Marketing, Rhetoric and Control

Introduction

In this study, I investigate the tensions that surround the place of persuasion (and, more broadly, control) in marketing. Persuasion has variously been seen as an embarrassment to the discipline, a target for anti-marketing sentiment, the source of marketing’s value in the modern organisation, a mysterious black box inside the otherwise rational and logical endeavour of enterprise, and a rather insignificant part of the marketing programme. I will argue that this multifarious reputation for persuasion within marketing stems from the influence of two quite oppositional paradigms—the scientific and the magico-rhetorical—that ebb and flow across the discourses of its discipline and practice.

The scientific endeavour can be characterised ...