Journal of Consumer Culture

12(1) 106–114

! The Author(s) 2012

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DOI: 10.1177/1469540511429503

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Detlev Zwick and Julien Cayla (eds) Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies and Devices, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2011; 320 pp. $85 ISBN 0199576742 (hbk)

Zwick and Cayla have assembled an excellent series of commentaries and empiricalreports into the strangely pervasive world of marketing. Spread across analyticalcategories of studying marketing differently, marketing as performance, politicaleconomy and the ideological diffusion of marketing practice, this comprehensiveexploration leaves marketing best thought of, as Sherry puts it, as ‘a well intendedbut impoverished philosophy’. Despite intentions, marketing’s ideological opera-tions, strategic interventions and logical short-circuits are revealed to be globaliz-ing, incoherent and politically dynamic but also ingenious and downright hilarious.

The editors resist conventional understandings and frame marketing as a processof engagement through which products and services come into being, acquiremeaning, obtain value and are determined, contested and provisionally givenstable forms. Throughout the volume we see processes of valorization, stabaliza-tion and destabilization of market boundaries, strategic cultural interventions andpolitical economic acts in which consumers are subjects of bio-political injunctions.The conceptual high point is provided by Slater’s analysis of marketing as mon-strosity because its immateriality, cultural orientation and empirical unproveabilityoffend and contaminate ordinary commercial practice. Marketing, then, is a faultline between commercial practice, economy and culture and this produces messyand contradictory conceptions: ‘consumer culture’ is argued to be contradictorybecause a culture driven by market needs is not a culture, whilst economists’ invo-cation of the analytic framework of a market, as though there is such a stableentity, is a methodological violence that brackets marketers’ efforts to disruptfixity. The outcome for Slater, paraphrasing Latour, is that ‘we have never donemarketing’. Also Latourian, Cochoy opposes focussing upon interplays of con-sumers and marketers whilst neglecting the objects that modify the actions andidentities of both on the basis of an actor–network theory account of changinggrocery shop designs.

However, for incoherent marketing practice, see Sunderland and Denny’s tale ofslippage, false assumptions and all-too-human consumer research that rendered alarge-scale study a pitiful fare-thee-well. More market research farce is revealed byGranclement and Gaglio who explain the focus group: eight strangers gathered onthe basis of their connection to categories to which they are deemed to belong,

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asked often nonsensical questions and on the basis of their responses, knowledgeregarding how the consumer sees the world emerges for the benefit of researchersbehind one-way mirrors who sneer at the spectacle of real consumers as thoughthey are a discovered anthropological other. Inevitably Grancelment & Gaglioreport a product manager – I would like to think of him as the Great UnknownMarketer – exasperating ‘they just repeat what I kill myself explaining to col-leagues’, demonstrating his ingeniously emphatic understanding of these mysteri-ous subjects that we call ‘real consumers’. Further strangeness is documented byDesroches and Marcoux’s account of L’Oreal marketing managers’ quest to getclose to sensuous consumers, which entails going to women’s apartments, observ-ing them in their bathrooms and conducting weird ‘sniff tests’.

Comedy is never too far away yet the text trawls marketing’s dark side. Brown’sanalysis of black models and the invention of the US ‘Negro Market’ presentsadvertisements that invoke slave tropes. Here, the inclusion of black people inadvertisements and market segments became a civil rights campaign and ameans through which consumption could serve to achieve inclusion into US citi-zenship. Meanwhile Arvidsson and Malossi reveal customer co-production in thefashion world and the transformation of networks of urban cool into social facto-ries of immaterial production where innovations are rationalized and then inter-nalized as professional practices. Also concerned with immaterial production andits bio-politicality is Zwick and Ozalp’s study of regenerating downtown Toronto.Home buyers are attracted by cool downtown living, but this lifestyle does not existand must be produced by the residents as exchange becomes inverted because thehigher price paid by consumers reflects an extra value that they must produce as anoutput of their ‘leisure time’.

Exploring the diffusion of marketing ideology Cayla and Penaloza demonstratehow Indian marketing promotes western consumerism as development; a teleolog-ical essentially consumerist view where marketers understand their country to beprimitive because consumers have not embraced breakfast cereals. Cook chartshow child marketing became normalized and valorized through appealing ideassuch as the ‘savvy child consumer’. Applbaum explores public interest and privatecommodity via the inverse relationship between quality of health care and market-ing practice, revealing that pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) istypically marketing research that develops the means of convincing people thatthey need a medical intervention. Applbaum attacks marketing humanists whoadvocate marketing solutions to societal ills and their logic of privitization.Neoliberalism is further critiqued in Moor’s analysis of social marketing and thegovernance of populations; practices that reify logics of consumers in a fullyfledged market society and economizations that bracket political intervention.

The question of efficacy, located across incoherent dubious ideology emerges asa central enigma – does this marketing actually work? Where do we draw the linebetween a Packard fantasy of effective hidden persuaders versus Dilbert-esquenonsense? As Slater implies, the question is naive given marketing’s unproveability.However, the volume points towards two answers. First, the cultivation of the

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real consumer serves an agenda for what matters managerially rather than foractual consumers: it must ‘work’ for the client paying for the research and itmust ‘work’ for the agency and marketing’s effectiveness exists across these corpo-rate networks. Second, notwithstanding Ponzi-esque logic, it is clear that consumerculture can be consequentially rearranged in terms of what people do and how theydo it; in other words, marketing works despite itself.

The volume presents an excellent, comprehensive and high-quality analysis intopervasive and determinate practices. How strange that such political economicanalysis and consideration of the impact of the diffusion of marketing ideologyvia practice seem rare.

Reviewed by Alan Bradshaw

University of London, UK

David Buckingham and Vegbjørg Tingstad (eds) Childhood and Consumer Culture (Studies

in Childhood and Youth) Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2010; 266 pp. £55.

ISBN 9780230227835 (hbk)

This volume on childhood and consumer culture, edited by David Buckingham andVegbjørg Tingstad, opens by addressing the often repeated argument that thedichotomous construction of childhood in consumer culture arises from an endur-ing tension between markets and moralities. It is a tension that continues to repro-duce binary oppositions such as sacred child/profane market, innocent child/media-savvy child, exploited child/empowered child. Yet, as the editors note, it isobvious by now that it is essential to move beyond these simple dichotomies and tofocus on the ways in which consumer culture shapes children and childhood, and isshaped by them. As Buckingham and Tingstad put it: ‘We need to address howconsumption practices are carried out in these different settings [i.e. family, peergroup, school], and how they are implicated in the management of power, time andspace’ (p. 6).

While the edited volume tackles these issues, it also makes it obvious that studiesof children’s consumption are not a unified field of study that shares disciplinaryambitions. The book is a selection of the best papers presented at the third inter-national conference on Child and Teen Consumption held in 2008 at theNorwegian Centre for Child Research in Trondheim. The contributors, who com-prise both well-established and younger scholars, come from different fields, includ-ing history, sociology, childhood studies, marketing and education. Thismultidisciplinarity is reflected in the various choices of theories, methods andapproaches utilized in the volume. The only thing that the scholars seem to havein common is that they address issues of childhood and consumer culture. The lackof intertextuality means that the compilation as a whole makes a less substantialcontribution to the study of children and consumer culture than it might otherwisehave done.

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