Marketing, Rhetoric and Control

The Magical Foundations of Marketing Theory

Christopher Miles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317212577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Marketing, Rhetoric and Control investigates the tensions that surround the place of persuasion (and, more broadly, control) in marketing. Persuasion has variously been seen as an embarrassment to the discipline, a target for anti-marketing sentiment, the source of marketing's value in the modern organisation, a mysterious black box inside the otherwise rational and logical endeavour of enterprise, and a rather insignificant part of the marketing programme. This book argues that this multifarious reputation for persuasion within marketing stems from the influence of two quite oppositional paradigms – the scientific and the magico-rhetorical – that ebb and flow across the discourses of its discipline and practice.

Constructing an interface between original, challenging close readings of texts from the beginnings of the Western rhetorical tradition and an examination of the ways in which marketing has set about describing itself, this text argues for a Sophistic interpretation of marketing. From this perspective, marketing is understood as providing intermediary services to facilitate the continuing exchange of attention and regard between firm/client and stakeholders. It seeks to manage and direct this exchange through an appreciation of the changing rational and irrational motivations of the firm and stakeholders, using these as resources for the construction of both planned and improvised persuasive interactions in agonistic (or competitive) environments.

This book is aimed primarily at researchers and academics working in the fields of marketing, marketing communications, and the related disciplines of marketing theory, critical marketing, and digital marketing. It will also be of value to marketing academics in business schools, including those working in the areas of media and communication studies who have an interest in commercial and corporate communication, brand use of interactive media, and communication theory.

1
A History of Rhetoric for Marketers

This chapter provides a grounding in the history of rhetoric so that the reader can later be brought to an understanding of exactly how modern marketing (both its theory and practice) represents the most sophisticated, influential, and articulated flourishing of the rhetorical tradition. The fact that, by and large, both marketing and modern rhetorical studies do not recognise this connection can be argued to be a, rather ironic, function of marketing’s own rhetorical success. In order to lay out the case for this position, we will initially have to concern ourselves with definitions of rhetoric and an overview of its history. In looking at how rhetoric has evolved over time we can develop some appreciation of how its practice, purpose, and public status have altered in response to changes in society and culture. In particular, I wish to emphasise the ways that rhetoric has been expected to be used professionally—for what purposes and by whom has rhetoric been employed?

In constructing this history, I have tried to write it from the perspective of the key concepts that develop around the art of persuasion. While this means that I will inevitably have to cover some historical material, to give an idea of how certain concepts became popular or unpopular and to trace the evolution of the discipline, I will be trying to present this historical material in a way that is grounded as much as possible in considerations of the main rhetorical concepts that will be important for the reader’s full appreciation of the later arguments that I will be constructing regarding the relationship between marketing and rhetoric. The marketing scholarship on rhetoric, which I will be examining in detail in Chapter 2, has generally not attempted to provide readers with an understanding of the historical development of rhetoric. Journal articles tend to quickly fill in some sense of Aristotle’s legacy in the systematisation of rhetoric and then move on to the more important business of finding rhetoric in marketing communication executions or interpreting marketing writing in the light of narrow definitions. It is, therefore, important in a book that intends to argue that marketing is fundamentally and completely rhetorical that a wider, more detailed overview of the long development of thinking around Western rhetoric is provided for the reader. What follows, however, is just that—an overview designed to sketch out some aspects of the evolution of the field and provide the interested reader with some jumping off points for their own further reading. The reader who is well versed in the rhetorical tradition might skip ahead to Chapter 2, where I examine the ways in which this tradition has been applied in marketing scholarship.

Western rhetoric was born in ancient Greece, though the exact nature of its origins is shrouded in obscurity and argument (perhaps not unfittingly). The discipline does have its oft-repeated foundation myth, however, and this identifies the inventors of rhetoric as Corax and Tisias, who are alleged to have authored a treatise on the art of public speaking around 476 BCE in the city-state of Syracuse (in what we now call Sicily). Syracuse had recently transformed from a tyranny to a democracy and, as a result, many private citizens found that they had to represent themselves in claims to recover land that the earlier tyrants had stolen from them (Kennedy, 1994; Murphy et al., 2014). Corax and Tisias, so the story goes, sought to take advantage of the great demand for instruction in persuasive discourse that attended this flourishing of litigation. This timely exploitation of a marketing niche brought them to produce the first codification of the techne (or art) of persuasive oratory (though this work is now lost to us). Tisias was the pupil of Corax, and it is this relationship that provides the frame for perhaps the most famous story regarding the Sicilian pair to come down to us. It is said that Corax sued Tisias for unpaid tuition fees. Corax’s argument was that Tisias will inevitably pay, for if he won then the court must judge his education to be successful and thus worthy of payment, whereas if he lost the court would force Tisias to pay anyway. Of course, Tisias used exactly the same argument to argue for his own success—the court could not expect him to pay if he lost to Corax for that would prove that Corax’s own teaching was useless. The court is thought to have given up and walked away from the whole mess.

The move towards democracy in Athens meant that similar opportunities were available in the significantly larger and more influential market there. The courts of Athens in the fifth century BCE were boisterous affairs. With no judges or lawyers, prosecuting and defending parties had to convince a jury of at least 201 members (often significantly more) of the truth of their arguments. This meant that everything hinged upon the effectiveness of speeches and, as a consequence, the demand for custom-written addresses to the court provided by a logographos was intense. At the same time, political decisions in Athens were made in a similar way. Radical democracy meant that any Athenian citizen could speak in the assembly, but in practice the power to influence the assembly lay in the hands of effective speakers who “represented the views of shifting factions within the state” (Kennedy, 1994, p. 16). Such speakers, sometimes called demagogues, could stir the assembly to ill-considered decisions that often might go against the long-term interests of the city-state.

The Sophists and the Birth of Rhetoric

It is in this environment that the thinkers we now know as the Sophists flourished (their name coming from the Greek for ‘wise’, sophos). Murphy et al. (2014) note that “while the term applied originally to any wise person, it soon came to denote those who engaged in the art of rhetoric in the courts, the legislature, and/or the public forum” (p. 28). Sophists might earn their living from the teaching of argumentation, the writing of speeches for others, or from the public display of their oratorical skills. Now, all three of these vocational directions will lead at some point to the Sophist having to construct an effective argument for a case that might be called (to use Aristotle’s terminology) the weaker. So, a speechwriter will compose a plea for a client whose case might be full of holes, a teacher might build an exemplary argument for a patently absurd case in order to teach the use of particular tropes and strategies, and an orator who lives on the generosity of the crowd will sometimes seek to display his admirable skills in ways that are greatly entertaining precisely because they clearly make the weaker case the stronger. Modern marketers are, of course, familiar with the pressures; sometimes the realities of the profession mean that marketing skills are used to valorise a shoddy product or weak brand. Your campaign can still win a Cleo even if it is for a nutritionally suspect soft drink that others are convinced contributes to teen obesity levels. Indeed, in the same way that modern marketing is routinely lambasted for being at the root of a host of social ills (Critser, 2003; Chomsky, 2012; Klein, 2009; Malkan, 2007; Moss, 2013; Schlosser, 2002), the Sophists attracted a reputation for a dangerous lack of consideration towards the truth and for being concerned with victory in argument at any cost (called eristic argument). The nature of Sophistic argument and how it relates to what will later flower into the discipline of rhetoric is important to my thesis linking rhetoric and marketing, so I will spend a little time delineating the principal perspectives that surround it and we will return to it in later sections.

Much of the way that Sophistic practice is now understood has come down to us from the discourse of those who have sought to attack it. In particular, the works of Plato and Aristotle have powerfully influenced later understanding of the Sophists, tainting them with the “stigma of deception” (Tindale, 2004, p. 40). Platonic dialogues such as Euthydemus, Gorgias, Hippias Major, and Protagoras characterise their eponymous Sophists as unconcerned with objective or ultimate truth (aletheia), instead focused upon the importance of opinion (doxa) and how it can be swayed by appeal to an audience’s sense of what is most likely or probable (eikos). For Plato, such an approach is diametrically opposed to his own project of finding the truth of the good life because it leads to a mercenary style of relativism. The root of Sophistic eikos can be found in Protagoras ‘measure maxim’. Protagoras (484–411 BCE), along with Gorgias, is the most famous of the Sophists and was the first to settle in Athens. His ‘measure maxim’ asserts that “man is the measure of all things, of things that are as to how they are, and of things that are not as to how they are not” (quoted in Murphy et al., 2014, p. 31). The meaning here is that man cannot perceive the truth behind appearances; all we can do is to pay attention to our own subjective experiences, to the way that things seem to us. Consequently, it follows that in deciding upon any issue we should ask ourselves ‘what is the more probable’? In doing so, each of us will look upon our own experience and make a judgement. Such a position was not just antithetical to Plato, of course. Many aspects of Athenian culture assumed the existence of absolute truths and the “rampant individualism” (ibid.) displayed in the teaching of the Sophists (almost every one of them metics, or foreign-born immigrants to Athens) generated much anxiety in the city-state while at the same time contributing “to a more pluralistic and tolerant society than would exist at any other time in Greece” (Smith, 2003, p. 47).

One of the most obvious methodological differences between the Sophists and Plato is the former’s focus on public argument, often instantiated in lengthy speeches, which contrasts with the latter’s belief in “interior reasoning” (Tindale, 2010, p. 33). Disputing in public meant that Sophists relied upon the audience. This meant, from Plato’s perspective, that they cared “not for truth but only for persuading their audience” (ibid.). The Socratic elenchus (the question and answer pattern Plato has Socrates use in the dialogues) is far better suited to intimate argumentation between a few friends. It is also more adapted to the hunting down of small detail around specialised aspects of topics. The long speeches that were the Sophists’ tool in trade were primarily concerned with portraying the bigger picture, the wide sweep of a topic, in order to win over a large audience. Perhaps the most famous example of the power of Sophistic speech-making is Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen. Gorgias represents the final important element in Sophistic style and that is the power of poetic oratory. The Encomium provides four reasons why Helen should be considered blameless in the events surrounding her kidnapping by Paris. By Gorgias’ time, Helen’s part in the horror of the Trojan War had been much mulled over by generations of poets, playwrights, and philosophers and one’s view of her guilt or innocence was a litmus test for where one stood “in the emerging Greek sense of morality” (Murphy et al., 2014, p. 233). The Encomium is famous for two reasons. Firstly, it is a clear application of Gorgias’ poetic style to argumentative purposes—Gorgias plays with patterns of length, rhyme, and sound throughout the piece to great effect. Secondly, it contains a description of how Gorgias saw the operation of persuasion through the power of words that has become canonical in regard to the practice of rhetoric. In the Encomium Gorgias considers four reasons as to why Helen voyaged to Troy (abandoning Sparta and her husband, Menelaus). The third possibility, and the one that he spends the most time considering, is that “speech persuaded her, and deceived her soul” (ibid., p. 234). For Gorgias, speech (logos) “is a powerful lord” that can alter the “opinion of the soul” as if by the arts of witchcraft or magic”. The persuader is therefore a “user of force” and can rely upon the power of speech as having “the same effect on the condition of the soul as the application of drugs to the state of bodies” (ibid.). As Conley (1990) remarks, this means that “the relationship between speaker and audience is, so to speak, ‘asymmetric’ as it is the speaker who casts a spell over the audience and not the other way around” (p. 6). In addition, we should note that Gorgias’ Encomium is itself an example of the power of logos to bewitch—it “both pays homage to the power of logos to create impressions and at the same time uses it to do so” (Tindale, 2004, p. 47). It advertises the power of which it speaks through its continuing power to enchant even in the twenty-first century.

I will be giving the Sophists significantly more attention in later stages of this study. Their legacy is, I will argue, central to a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical and magical nature of marketing. For now, though, we need to move on to consider the way in which competing and later Greek philosophers reacted to Sophistic rhetoric by constructing a systematised, bounded approach to persuasive argumentation that sought to cleanse public discourse of some of the more apparently irrational and dangerous aspects of Sophistic practice.

Plato and Anti-Rhetoric

It is no wonder that, despite their moral relativism and sceptical perspectives, Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, Antiphon and Isocrates had such tremendous influence over the education of Athenian youth. Their emphasis on the cultivation of effective, persuasive speech had great practical value in the radical democracy of Athens. They were also very much part of the market—the sold their skills as teachers, speechwriters, speech-makers, and authors of teaching texts. Plato, who spent so much time across his dialogues attempting to ridicule and undermine the Sophist tradition, was certainly not a speech-maker. For him, the end of discourse was the philosophical discovery of absolute truth. The fact that we now use the word ‘sophistry’ in an entirely pejorative way to describe deceptive, fallacious arguments is in no little degree due to the influential early characterisations of Sophistic discourse provided by Plato. The speech-making of the Sophists was seen by Plato as trapped in the material world, the world of appearance and opinion, and as such was incapable of reaching the absolute truth that lies behind the senses. Plato “established dichotomies that the Sophists rejected: inquiry is preferred to persuasion; reason is preferred to emotion; one-on-one communication is preferred to mass persuasion” (Smith, 2003, p. 57). We shall see these tensions repeat themselves throughout the current study—they are not ancient matters far removed from our modern lives but instead sit at the heart of contemporary marketing thinking (as well as public reactions to it).

Plato was suspicious of rhetoric and poetry precisely because he was suspicious of the audience. Unlike the Sophists, who thrived upon the challenges of an audience-led civic life in democratic Athens, Plato was no supporter of the crowd. His conception of the ideal state as outlined in the Laws and the Republic has the public audience “slotted into well-defined positions and not allowed to defy the philosopher king” (Smith, 2003, p. 59). If rhetoric was to be used, then it was to be restricted to ensuring the “consent of the governed by the governors” (ibid.). For Plato, the fact that Sophists were willing to teach all citizens the means of securing adherence to their position was not only a reckless and irresponsible abandonment of intellectual duty but it was also based upon an incorrect understanding of what the duty of a citizen should be. Perhaps one of the most fundamental problems that Plato had with the Sophist approach to logos is that it fosters a power asymmetry in discourse. This might be ironic in a broader sense, when we consider that Plato envisaged a state where each citizen had an allotted place and was led to knowledge of absolute truth (and hence the good life) by the forces of the philosopher king. However, in regard to the methodology of argumentation, Plato’s position is quite clearly concerned with equality between disputants. In Gorgias, Plato argues that the rhetor is successful only because he is talking to those who are ignorant of the matters in hand. While it might be true, as his interlocutor Gorgias contends, that a good rhetor could persuade a patient to accept a course of treatment far more effectively than a doctor might, this is only because the patient is ignorant and therefore will be swayed by the language tricks of the rhetor. Conversely, the rhetor has no power to convince the doctor regarding medical topics. The Sophist takes advantage of the ignorance of his audience, while the philosopher (i.e. one schooled in the methodology of Socrates) seeks to lead his interlocutor through a dialectic that will uncover for both of them the real truth. Similarly, in the Phaedrus Plato describes the way in which Sophistic logos can seduce the young (represented by the titular character) by aping the tricks of the Sophistic rhetor Lysias and bewitching Phaedrus with his speech on love only to point out that he has been successful through a use of linguistic and argumentative manipulation. As an antidote to this, Plato has Socrates expound upon the real art of rhetoric—by which, of course, he means a philosophical rhetoric that is anchored in, and convinces because of, the true knowledge of that which the rhetor speaks.

Perhaps the biggest irony regarding Plato’s position on rhetoric is that, while ridiculing the Sophists’ reliance upon the persuasive power of logos, he is such a masterful user of these techniques himself. Indeed, while Plato clearly has many important issues with Sophism, there is one area in which their methodology ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A History of Rhetoric for Marketers
• 2 Marketing Scholarship and Rhetoric
• 3 Control and the Discourse of Marketing Science
• 4 A Rhetorical Approach to Marketing as Exchange
• 5 Marketing and Sophism—A Comparison
• 6 Magic, Sympathy, and Language
• 7 The Magical Roots of Rhetoric
• 8 Magical Persuasion and Marketing
• 9 A Sophistic Marketing
• Index