Most marketing books discuss the subject as a business discipline, from a managerial point of view. How to do marketing in companies and other organizations. But marketing is not just about being a marketing manager.
Marketing is all encompassing nowadays. Everything is marketed the church, politics, science, history, celebrities, careers, sport, art, fiction, fact. Marketing involves promotion, selling and consumption. However, marketing is more than just an economic activity. It drives the consumer society, a culture of consumption. Marketing affects everybody; as consumers we cannot escape the market, even those who try to live simply.
Consumers are not passive recipients of what marketers do. We re-interpret marketing messages, display their logos; present ourselves through what we consume; make choices; complain; window shop; view celebrities as brands; compete with other consumers. This book explains marketing as consumers experience it, as active participants in it.
Marketing may appear to affect more and more of the world nowadays, but its powerful effects are not new. Over the centuries, trade, exchange, what we now call marketing, influenced how and why empires were built, technologies applied, property law, transport routes constructed, shopping architecture of cities, languages developed and spread. It was in order to calculate market exchange that Europeans imported from the Arabs the mathematical concept of nothing .
Topics in this book reflect the view of marketing as a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a business function. Therefore, it does not adopt the managerial...
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