`Don't forget the fruit gums, chum': marketing under erasure and renewal

Abstract

The world's best marketers are blessed with a peculiar inventiveness that stems from experiencing the world as a novelty, which is why the marketing discipline in general has a good memory for forgetting. In this paper then, we contend that amnesia in marketing academia is perfectly healthy, and indeed functions as a key component of our creative, ideas-laden discipline. We argue that the marketer's natural inclination towards erasure and renewal, towards always wiping the slate clean, should be encouraged, not cured. In marshalling the evidence in favour of forgetting, we pull apart the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, demonstrate how forgetting is integral to the academic sensibility, and question how much of the marketing literature is worth remembering in the first place. New and improvedMarketing has a good memory for forgetting. Whether as a consequence of the socalled 'end of history' thesis promulgated by postmodernists or not, it is clear that many marketing thinkers and theorists frequently ignore our discipline's prodigious history. You could say they are amnesiac neophiliacs. After all, marketing's life-blood is a consumer culture sustained by what Walter Benjamin (2003: 179), paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, calls the 'eternal recurrence of the new'. In 449 Volume 8(4): 449-463

Mapping the absence: a theological critique of posthumanist influences in marketing and consumer research

“…While we do not disagree with the theorising outlined above, we also believe that subtler forces than surface ideologies are at play here. What we suggest instead is that the growing interest in the various posthumanist tendencies exhibited by marketing and consumer research scholars is not necessarily dictated primarily by a tendency to jump on the bandwagon of the new 'cool' things coming from other social sciences or humanities (Bode & Østergaard, 2013;Cova et al, 2013;Patterson et al, 2008). Rather, we claim that the adoption bares striking similarity to age-old theological ideas.…”

“…As we have noted, shedding light on how theological reflections thought long lost share much in common with various posthumanist anti-essentialist approaches can also inform us how marketing scholarship is always seeking conceptual novelty (e.g. Patterson et al, 2008) in a historical sense. In the literature, these frameworks are generally seen to hold the promise of disrupting and breaking age-old hegemonic narratives and thus tend to constitute a liberatory potential.…”

Our Obsolete Marketing Mentality: George Fisk, Meet Karl Polanyi

“…One is simply for the intellectual stimulation. Paying attention to a discipline’s history of thought can help avoid intellectual amnesia (McCullough 2002; Ritzer 1989; Tadajewski and Saren 2008), and thereby avoid reinventing the wheel by using new terms to express old concepts (see Patterson, Bradshaw and Brown 2008 for an alternative take on this). An awareness of a discipline’s history of thought also provides the intellectual heritage and a sense of origin that aids in connecting academic research in marketing to marketing’s lineage and genealogy.…”

Performing place promotion—On implaced identity in marketized geographies

“…The marketization of geographical knowledge thus appears faceless, an array of flows born from no single source (Hardt and Negri, 2001). It is everywhere in its continuous act of disappearance, moving from discursive emergence to mundanity (also Botez and Hietanen, 2017; Patterson et al, 2008; Tadajewski and Saren, 2008). Despite its opacity, what the flow, enactments, and machinations constituted by “the market” leave in their wake is an intensified understanding of place through inherently commercial rationales.…”