Explore some aspect of the relationship between marketing and the needs and desires of the consumer: is the consumer of brands an autonomous, rational actor, or does marketing manipulate them?

Explore some aspect of the relationship between marketing and the needs and desires of the consumer: is the consumer of brands an autonomous, rational actor, or does marketing manipulate them?

If you address the topic through a case study, you should draw on a detailed examination of a particular organisation’s marketing research and communications (for example, looking at an attempt to regulate or standardise consumer behaviour).

If you address the topic through a conceptual critique, you should focus on analysing and critiquing how marketing conceives of its social and organisational function (such as the ideas of the marketing concept or brand value).

One way to approach this topic is to take a critical look at marketing’s own accounts of its historical development (Brown, 1993; Tamilia, 2009). The rosy picture that marketers paint distinguishes four, successively more “sophisticated” eras (production, selling, marketing, relationship marketing), each characterised by distinctive attitudes towards the customer/consumer. In this story, marketing is characterised by growing recognition of the agency of consumers as complex, intelligent individuals, and collaborators in the “cocreation” of value. You have a wide range of more critical accounts of marketing theory and practice (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006; Elmer, 2004; Turow, 2008) that you can use to question this self-serving narrative. Has marketing practice really changed as much as marketers themselves claim? Hasn’t it just found new ways to manipulate?

Another, narrower focus would deal mainly with the exploitative nature of brand value creation: even the professional marketing literature openly recognises that the value of brands is linked to the ideas and emotions that people associate with it —ideas and emotions, in a sense, that audiences “own”— and there is now a considerable body of critical literature exploring the notion that this value is produced by the unpaid “immaterial labour” of consumers (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006; Cova & Dalli, 2009; Willmott, 2010; Zwick et

al., 2008). You can also link this topic with the debate about productive consumers

(“prosumers”, or “co-creators”, to use the marketing jargon), discussing how parallel ideas have been developed in analyses of material and consumer culture (Lury, 2011, c. 2).

A third option would be to look at how branding and marketing practice reinforce existing social differences and classifications, limiting the agency of consumers. One example is the tension between the local and the global: does the globalisation of marketing pretend to embrace cultural differences, just to overwhelm them with a homogeneised, “Americanised” or “McDonaldised” form of culture (Ger & Belk, 1996; Halsall, 2008; Ritzer, 2006; Ritzer &

Stillman, 2003)? These ideas deserve discussion in the broader historical context of colonialism (McClintock, 1995) and promotional culture (Lury, 2011, c. 6). In the same manner, you can question how branding makes the successful performance of gender identity depend on specific patterns of consumption (Alexander, 2003; Russell & Tyler,

2002), or apply these ideas to discussions of age (Katz & Marshall, 2003), sexual orientation, etc.