Markets and marketing

While Sophie may have no reason to look at what she is doing in terms of markets and isolated moments of exchange, the salesman certainly does, and so does the corporation that stands behind him.

Marketing, I want to argue, is a framing process, and one that involves strategic disentanglements, but it is based on quite other kinds of knowledges. These are interpretative, cultural knowledges that should look and behave more as in Miller’s examples, yet also have to be understood within a framework of instrumental rationality. My example is about marketing strategies (Slater 2002, 2003). When advertising and marketing agents devise marketing strategies they aim to produce definitions of objects that simultaneously accomplish two interlinked goals: they must make sense in terms of relations of consumption and they must look capable of achieving profitable positions in relation to other products (relations of competition, the marketplace). The object has to be produced conceptually before the various branches of the sales effort are deployed to try and produce it socially A product concept is therefore the basis for strategic action. In this conceptual production, it is very hard to separate out cultural and economic issues; indeed, marketers spend a lot of their time explicitly connecting them.

However, this is only part of the story Cultural and economic thinking are inseparable in a deeper sense: they are analytically opposite sides of the same coin in a way that marketers are aware of at every moment. When I define an object in cultural terms I am also defining it competitively and vice versa. To use an example from a previous paper: to define Johnson’s baby oil (this was a strategy exercise) as an eye-makeup remover rather than a facial cleanser means to relate different aspects of the same object to different social practices (cosmetics versus health care) enacted by different social actors (in this case younger versus older women). At the very same moment, to be selling a makeup remover rather than a cleanser is also to enter into different markets, because each object is competitive with different products. Any definition of the product makes it more or less substitutable for another product. This is conventionally what we mean by a particular ‘market’. The boundaries of a market are defined by what is perceived as substitutable for what, and by whom.

That is to say, marketing is not only about competition within markets, within given structures. It is a competition over the structures of markets and market relations themselves. The cultural calculations of marketers are attempts to frame and stabilize objects as given individual items, which then compete with other objects in rationalizable ways. They are, if you will, disentangled from the broad range of social relations to be isolated as individual, transactable entities. This attempt (more often than not a failure from any individual firm’s point of view) is strategic: every firm wants to redefine the boundaries of markets by reframing goods. That is how they compete. They aim at a profitable stabilization of the market, but they do this by persistently destabilizing it. Finally, the disentanglements they attempt to effect are precisely not a disembedding, in the sense of a separation of economy from culture. Rather, it is a specific instrumentalizing of culture in order to profit by a very specific form of transaction.

In fact, one can think of marketing as playing another, more complex framing role, something beyond even the framing of objects, hence of market structures. Marketing is not just one of the many framing technologies through which markets are defined. It also tries to act as something like a meta-technology, a technology that tries to manage or orchestrate the technologies of cultural framing. It orchestrates such commercial technologies as pricing, design, packaging, consumer education and so on in such a way as to manage people’s framing of goods in relation to commerce. As noted earlier, in the act of buying and consuming, I may think of myself as only minimally engaged with markets or commodities at all; I may largely frame my actions in terms of the meaningful constitution of everyday life. Marketing employs a range of technologies that individually and together establish commercial frames in the first place; it tries not only to produce specific market structures, but also to impose the very idea of a market and of commerce in relation to other object relations.