Islam, Marketing and Consumption

Critical Perspectives on the Intersections

Aliakbar Jafari, Özlem Sandikci, Aliakbar Jafari, Özlem Sandikci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317753223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Marketing
• Index: Business

In recent years, a critically oriented sub-stream of research on Muslim consumers and businesses has begun to emerge. This scholarship, located both within and outside the marketing field, adopts a socio-culturally situated approach to Islam and investigates the complex and multifaceted intersections between Islam and markets.

This book seeks to reflect various unheard and emerging critical voices from within the Muslim world, and provide a series of critical insights on how, if and why Islam matters to marketing theory and practice. It questions the existing assumptions and polarising discussions which underpin the portrayal of Islam as the 'other' of Modernity, while acknowledging that Muslims themselves are partially responsible for creating stereotyped representations of Islam and 'the Muslim'.

This wide-ranging and insightful collection will advance emerging critical perspectives, and provide new insights that will influence the generation and application of knowledge in the context of Muslim societies. It will open up fresh conversations for scholars in marketing as well as the broader humanities and social sciences.

Part I Beyond the brand ‘Islamic'

DOI: 10.4324/9781315797335-2

1 What is in a name that we call ‘Islam’?

A critical inquiry into the semiotic construction of super-brand Ummah

Ahmet K. Süerdem

DOI: 10.4324/9781315797335-3

Introduction

Linking Islam and marketing is beyond a technical-managerial issue as it has important discursive functions related to the production of profits, ideology, power and identity. Establishing Islamic marketing as an academic discipline is also establishing a ‘modality’ (Giddens, 1986) carrying an interpretive frame, empowering resources and restricting rules. This modality is particularly important because it not only shapes the lifestyles and consumption patterns of the Muslim individuals, but also is shaped by their preferences and practices. The framing of a modality is important since it determines the availability of resources and power for the individuals to change policies, standards or norms that a discipline imposes upon them. The rigidity or flexibility of this framing affects and informs an individual’s control over the judgements about truth or reality which in turn determines the level of his/her agency. Thus, establishing an academic discipline is also setting an authority to guide these judgements. To be legitimate, an authority needs to ground its subjectivity claims upon a discursive source, which in this case is Islam. This brings forth the question ‘what is in a name that which we call “Islam”?’

We cannot assess the ‘essential’ meaning of Islam since it is not an ontological entity with eternal, unchangeable and substantial properties. As a faith, like any religion, Islam is a transcendent symbol system guiding and inspiring its believers about the meaning of life and universe. The truth value of its meaning and authority cannot be a matter of academic judgement. On the other hand, as a nominal entity, ‘Islam’ is just a sign and as any other sign its meaning is discursively constructed through socio-historically contingent political struggles, institutional structures and material circumstances in particular contexts. In this vein, we cannot judge referral to Islam as a source of authority that is inherently correct or wrong. To judge this, we need to evaluate how actual socio-political practices embody the political and ethical claims derived from this authority.

In this scope, the International Islamic Marketing Association (IIMA) (2014) defines its aim as: According to this definition, it discursively puts forward some political ethical claims against the authority of Western consumerist modality in marketing and consumer disciplines. It positions itself within the category of counter-hegemonic voices challenging the long-standing hegemony of Western ethnocentric modality reducing consumer culture to liberal consumerist ideology (Sklair, 1995). A large amount of consumer research is now being dedicated to the issues such as consumer resistance, consumer identity projects, marketplace cultures, how consumption is shaped in different contexts, and localized interpretations of the mass mediated consumerism (for a list of examples see Arnould and Thompson, 2005). In a similar manner, the ‘western imaginary of marketing’ (Cayla and Arnould, 2008) receives severe critiques for reducing the evaluation of cultural development to the level of adaptation to consumerism and making cultural richness invisible under a spectrum of a unidimensional scale. There is now an encouraging wave of research that interprets consumption in the light of theoretical categories and constructs developed from the perspectives residing beneath the ‘invisible half’ (for a concise discussion, see Jafari et al., 2012). Hence, considering its aim, we can put Islamic marketing as a voice in the kaleidoscope of the invisible half which increasingly becomes visible for more critical, culturally polyvalent and context dependent alternatives to the homogenizing effects of the consumerist ideology.

to give control back to the people and to liberate them from the dictatorship of markets and corporations by working closely with those who envision a better future where consumption is no longer the sole determinant of the quality of our lifestyles.

However, we cannot judge a book by its cover. Like any definition, the definition of the aim of Islamic marketing is a discursive form whose content is filled according to what it produces in practice. In his critical article in the Journal of Islamic Marketing (JIMA), Jafari (2012) rightly points to the reductionist approaches conceptualizing Islam and marketing in a problematic manner and lack of critical voices in the journal. The scholars who want to publish in the field of Islamic marketing usually do not contribute much to reform the marketing discipline towards a direction where it serves to more fair and ethical production and consumption processes. Rather than offering research, cases, methods and tools for decommodifying goods and services, much of the articles produced in this field contain scholastic debates searching for apologetic references to the application of Shariah dogmas to the much criticized consumerist marketing tools. The dominant understanding of ethicality in its academic and managerial writings reduces Islamic marketing to an obsession with halal-ness and ignores a more dynamic and complex sociocultural agenda against the harmful effects of consumerism.

As a part of such a dynamic agenda, Sandıkcı (2011) proposes Holt’s (2004) ‘cultural branding’ strategy for creating Islamic global brands competing against the Western dominance in branding. Cultural branding refers to a form of branding strategy that constructs brand communities to represent a group subjectivity whose desirability comes from the myths addressing some important tensions in society. The function of these myths is to negotiate these tensions through a sense of common bond among the members of a semiotically constructed imagined community feeding and fed by the popular imagination. Sandıkcı advances the idea of studying how Islamic myths can be used to construct cultural-iconic brands as a challenge for the future research agenda. In this chapter, I aim to face this challenge from a double-sided perspective. If we consider the counter-hegemonic claims of Islamic marketing, we can expect such a branding strategy to help the political mobilization of Muslim consumers and producers for creating a sense of social responsibility about the harmful effects of consumerism. On the other hand, myths do not have only discursive solidarity functions for solving social tensions. They may also serve deceptive functions if they are rigidly framed by powerful actors to constitute a mass mentality denoting a dogmatic ideology that conceals domination relations. Flexibility in the framing of a myth determines the way it functions. If this framing allows a wide range of interpretations through imagination and symbolism, then a myth will function as a discursive arena to solve social tensions. However, the common approach to Islamic branding leaves little space for vivid imagery and heavily relies on strict definitions reducing all ethical claims to ‘Shariah compliance’ (Business Wire, 2008). Considering this rigidity of the dominant framing, the likelihood that cultural branding may serve a deceptive function is more likely. Using Islamic myths to construct global brands carries the risk of deploying an internal branding strategy imposing the standards of an authorized Islamic lifestyle and worldview on all Muslim individuals. Constructing the myth of a morally pure cultural community as an imagined Ummah (universal community of believers) by using the latest marketing and branding strategies may have serious political repercussions. This myth can be used by demagogue leaders to persuade the masses to buy into the idea of a (national or transnational) authoritarian regime. Consent manufacturing techniques used by these leaders can cause Muslim individuals to morally police themselves and each other to maintain this regime even without a need for the coercive instruments of a state.

In this chapter, I will explicate the idea of using cultural branding as a consent manufacturing technique to semiotically construct a super-brand Ummah. The chapter will unfold as follows. First, I critically outline that the semiotic construction of brand identities has cultural, political and ideological dimensions as well as economic and psychological dimensions. Having emphasized these dimensions, I discuss how today’s dominant global brand sign system embodied as super-brand America reconstructs consumer culture to denote liberal-consumerist ideology. I then explore some important semiotic concepts such as denotation, connotation and myth for a deeper understanding of how sign systems design and construct reality; and how ideology and meanings are generated as a discursive process. Having derived the premises that semiotic construction is not an absolute imposition of a fixed meaning, I argue that this process is a discursive formation determined according to the level of political struggles and material circumstances. Drawing on these arguments, I further discuss how glocalization and translocalization open the gates for a more dynamic and flexible framing of the brand sign system as a hegemonic discursive form. Yet, this conclusion comes with the reserve that political struggles and material circumstances still play an important role in determining the homogenization and heterogenization of the cultural sphere. Unequal distribution of economic and political power and resources always influence the shaping of the hegemony process. While the weakening of the nation states provides opportunities for a more flexible sign system in the cultural arena, it also causes the erosion of the citizenship rights defending the weak against the powerful in economic and political spheres. Then, following a critical discussion of identity politics and post-Islamism theories, I draw attention to how deregulation of the cultural sphere can lead to the commodification of politics (the overlapping between politics and consumption). Combined with identity politics, this can reduce democratic polities into audience democracies where, like machines, commercial holdings compete for redirecting public resources to their patronage networks. As demonstrated by the Berlusconi example in Italy, such machines benefit much from iconic branding strategies as an instrument of consent manufacturing. Along this line, drawing examples from Turkish and post-Arab Spring experiences, I redefine post-Islamism as a kind of sectarian identity politics exploiting an authoritarian audience democracy à la Berlusconi. These movements heavily invest in iconic branding strategies as an instrument of consent manufacturing to re-Islamize the cultural and public sphere by opportunistically deploying Islamic myths and symbols. I finally conclude by drawing attention to how invasion of the cultural sphere with the signs of a semiotically constructed super-brand Ummah to fabricate a universal ‘Islamic civilization’ myth can be used as an instrument of internal branding and oppressing the cultural diversity of the localized interpretations of Islamic symbolism.

Branding is a cultural and ideological process

Brand is defined by AMA (2007) as a ‘name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s product distinct from those of other sellers’. According to this definition, brands act both as the distinguishing signs of goods and markers of the tastes of their consumers. The long-term value of brands depends on the symbolic associations in addition to their economic value (Schmitt and Simonson, 1997). Symbolic elements of consumption highlight the aesthetic, intangible and ideological against functional undertakings or utilitarian concerns (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982). The pleasure derived from a brand does not reside in the intrinsic properties of the good itself, but is a product of a process of semiotic construction. Brands are not meant to be consumed alone; the immaterial, aesthetic element needs to be materialized as if the symbols actually carry the designed intrinsic properties of the consumption object. Brands stand for a publicly accepted symbolic value within a semiotically constructed sign system. They are meant to signify certain lifestyles and/or identities reflecting the positions of their possessors in the eyes of other members of society (Levy, 1959). The quality of a brand does not come from its intrinsic or emulated properties but from its quality to persuade the people to buy into a semiotically constructed lifestyle and worldview (Thellefsen et al., 2008). This construction is manufactured by communicating a simple, single, conspi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Islam in consumption, marketing and markets
• Part I Beyond the brand ‘Islamic’
• Part II Islam and Islamic representations in the fashionscape
• Part III Towards a reflexive account of theorization
• Glossary
• Index