Marketing, Rhetoric and Control

2Marketing Scholarship and Rhetoric

The extant marketing literature that recruits one or more aspects of the rhetorical tradition as framework, point of comparison, or theoretical foundation can be divided into three main areas. Firstly, there is research that has looked at marketing communication practices in order to identify the use of traditional rhetorical tools and techniques (most commonly the ‘figures of speech’). Secondly, there is research that has looked at marketing scholarship for evidence of rhetorical strategies—treating the academic marketing word as persuasive communication. Finally, there is a small amount of research that has sought (like the current work) to argue that marketing is entirely a rhetorical enterprise. I will ...