marketing management tools, search for more circular and ecological economic models, etc. Beyond these initiatives, the power of marketing, which makes it an essential cog in capitalism, still lies in its capacity, as an institution of capitalism, to naturalize consumption. Marketing, its professionals, their knowledge and their tools are no stranger to the fact that, paradoxically, the cost of not consuming (or consuming less) is much higher than that of consuming. In a society where affluence, the major political-economic consensus of the post-war decades, is coming under fire, marketing is questioned. Could this cultural and behavioural engineering, historically constructed to promote affluent consumption, be put at the service of a socio-political project geared towards sufficiency?

Kevin Mellet is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris.

Marketing: A Sociological Approach is published by polity