‘Murketing’ and the rhetoric of the new sincerity

Abstract

This paper argues that marketing scholars should be paying a lot more attention to the rhetorical form which the economic historian Philip Mirowski-following the novelist David Foster Wallace-calls murketing. Combining philosophical, historical, economic and fictional resources, the paper first produces a synthetic account of what murketing is. Blurring calculated dishonesty with impassioned sincerity, murketing operationalises a double-truth dialectic which treats consumers as both subjects and objects within the process of their own persuasion. In order to indicate how murketing works, the paper then considers recent examples from murketing practice where allusions are made which are both cynical and gnostic, both conceited and intimate, and both earnest and ironic. The paper closes by indicating how its account of the theory and practice of murketing might inform the future study, consumption and regulation of advertising and marketing communications.

Bleak signs of our times: Descent into ‘Terminal Marketing’

“…The conventions of marketing and consumer research 1 stand in stark contrast to these Deleuzo-Baconian screams. Rather, they been invested in silences that produce and maintain certain orthodoxies (see Alvesson, 1994; Dunne, 2018; Eckhardt et al, 2018; Kravets and Varman, 2022; Tadajewski and Saren, 2008). Critical positions that question the politics of marketing theory and practice have often been hushed, muted or elided.…”

“…To echo Jameson (1991) we live in a time where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and if indeed the future is cancelled (Fisher, 2014a) and our cultural and social imaginary is reduced to various forms of historic mish-mash presented under the veneer of the new (Ahlberg et al, 2021), new affective encounters and subsequent shocks to thought appear increasingly necessary for the invocation of possibility itself. Similar to Bacon’s paintings, TM studies seek to rupture the therapeutic representations and the new ubiquitous sincerity of marketing (Fisher, 2014b; also Dunne, 2018) without providing an alternative that capitalism could readily capitalize upon. Today, there is a global atmosphere where disasters seem to be offloading each other faster than one can keep up, and as a recourse to the shortcomings of raising awareness, less talking and more screaming appears strikingly relevant.…”

De-romanticising critical marketing theory: capitalist corruption as the Left’s Žižekean fantasy

“…this open question proves productive in (a) challenging Marxists to understand the psychological processes that play into the struggle between capitalism and communism, and (b) contextualising psychoanalytic insights within a system that is not only sociocultural but also a political economy. For instance, thinking through Marxism and psychoanalysis allows one to consider why informed consumers may actually enjoy indirectly harming others by consuming excessively and unethically (Böhm and Batta, 2010;Cluley and Dunne, 2012), or how marketing practitioners may sincerely believe that their acts of perpetuating capitalism are for the best (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016;Dunne, 2018). But in addition to these acts of deconstructing the individualistic and destructive desires of the capitalist status quo, Marxist thought also seeks to reconstruct postcapitalist possibilities around "a collective desire for collective desire" (Cova et al 2013, p.219).…”

Marketing strategy and the hunt for era V

“…One power effect of this is political indifference (Gicquel, 2017), derealization (Varman and Al-Almoudi, 2016) or a numericalising of the other, with potential to distance the enactment from the consequence (McCabe, 2016). Elsewhere Dunne (2018) points to the political-economic implications that arise from language by urging us to appreciate the world of 'murketing', a "rhetorical craft" (p.1298) where marketer and consumer have grown so accustomed to each others' discourses and tactics that all that remains is a flirtatious interchange where persuasion is accomplished through a double truth dialectic. In the process, principles such as intimacy and sincerity seamlessly encompass conceit and irony.…”