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Why Marketing Is Central to Culture

MARKETING IS NOT just one of the most important ideas in business. It has become the most dominant force in human culture. If this sounds like an outrageously strong claim that no rational person could believe, consider that much of this disbelief stems from misunderstanding “marketing” as a pretentious term for advertising. But marketing is far more than that. It is, ideally, a systematic attempt to fulfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy. It is where the wild frontiers of human nature meet the wild powers of technology. Like chivalrous lovers, the best marketing-oriented companies help us discover desires we never knew we had, and ways of fulfilling them we never imagined.

Almost everything we can buy has been shaped by some marketing people in some company thinking hard about how to sell us things that we think will make us happier. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has spawned the invisible eye. Production is no longer guided by the clumsy feedback provided by last quarter’s profit figures, but by empirical research into human preferences and personalities: focus groups, questionnaires, beta testing, social surveys, and demographics. Psychology has given way to market research as the most important investigator of human nature. For example, as of 2004, about 212,000 Americans worked as market and survey researchers, whereas only about 37,000 worked as psychology professors.

Markets themselves are ancient, but the concept of marketing in its modern form arose only in the twentieth century. In agricultural and mercantile societies there were producers, guilds, traders, bankers, and retailers, but economic consciousness was focused on making money, not on researching and fulfilling consumer desires in any systematic way. Only through trial and error did Albrecht Dürer learn what kinds of prints would sell, or Thomas Chippendale learn which of his chairs would prove fashionable. With the Industrial Revolution, mass production led to a greater emphasis on the cost efficiency of production rather than the satisfaction of the customer. As markets matured in the early twentieth century, businesses had to compete harder for market share, but they did so through advertising and sales promotions aimed at unloading their goods on resistant customers.

Only gradually did corporations understand the relevance of psychology to sales. A key figure was Edward Bernays (1891-1995), a founding theorist of propaganda, public relations, and advertising. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, and used psychoanalytic insights to address what he called the problem of “engineering consent” in a democratic society. He consulted on ad campaigns for Dodge, Procter and Gamble, General Electric, and Cartier, and helped the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita) overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954. In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays argued

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Yet, even Bernays realized that effective manipulation of public opinion required listening to the beliefs and desires of consumers and citizens. Governments and corporations need to listen in confessionals, not just to shout from the pulpit. Good public relations require good public opinion polls, not just good propaganda.

By the time Willie Loman was lamenting the fall of traditional hucksterism in Death of a Salesman in 1949, several consumer-goods companies had developed a more respectful, inquisitive attitude toward the consumer. The marketing revolution they launched came with the same sense of wondrous inevitability that accompanies all scientific revolutions. That a company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince people to buy what the company happens to make, was a radical idea that seems obvious only in retrospect. These corporations established marketing departments dedicated to finding out what people want from their detergents, soaps, and light-bulbs. Their success spawned imitators, and almost all large corporations now include marketing arms that are supposed to coordinate all aspects of product research and development, advertising, promotion, and distribution.

By the 1960s, as more and more marketing executives were promoted to CEO positions, some firms adopted the modern “marketing orientation,” in which everything the firm does is aimed at making profits by satisfying consumers. This constituted an invisible revolution in the 1960s, and though it did not get the same press as the sexual revolution, the hippies, or the New Left, unlike these counterculture trends, the marketing revolution radically changed the way business works. (Indeed, the marketing revolution was largely responsible for the popular spread of countercultural values through cool new products like the Volkswagen T2a Bus, the Enovid contraceptive pill, and Jimi Hendrix records, all of which were often combined enjoyably.)

While the marketing orientation has become commonplace in companies that produce things for individual customers, such as clothes, cars, televisions, and movies, it remains rare in the heavy industries (steel, coal, oil, and paper), where the immediate consumers are other businesses, and where conspicuous consumption and luxury branding are less important. The marketing orientation is also still poorly developed in most service industries such as banking, law, government, the police, the military, medicine, charity, and science. Indeed, most leaders in these sectors do not think of themselves as working in service industries. But until they do, they will not bother using market research to shape their services to their customers’ desires, and their institutions will lose market share to those that do.

The transition from the production orientation to the marketing orientation is still under way, and remains one of the most important but least understood revolutions in human history, marking a decisive power shift from institutions to individuals. Production made workers into technology’s servants; marketing, ideally, makes consumers into technology’s masters. Marketing zealots might even take the view that the marketing revolution renders most of Marx irrelevant: What meaning could “alienation” and “exploitation” have when businesses work so hard to fulfill our desires as consumers?

Generally speaking, intellectuals still don’t understand marketing. It is largely invisible to right-wing economists, who think prices carry all the information about supply and demand that markets need in order to produce the goods and services that people want. There was no role for market research in the worldviews of the economists Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Gary Becker. To left-wing social scientists, journalists, and Hollywood scriptwriters, in contrast, marketing means nothing more than manipulative advertising by greedy corporations. Since they rarely deign to talk to businesspeople, they believe that modern business works like the evil Omni Consumer Products corporation from Robocop. The rare professors who acquire some modest net worth tend to learn much more about investments than about marketing, because while investment advice is everywhere (CNBC, Fox Business Network, personal finance magazines), marketing knowledge lurks as a sort of arcane magic behind this financial-product hucksterism.

One problem is that marketers, like all professionals and academics, are prone to showing off their expertise by using distinctive terms and concepts that are baffling to eavesdroppers. When disempowered subcultures use private jargon, they sound cute. But when marketers with heavy economic firepower do so, they can sound both hilarious and necromantic, like Pentagon acronyms. Consider these lines overhead at the 2006 Intelligent Printing and Packaging Conference, posted on one of Bruce Sterling’s blogs:

• “It’s our metallo-organic approach versus the incumbent technologies”

• “Thermochromic ink is the Pet Rock ink of the New Millennium”

• “We need a taxonomy for printing-that-is-no-longer-printing”

• “Electronic cardboard blurs the line between printed objects and the virtual world”

• “It’s bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble in conductive polymers”

Such canny observations no doubt mean something, but it’s not clear what.

Even within business, although most younger managers understand marketing at a practical level, they do not know how to talk about it as a cultural, economic, social, and psychological revolution, as it is not presented that way to them in business school. Business journalists, likewise, have not brought the marketing revolution into public discourse the way they have brought the “New Economy” of the Internet to the public’s attention. Pundits still talk as if we are moving from an industrial era based on mass production to an information era based on mass entertainment.

Like fish unaware of water, we do not realize that we live in the Age of Marketing. It does not much matter whether products are material or cultural, sold in stores or online. What matters is that products are systematically conceived, designed, tested, produced, and distributed based on the preferences of consumers rather than on the convenience of producers. The New Economy, “Web 2.0,” and “social network marketing” are just the most recent stages in the marketing revolution.

How can we understand this revolution? There are two analogies from history that can help us think about it. Democracy can be seen as the marketing concept applied to government. The American and French revolutions brought the marketing concept to politics long before it gained a toehold in business. The production-oriented state asked what taxpayers could do for it; the marketing-oriented state asks what it can do for voters. Citizens demanded the vote so they could tell government what state services they wanted long before consumer focus groups were telling manufacturers what goods they wanted. “No taxation without representation” came long before “No profits without market research.”

Even before these political revolutions, the Protestant Reformation applied the marketing insight to religion. Martin Luther and John Calvin organized churches to fill the emotional needs of worshipers, not the fiscal interests of priests. They were dissatisfied with a production-oriented papacy that churned out costly rituals in a dead language within opulent cathedrals. They crafted a new form of Christianity based on local languages, simple churches, and glorious music. The thirty thousand current denominations of the Christian faith are just what we would expect from efficient market segmentation given diverse consumers of religious services. Similar shifts occurred from production-oriented Hinayana Buddhism to market-oriented Mahayana Buddhism, and from Orthodox to Reform Judaism. The common denominator in business marketing, political democracy, and religious reform is the transfer of power from service providers to service consumers.

Is the marketing revolution a good thing? On the upside, it promises a golden age in which social institutions and markets are systematically organized on the basis of strong empirical research to maximize human happiness. What science did for perception, marketing promises to do for production: it tests intuition and insight against empirical fact. Market research uses mostly the same empirical tools as experimental psychology, but with larger research budgets, better-defined questions, more representative samples of people, and more social impact. Ideally, marketing’s empiricism works like Rogerian psychotherapy, in which the therapist restates and reflects the patient’s concerns. Marketing holds up a mirror to our selves, reflecting our beliefs and desires so we can recognize, remember, evaluate, and transform them. The invention of real mirrors empowered people to accept or reject potential modifications to their appearance with greater accuracy and objectivity, allowing them to try different makeup, hairstyles, and fashions, to judge what looks good. The marketing revolution empowers us in a similar way, on a longer timescale. It allows us to accept or reject potential ways of displaying our traits through our product choices. We can try on different lifestyles, experience the results, and perhaps even change our consumer preferences if we’re dissatisfied.

On the downside, marketing is the Buddha’s worst nightmare. It is the grand illusion, the Veil of Maya, turned pseudoscientific and backed by billion-dollar advertising campaigns. It perpetuates the delusion that desire leads to fulfillment. It is the enemy of mindful human consciousness, because consciousness is content with its own company, and needs little from the world.

The trouble is not that marketing promotes materialism. Quite the opposite. It promotes a narcissistic pseudospiritualism based on subjective pleasure, social status, romance, and lifestyle, as a product’s mental associations become more important than its actual physical qualities. This is the whole point of advertising and branding—to create associations between a product and the aspirations of the consumer, so the product seems to be worth more to the consumer than its mere physical form could possibly warrant. Marketing actually avoids materialism at all costs, for if consumers comparison shopped solely on the basis of objective material features and costs, the products themselves would be reduced to commodities—and commodities cannot be sold for serious profits in a competitive market.

For example, tap water (about $0.006 per gallon in Albuquerque) is a low-profit commodity, whereas Glacéau SmartWater ($1.39 per thirty-four-ounce bottle, or $5.20 per gallon) is a high-profit branded product. SmartWater sounds like a magical intelligence-boosting elixir from the French Alps, so it can be sold for 870 times the price per volume of commodity water, even though it is really just distilled water with some added electrolytes (a bit of calcium chloride from limestone and magnesium chloride from seawater). However, right after Coca-Cola acquired Glacéau in 2007 for $4.1 billion, SmartWater started to be advertised with the image of a nearly nude Jennifer Aniston. So, commodity water plus limestone and seawater and a nice bottle, plus Aniston’s beauty and fame, yields a profitable brand.

Thus, a world run by marketing to profit from consumer desires will never allow itself to be “commodified” into a “materialistic” world. Rather, it could easily transmute into a virtual reality where neither products nor consumers require any physical qualities at all. Marketing’s logical culmination would not be crass materialism, but the seductive immateralism of The Matrix or Second Life.

Marketing also creates some more immediate problems. Like democracy, it forces intellectual and cultural elites to confront their patronizing attitudes toward the masses. Elites do not always like companies and states that provide what the people desire. Consumers may want sweets, fats, and sugars; cigarettes, beer, and marijuana; motorcycles and handguns; porn videos and prostitutes; breast implants and Viagra; reality TV and formulaic anime. Likewise, if everybody voted, they might want the death penalty, prayer in schools, book burning, ethnic cleansing, fascism, and American Idol. Plato clearly saw the difference between a mass democracy based on universal suffrage, and a republic based on the utopian visions of elites. For the elite, marketing’s populism can be an alarming prospect. Plato thus rejected the marketing orientation—including democracy, which is marketing applied to politics—as a basis for social organization. His ideal benevolent dictator, the philosopher-king, does not organize focus groups, conduct market surveys, or hold elections to decide his policies. The common folk cannot be trusted to understand their true long-term interests, for the mismatch between their primitive instincts and the behavioral demands of civilized life are so severe that the enlightened minority must control the ignorant majority, for the greater good. Confucius had similar views: the patriarch must rule the family, just as the emperor must rule the nation, to impose civilized order on natural anarchy.

This Platonic-Confucian tradition dominated European and Asian political theory for millennia. It can still be seen today, whenever elites argue that the state should collect taxes and provide certain services that people can’t or won’t buy as individuals. Sometimes these state-organized services seem sensible (roads, fire departments, health care, the BBC), sometimes not (farming subsidies, fraudulent wars, bridges to nowhere). The Platonic-Confucian ideal also comes into play whenever elites argue that some product or behavior must be banned. (Sometimes the elites have a point: even among Second Amendment extremists, few would advocate that your local Target store should be allowed to sell FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles.)

Marketing, like democracy, has the (often untapped) potential to be anti-arrogance, anti-power, and anti-idealism. It can, in principle, replace elitist progressive visions based on the illusion of popular consent with the reality of a world shaped to fulfill ordinary human desires. It is tempting to minimize the marketing revolution, to naïvely propose that the most significant revolutions of the past millennia have been technological inventions that expand production capabilities, or scientific ideas that inform elite ideals. If we do choose to ignore the marketing revolution, we do so because we are terrified of a world in which our elite ideals lose their power to control the fruits of technology. (If you have the leisure time, education, and inclination to read this book, you are obviously a member of the elite.) Marketing threatens to put infinite production ability in the service of infinite human lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, greed, envy, and pride. It portends a world of Idiocracy, Cinnabons, and Super Bowls. It threatens to atomize human society into 6 billion navel-gazing blog writers.

Or is the elite’s fear of that prospect just another self-deceptive rationale for keeping a stranglehold on power? Fear of an economy based on market research, like Plato’s fear of democracy based on universal suffrage, is based on contempt for fellow members of our species. Elites hate to recognize the marketing revolution because they hate to acknowledge that contempt. Marketing is the most important invention of the past two millennia because it is the only revolution that has ever succeeded in bringing real economic power to the people. It is not just the power to redistribute wealth, to split the social cake into different pieces. Rather, it is the power to make our means of production transform the natural world into a playground for human passions.

Ecologists estimate that humans now consume more than half our planet’s “net primary productivity”—more than half the biomass grown each year on earth. One lucky species, out of 20 million, sucks up half of the biosphere’s annual output, and transforms it into work roles and leisure activities that are structured mainly by marketing. Marketing does not just dominate human culture; since human culture dominates the matter and energy flows that constitute terrestrial life, it also, at this historical moment, dominates life on earth.

Marketing Versus Memes

This blindness to marketing’s cultural role became especially clear when I joined a debate about memes, moderated by Richard Dawkins, at Oxford University in May 1999. My debating partner, the British psychologist Susan Blackmore, had just published her book The Meme Machine. She argued, following Dawkins, that much of human culture reflects an evolutionary competition between memes: information units such as stories, anecdotes, ideas, catchphrases, or jingles that can be remembered and repeated to others. Memes that are salient, memorable, and communicable (like celebrity gossip and human interest stories) are expected to proliferate and spread. Memes that are irrelevant and forgettable (like the fact that a proton has about 1,836 times the mass of an electron) should fade quickly from popular consciousness (despite the best efforts of high school physics teachers). According to Blackmore, human popular culture consists of successful memes that reflect the interests and preferences of individual humans.

The meme idea has always seemed fascinating and provocative, especially in Blackmore’s book. However, I argued a somewhat different line: most successful memes are imposed top down by marketing, in the interests of certain powerful individuals, groups, and institutions. It seemed clear that the most successful memes—religions, political ideologies, languages, cultural norms, technologies-have been disseminated by churches, states, school systems, and corporations with immense wealth and power. In principle, marketing responds to pre-existing consumer preferences. In fact, marketers sometimes refer to their work as “cultural engineering”—the intentional creation and dissemination of new culture units (memes) through advertising, branding, and public relations.

Even the proliferation of ordinary memes (such as buzz about films, new social and political issues, countries to fear this year) is dominated by the six global media conglomerates:

• TimeWarner ($45 billion in revenue, 87,000 employees as of 2006), including Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, AOL, CompuServe, Atlantic Records, HBO, CNN, Time Warner Cable, Turner Broadcasting, Time-Life Books, and the magazines Time, Life, Money, and People

• Disney ($34 billion in revenue, 133,000 employees), including Touchstone, Miramax, Buena Vista, ABC TV, ESPN TV, Hyperion Books, Discover magazine, and ABC Radio Networks

• NewsCorp ($25 billion in revenue, 47,000 employees), including Twentieth Century Fox, Fox TV, Sky satellite TV, Sky Radio, HarperCollins Books, TV Guide, and 175 newspapers

• Vivendi Universal ($20 billion in revenue, 34,000 employees), including Universal Studios, Geffen Records, Polygram, Universal Music Group, Canal+ TV, and Universal Television Group

• Bertelsmann ($20 billion in revenue, 97,000 employees), including UFA Film and TV, Barnes and Noble, BMG Music Publishing, RCA Records, AOL Europe, and the publishers Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Doubleday, Dell, Fodors, Knopf, and Random House

• Viacom ($10 billion in revenue, 9,500 employees), including Paramount, United Cinemas, CBS TV, MTV, Showtime TV, Simon & Schuster, Infinity Radio, and Viacom Outdoor advertising

These conglomerates relentlessly cross-promote their TV channels, films, magazines, and books through all available media. For example, if Warner Bros. releases a big-budget film such as The Dark Knight, it will typically be featured on the covers of Time and People magazines, reviewed favorably on CNN, and well advertised on AOL. This is not conspiracy theory; it’s just good business sense and standard operating procedure for media conglomerates.

Apart from these big six media conglomerates, there are the four big advertising holding companies:

• Omnicon ($13 billion, 61,000 employees)

• WPP ($12 billion in revenue, 100,000 employees in 106 countries as of 2007)

• Interpublic ($7 billion, 43,000 employees)

• Publicis ($6 billion, 44,000 employees)

Most academics have never heard of these companies, but they are at the heart of cultural engineering, as they are involved not only in advertising, but also design, marketing, media buying, public relations, and lobbying. They design the memes, buy the airtime and column inches to distribute them, and measure how well the memes are achieving their purposes in promoting consumer, investor, and political recognition for their clients. Altogether, about $400 billion per year is spent in the global ad market—money spent specifically to promote some memes, brands, products, and people at the expense of others.

Consider another example of cultural engineering: food preferences. Every evolutionary psychology textbook suggests that our fast-food cravings for fat, salt, and sugar are innate, evolved preferences. The theory is that because these nutrients were so rare and valuable in prehistory, we inherited an insatiable desire for them that is now counterproductive, making us fat and sick. Honey was hard to get in the Pleistocene, so now we can’t help but eat two-hundred-calorie Krispy Kreme doughnuts. This evolutionary view nicely accounts for some cross-cultural universals in food preferences.

Meme theory offers a different view: maybe we consume steaks, doughnuts, and sodas because we’ve seen others do so, and have imitated their eating habits. We could just as well have ended up favoring pickled tofu and Siberian kale, but the random dynamics of meme evolution took us in a different direction. This meme view might likewise explain some cross-cultural differences in food preferences, such as why Americans tend to turn all naturally savory foods into sweet desserts, by such measures as adding barbecue sauce to meat, ketchup to french fries, honey-mustard dressing to salad, sugar to bread, and corn syrup to water (“soda”).

While their insights are valuable, it would be helpful for both evolutionary psychologists and meme theorists also to recognize the economic, political, and marketing power of the global food industry. In the United States, we have a lot of fat, salt, and sugar in processed foods partly because there are rich, powerful trade organizations that lobby politicians very effectively for government subsidies and contracts, weaker regulations, and tort reform to minimize liability, including the National Council of Chain Restaurants, National Grocers Association, Food Products Association, Food Marketing Institute, and Grocery Manufacturers of America. The National Restaurant Association represents the nine hundred thousand U.S. restaurants, which employ 12.2 million workers and earn $476 billion in revenue per year. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association represents eight hundred thousand ranchers who “harvest” about 26 billion pounds of beef per year from 35 million cattle. The National Chicken Council represents massive companies such as Tyson, Gold Kist, Pilgrim’s Pride, and ConAgra, which sell about 600 million pounds of chicken flesh per week in the United States, by killing about 8 billion chickens per year. Further promoting fat and protein consumption are the American Meat Institute, National Pork Board, National Turkey Federation, International Dairy Foods Association, and National Milk Producers Federation. To promote salt consumption, we have the Snack Food Association and National Association of Convenience Stores. To promote sugar consumption, we have the Sugar Association, Association for Dressings and Sauces, and International Jelly and Preserves Association. The Corn Refiners Association is especially important, since it represents the U.S. “corn wet-milling industry,” which manufactures about 25 billion pounds of high-fructose corn syrup per year. Corn syrup is the main ingredient in sodas (apart from water), and each American consumes on average about forty-five grams of it per day.

So, we doubtlessly have some innate liking for fat, salt, and sugar. The lobbyists and trade organizations do not create the demand for these tastes out of thin air—otherwise the Pickled Tofu Marketing Institute and U.S. Kale Association would have greater funding, influence, and success. Nonetheless, these more-powerful industry groups hugely amplify our evolved food preferences through massive political clout and marketing budgets for their food groups.

The shaping of such ideas, tastes, norms, habits, and memes by social power systems is exactly what the social sciences study. It is the very lifeblood of political science, sociology, and media studies. These sciences have realized through decades of research that they can’t jump straight from individual psychology to mass culture through a simple model of meme evolution; that would be as naïve as market fanatics thinking that political anarchy plus the economics of supply and demand would yield utopia. We also have to consider social institutions and interests. Meme perpetration—conscious, deliberate, institutionalized strategies for shaping popular views and preferences—is what millions of people are paid to do every day when they work as marketers, advertisers, retailers, or public relations experts.

The market fanatics are right in one respect: marketing’s power is quite decentralized. There is no unified conspiracy, no secret Masonic Temple, to perpetuate capitalism, consumerism, patriarchy, hetero-sexism, racism, or general mass stupidity and apathy. The World Trade Organization is just 630 folks working in a five-story office building at 154 Rue de Lausanne in Geneva. Mostly, marketers are not trying to perpetuate the power systems that social scientists analyze; they’re just trying to increase market share for their companies. Marketers are often portrayed as evil geniuses, but in reality, they’re typically floundering around like everybody else. They try to keep up with the latest consumer psychology fads by reading the shortest available pop-business books by eccentric writers with extremely large or small quantities of hair.

So, none of the extreme views offered by modern science works very well to understand marketing. The innate-preferences theory and meme theory neglect marketing power entirely; the social science conspiracy theories neglect the decentralized, dog-eat-dog, ill-educated competition among marketers. As a result, most behavioral sciences—psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science—have rarely taken marketing seriously, with the result that they have largely ignored the mainspring of modern culture, the central force that amplifies, dampens, distorts, frustrates, or fulfills human nature.