CRITICAL MARKETING AC934

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CRITICALMARKETINGAC934
CRITICALMARKETINGAC934
Steffen Böhm Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

• Steffen Böhm
• Jerzy Kociatkiewicz

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Critical Marketing

• Introduce central concepts of marketing
• Discuss the main issues facing marketing today
• Develop a critical review of the role played by
  marketing in contemporary society

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4Ps of Marketing (the Marketing Mix)

• Promotion
• Product
• Price
• Place (distribution)

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Truth and Lies in Advertising

• Advertising presents an idealised/stylized
  version of the product and/or the world
• So does any other artform
• Advertising may mislead audience as to the
  benefit of using a product
• An informed audience is well aware of these
  biases
• Advertising may provide false information
• Only if the audience believes in presented
  message

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What is an Advertisement? Why?

• A university prospectus
• A political manifesto
• A film trailer
• A speed limit road sign
• A manufacturers label sewn on the outside of
  clothes e.g. on jeans or trainers
• A shop name on a carrier bag
• A poster in the grounds of a church, with Jesus
  Lives written on it
• A T-shirt with a slogan on it e.g. Time to
  Party
• A Youtube logo in the corner of a videoclip

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Rhetorics

• Rhetorics is the art of persuasion (studied at
  least since Ancient Greece)
• Advertisements are created to interest, inform,
  and convince their audiencein other words, they
  are rhetorical texts
• Are all rhetorical texts advertisements?

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Lies

• There are strong incentives for companies to lie
  and mislead
• Advertisements often disguise their commercial
  nature, pretending instead to be purely
  informative announcements (audience knows to
  react differently to commercial and
  non-commercial text)
• Regulations and consumer protection agencies are
  limited in their effectiveness, particularly in
  regard to shor-term campaigns

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Irony and Games

• Advertising audience becomes more and more savvy
  and discerning, and less susceptible to
  authoritative messages
• The role of advertisement is increasingly to hold
  attention rather than to
• Playful, interesting, and engaging adverts are
  more easily remembered and, in some cases, are
  actively sought out by the audience

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Adbusting
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Adbusting

• Consumer and community reaction against
  prevalence of advertising in public discourse
• Defacement, re-contextualization, and reworking
  of adverts and commercials to unmask or subvert
  their message
• A critical response to commercialisation of
  discourse

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Advertising as propagating culture

• Advertising tends to build upon dominant
  stereotypes, strengthening rather than
  challenging them
• Advertising creates trends, fashions, and as
  much as it responds to them
• Advertising inspires other art forms (e.g. pop
  art)

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Cool Hunting

• Marketers increasingly use tropes originating
  from street culture to promote products often
  only loosely affiliated with that culture
• Many well-known trends and fashions (e.g.
  parkour, hip hop) originated in street culture
  only to be picked up and propagated by commercial
  interests

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Commercials as culture

• Advertising is a mass-appeal art form
• Advertising is used not only to propagate
  commercial products
• Commercials can be (and often are) playful,
  thoughtful, and interesting
• Culture constantly reworks themes and ideas from
  advertising in earnest as well as ironic ways

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Campbell's Soup Can - Andy Warhol (1964)
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