Control of the Flow of Value

A marketer profits by adding value via the control of flow. So, Plato’s middleman creates value by buying goods from a producer and then staying in the market permanently in order to take advantage of the consumer’s need for the good when that need arose. The producer does not have to stay in the market and is therefore free to spend their time more productively (or enjoyably). Similarly, the consumer does not have to spend their time hunting down the producer. The intermediary position of the marketer produces value in the form of convenience for both producer (who pays for that value via a sacrifice in price asked) and consumer (who pays via an increased price tendered). We might regard this, then, as the model of urmarketing. In this consideration of the role of the intermediary, there needs to be no control of flow other than the act of buying to hold and then sell at a later date, but it is this control of flow which defines the value of the practice.

It is important at this point to note the difference between the nature of the relationship produced when the producer and consumer exchange face-to-face and the relationship produced by mediated exchange. As Plato¹ describes it in the Republic, the direct exchange of goods between producer and consumer is characterised by barter, the swapping of one good for another. It is the form of relationship, “giving and taking” (369c), which initially leads to the establishment of Plato’s thought-experiment city as people come together in order to share what they produce. However, this simple form of exchange, by which a cobbler might share a pair of shoes in return for clothing or food, will, in Plato’s theorising, rapidly evolve beyond practical means. Although imagining a city starting with only five professions (farmer, builder, weaver, cobbler, and doctor) the logic of the division of labour begins to necessitate a far more complex society, with metalworkers to make tools, carpenters to help the builder, tanners to provide leather and so on. It is at this stage, and as a direct result of the division of labour that is a cornerstone of Plato’s thinking about society, that the issue of the middleman arises. If a farmer is to be a farmer and therefore spend his time efficiently in the production of crops, then it makes no sense for him to waste his time sitting in the marketplace waiting for customers to come along. As Adeimantus (Socrates’ interlocutor) notes, “there’ll be people who’ll notice this and provide the requisite service” (371c). More specifically, the “service” that they will provide is described as “buying and selling” (371b). This is important because it makes a clear distinction between the barter exchange characterised as “giving and taking” and the market exchange founded on “buying and selling”. Consequently, for Plato, the market is based upon mediation. The exchange of “buying and selling” is defined by the separation of producer and consumer by those services associated with the market (retailing, merchandising, transporting, etc.).

Shaw (1995) admirably uses Plato’s arguments in the Republic to (re-) construct a “first dialogue on macromarketing” which is designed to both celebrate Plato’s prescience and intellectual acuity and demonstrate the logical flaws in Kotler’s attempt to establish a “generic exchange concept”. He notes that Plato’s arguments clearly describe how “market exchange is the bridge connecting parties arising out of considerations of efficiency in production resulting from the division of labour and comparative advantage” (p. 9). He underlines that what drove Plato’s vision of how society comes together in cities was not just any form of exchange but, specifically, the market exchange of buying and selling. While he admits that there might be “superficial similarities in all forms of exchange” (p. 12), he appeals to Polyani’s tripartite distinction to demonstrate that market exchanges are based upon “voluntary agreements and specified terms” (p. 11).

Weinstein (2009) goes further than Shaw (1995) in contrasting Plato’s conception of barter and market exchange. For him, the change from one to the other that takes the Athenian barely ten lines of text represents a “veritable revolution” (p. 439). The system of sharing that the city is initially founded upon is “organized communally, much as a single household might be” (ibid.) but this is then “overturned” by the far more complex market exchange which “integrates a variety of needs into a single framework that is capable of satisfying them, while avoiding the pitfalls of less sophisticated approaches” (p. 440). Complexity inevitably emerges from a realistic consideration of the needs that must be met as people come together in a city with the single goal of autarky (self-sufficiency). As Weinstein notes, “satisfying each need leads to new needs, which must in turn be satisfied if self-sufficiency is to be achieved” and so the “city arises tier by tier through cyclical applications of the logic of autarky” (p. 443). This iterative nesting of needs means that the city cannot logically be expected to remain entirely self-sufficient—it must look to trade with other cities and other regions to supply it with the raw materials that its various artisans require for their professions. At this point, Plato’s interlocutors rather matter-of-factly agree that of course this will mean the city will have to be organised around “buying and selling” rather than the simple sharing of the family-like commune. Weinstein (2009) notes that this “fundamental shift itself seems unexplained” (p. 444) and is unsure of the reasons for this elision. However, his reconstruction of the logic of this revolution from the “signs, […], suggestions, and indications” (p. 445) that are to be found in the text is sufficiently important to a marketing understanding of exchange that it is worthwhile rehearsing here. What, he asks, “does the market provide that is missing from the communal city and denies it its self-sufficiency once there are merchants in the picture?” (ibid.). The answer, he argues, is “some nexus, some way of interconnecting and harmonizing imports with exports” (p. 446). The exact nature of this nexus Weinstein (2009) thinks can be found in the distinction that the Republic makes between artisans/producers (demiourgoi) and service-providers (diakonoi). Indeed, if we quickly return to our urmarketing scenario, we can recognise that the middleman between consumer and producer is the epitome of the service-provider—they do not make anything but rather take advantage of an opportunity to serve both the producer and the consumer. Plato keeps producers and service-providers “clearly distinct from one another” (Weinstein, 2009, p. 447) and it is the service-providers who embody the transformation to a “buying and selling” market exchange economy. The way in which Weinstein (2009) describes the nature of service in the market is particularly interesting. He points out that diakonos can be used by Plato in a number of ways, sometimes pejoratively to refer to a slave, sometimes more positively to refer to something which is subordinate but still useful (in the way that cooking is a diakonos to medicine), and sometimes in a far more noble manner to describe the way that a functionary or politician is in service (and so still subordinate) to the public. The final use that Plato makes of the term is to be found exclusively in the discussion of the market that we have been considering in the Republic. Weinstein (2009) argues that here the term is used to emphasise usefulness but significantly de-emphasise any sense of subordination. Plato does not accompany the term with the usual irony or sarcasm with which he treats the figure of the trader in other dialogues. Instead, the diakonos is portrayed as someone vital to the success of the city in that they “make up for the weakness of the various crafts, and brings the city closer to self-sufficiency” (p. 449). Finally, Weinstein is able to arrive at a formulation of the innate specialism of the service-providing market intermediary. Starting from an understanding that all types of service mean “doing what other ask of one, without knowing in advance precisely what their needs and demands will turn out to be” (p. 449), he focuses in on the necessity for a service-provider to find out what it is that is required of him, to fill the gap of “missing knowledge” (p. 450). It is this ability, to be able to reckon what is needed and provide it when required under “conditions of uncertainty” that characterises the successful service-provider. In the city systems based upon market exchange that Plato envisions uncertainty regarding the time and quantity of needs is endemic. No artisan/producer will be able to forecast the amount they must produce and therefore the amount of raw materials they will need. Instead, it is the job of the service-providers to act as the nexus for the resolution of this uncertainty. As Weinstein (2009) describes it, “the market is the single locus where all this disparate knowledge is integrated, converted into useful concretes, distributed, and made effective for the city as a whole” (p. 453).

Weinstein’s (2009) deep analysis of Plato’s vision of the market is important for its portrayal of the marketing intermediary as a service-provider whose value lies in a kairotic response to the uncertainties of human need. It situates the profession of marketing clearly within a frame of “buying and selling” exchange but anchors it to that exchange with the ties of knowledge and reckoning. This reading supports Shaw’s (1995) understanding of Platonic marketing as a system which by definition excludes any sort of extension of the profession out to the broad realms of social exchange typified by Kotler’s (1972) generic exchange concept. Even the “giving and taking” of barter is seen to be fundamentally different to the “buying and selling” of market exchange.

If we were to construct a definition of marketing based upon a Weinsteinian interpretation of Platonic thought, we might arrive at something resembling the following:

Such a formulation adequately reflects the central logic underlying Plato’s exposition of the market. The definition gives a clear scope for the marketing discipline but also contains a worrying ambiguity. So, one reading might infer that the marketing intermediary only reacts to the ebb and flow of demand. Yet, marketers have also been proactive. Indeed, while the early passages in the Republic that we have been examining here are remarkably positive about the position of market intermediaries in society, in later sections of that work, along with passages in the Laws, and in many other dialogues, traders are generally treated with suspicion and disdain. The reason for this is that they indulge in manipulation—of product, opportunity, and demand. So, a trader might adulterate their wares to receive a greater profit, they might set up shop at a place or time which gives them an unfair advantage over the appetites of their prospective customers (Plato gives the example of selling provisions at remote, deserted crossroads!), or they rise or lower their prices in a day, “push” their wares, or “take an oath on its quality” (Laws, XI, 917c). Aside from the first, each of these practices has come to be standard and accepted elements of the marketing intermediary’s profession. Of course, the fact that Plato is declaiming the need for tight regulation of market intermediaries in the hypothetical Cretan colony of Laws is a certain indication that such practices were common in the ‘real’ world. These practices can, in fact, be understood under the terms of the definition above if we concede that facilitating buying and selling under conditions of uncertain demand would naturally include efforts to make the demand more certain. In other words, the market intermediary should not be conceived of as someone who simply attempts to forecast the vicissitudes of demand and react accordingly, but rather should be understood as someone who considers the variables of the environment and tries to maximize them to their advantage. This leads directly to the manipulation of demand. For Plato, of course, the market intermediary is there to help the city perform as efficiently as possible in its goal of self-sufficiency. If a market intermediary attempts to maximize their own profit through the manipulation of demand, then they are succumbing to the greed that Plato sees as leading to “a city with a fever” (Republic, II, 372e), a city obsessed with luxury and the amassing of wealth. This is why the manipulation of demand is to be forbidden. And this is why the merchant and the trader are portrayed so regularly with suspicion and distaste. Like so many areas of life in Plato’s idealised societies, harmony and balance must be carefully regulated—while the market exchange of “buying and selling” is vital to the life of the city, its normal functioning always threatens to tip over into avarice. Indeed, in Laws, Plato attempts to protect the citizens of the new colony of Magnetes from any such corruption by ensuring that they are barred from taking market intermediary positions, such professions being reserved for “a resident alien or a temporary visitor” (Laws, XI, 920)—in other words, those who are naturally in liminal, intermediary positions (and are clearly Other).

The manipulation of demand by market intermediaries who seek to profit from it is something, then, that Plato would not countenance in his understanding of the market and its relationship to society. It is striking that the sort of condemnation that Plato reserves for the techniques of what we would today call marketing strategy and advertising is also regularly to be found in modern discourses that concern themselves with the health of society. Marketing is commonly held to be the driving force behind the increase in obesity (Critser, 2003; Moss, 2013; Schlosser, 2002), the widespread use of cancer-causing products (Malkan, 2007), and the general obsession with consumption above all else (Klein, 2009; Ewen, 2001). Yet there are many things that Plato would not want to encourage in the ideal society. The sort of highly censorious approach he has towards poetry and entertainment, for example, is indicative of the way in which he feels human social relations are injured by those who manipulate sentiment and emotion. Such practices threaten to upset the good sense of citizens who should be guided by rationality and temperance in all things.

However, we are not interested here in the markets of ideal societies. Rather, we are trying to find our way towards an understanding of the basic characteristics of the marketing profession—its true scope. Plato’s early analysis allows us to strip away many of the distracting superstructures that have been built upon the practices of marketing and return to basics. Yet, at the same time, we can also recognise some of the bias inherent in his discussion and acknowledge that what he specifically is at pains to outlaw might be a natural part of the market’s functioning. In particular, Weinstein’s (2009) reading of the Republic provides us with a vision of the marketer as someone who rides the ebb and flow of uncertainties, who is able to react appropriately to the latest knowledge of market demands and it is clear from what Plato forbids that an active manipulation of those demands is part of those “very powerful inducements to vice” (Laws, XI, 920b) that the practice of the market intermediary offers.

The reduction of uncertainty is a basic, powerful human need. Indeed, Maslow (1943) discusses what he calls “safety needs” (p. 376) as part of his description of the most basic level in his hierarchy of needs. Once we have our physiological hungers satisfied, we begin to focus on the need to mini-mise danger in our lives. We search for “some kind of undisturbed routine of rhythm” (p. 377) in our lives, trying to make the world predictable and orderly. So, too, in social organisations. As Beer (1993, 1994, 1995) and Bateson (2000) have amply demonstrated using Ashby’s (1957) work as a foundation, complex dynamic systems seek stability through “continual nonprogressive change” (Bateson, 2000, p. 125). In order to deal with a market of uncertain demand, marketers are inevitably going to attempt to control that demand to their own advantage. Whether this means changing prices, seeking out new markets, offering guarantees, or stimulating enthusiasm for the goods they offer these are all natural tools employed by the intermediary to control the instability the uncertainty of the market brings.

Contained within our understanding of marketing distilled in the definition provided above, then, is the recognition that the facilitation of buying and selling in an uncertain market will involve the manipulation of demand. The marketer’s intermediary role is one founded upon the attempt to control buying and selling exchange in a way that benefits all parties (including the intermediary).

Let us now move on to consider the stricture, arising both from Weinstein’s (2009) and Shaw’s (1995) readings of Plato, that marketing concerns itself with only “buying and selling”. For Shaw (1995), Plato’s model of how the market should support the city through the service of buying and selling serves to demonstrate how Kotler’s concept of generic exchange is mis-conceived. Yet this does lead him into some rather tortured logic. So, while he concedes that there are many forms of exchange in society which use “marketing-like activities” (such as “advertising, transfer of moneys, persuasive communication”, p. 11), these exchanges are not actually marketing because they are not being used to facilitate “buying and selling”. Adhering tightly to Plato’s vision of the ideal city and the place that marketing plays in it allows Shaw (1995) to maintain a tightly curtailed sense of marketing’s scope. Yet, as we have seen, Plato’s own boundary setting is intensely idealistic, in fact outlawing just those activities that Shaw concedes are signs of “marketing-like” activity. Surely, the point of returning to Plato’s considerations of the ideal market is that they allow us to examine the way in which the practices of marketing where conceived of in earlier, less developed, less complex eras? But we cannot forget that Plato is talking of the market in terms of thought-experiments (of the Republic of the philosopher-kings and of the Magnetes colony) and we cannot ignore the ramifications of Plato’s wider system of thought. As such, Plato’s marketing theory should be seen as an initial stepping stone in the discipline. The focus on “buying and selling” makes sense for Plato when he can arbitrarily militate against the greed such exchanges can foster with draconian punishments and strictures. It is also the case that there is little consideration of the representative nature of money by Plato. The fact that currency, which is essential for the service of market intermediaries, stands for something else is an important detail that is avoided by the philosopher despite (or, perhaps, because of) its inconvenience within Plato’s larger censuring of representation (see Weinstein, 2009, footnote on p. 454; see also Moore, 2014, for a discussion of the problematic status of representation in Plato).

Plato’s strictures regarding marketing reveal an intense effort to bound it and, most particularly, to keep persuasion away from it. Yet, in also seeking to quarantine the valued citizens of a city from taking part in its practice, Plato makes it clear that, by its very nature, it is a corrupting force. The promise of gain will mean that persuasion will always work its way into marketing practice. Plato does not say that marketing should be practiced only by those who have received a strong education in the pursuit of truth and have the wisdom to control their appetites. No, marketing will infect even those citizens who have had the most advantage and the most instruction. Indeed, the Laws go so far as to state that those citizens who re-offend by returning to marketing activities after having being punished before will have their imprisonment doubled. Imprisonment, clearly, does not dim the allure of the market.

The market infects. In the Republic, the market intermediary is portrayed as a service provider in language akin to that used for public servants (Weinstein, 2009), but this has the effect of framing them as selflessly motivated. As soon as the issue of personal gain, of profit, is brought into the equation, the service-provider becomes an infected, liminal stranger who must be kept quarantined from the rest of civil society and who must be heavily bound by laws in order to prevent their use of persuasive strategies. Consequently, we can imagine the urmarketer as a biphasic practitioner—acting in service to producers and consumers in one phase of operations and acting in their own service (i.e. via a profit maximising motivation) in the other. It is, of course, the latter phase, which spirals around the manipulation of demand, which is of most danger to society in Plato’s view—and in the view of many social commentators after him. However, if the history of marketing practice shows anything, it is that the dangerous, persuasive edges of the profit-maximising phase of marketing operations have moved towards the core of marketing practice. Modern Western societies have tended towards an increasingly laissez-faire policing of the manipulation of demand, often acting as if it were not even an issue. Guarantees are expected rather than outlawed, and testimonials and persuasive statements regarding a product’s worth are part of the everyday, normalised media landscape in such societies. Advertising is celebrated in international awards and exhibitions in major art and design galleries and is even allowed to mostly regulate itself. Yet, at the same time, the old Platonic mistrust remains, and marketing is used as a reliable scapegoat for all manner of human failings and social problems. I will examine what I consider to be some of the major causes of this oscillating regard below. At this stage, however, let us return to the construction of our definition of marketing.

If we are to explicitly include the manipulation of demand in our definition of marketing as well as reflect some of the substance of the above discussion, we might construct something along the following lines:

By glossing ‘facilitation’ we make it clear that market intermediaries can display a range of activities that include the manipulation of logistical flows as well as demand flows. The motivation for providing the service remains unstated, and the exchange system that marketing operates within remains that of “buying and selling”. However, we must now once and for all address the recurrent question regarding this latter characteristic. Is “buying and selling” something that can be taken metaphorically? Or, perhaps more succinctly, how symbolic can market exchange be? So, if we speak of political and social marketing campaigns and discuss the “selling” of a party, or the “selling” of a religion, or a set of values, are we necessarily making a category mistake? Certainly, Shaw (1995) uses Plato’s vision of the market to argue just this. Kotler and Zaltman (1971) and Kotler (1972) argue the opposite, for the applicability of the “logic of marketing to social goals” (Kotler and Zaltman, 1971, p. 3). This perspective is founded upon the idea that the “core idea of marketing lies in the exchange process” (p. 4) and, while most marketing might be performed around the buying and selling of goods and services, this does not mean that all marketing must. Once Kotler has defined marketing management as a practice based upon the awareness “of an opportunity to gain from a more careful planning of their exchange relationships” (ibid.), then it becomes clear that a marketer might just as well perform their marketing service for a client who wishes to create social change as for a brand wishing to increase demand for a product. This does, of course, assume that all exchange relationships are of the same type and would benefit in the same way from the intermediary services of marketing. Kotler and Zaltman’s (1971) logic relies upon the assertion that marketing has changed from having a selling focus (changing perceptions of a product or service to increase demand) towards having a response focus (researching nascent demand in order to respond to it via the creation of appropriate products or services). The truth is, of course, that both of these perspectives continue to be used within business. Indeed, as Mitchell (1999) argues, product-orientation has remained hugely powerful throughout the rise of the brand management paradigm, and firms that truly implement a customer-oriented marketing tend to remain the exception rather than the rule. This is, after all, the complaint that successive ‘revolutionary’ systems try to address; vide, amongst many others, Ries and Trout’s (2001) positioning, Levine et al.’s (2000) cluetrain manifesto, Lanning and Michael’s (1988) business as a value delivery system, Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s (2004) DART model, and even Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) Service-Dominant logic. Might it perhaps be more useful to look at a full customer-orientation as a goal to which all marketing exchange systems might be moving towards? Any understanding of marketing, however, must be able to contain (and account for) the marketing done from a product-orientation as well as that more ‘evolved’ form grounded in initial research of consumer needs and wants.

Perhaps the adoption of ‘value’ as the key term in contemporary marketing theorisation is a reaction to this constant tension between the product and customer orientations? It certainly might provide us with a way of thinking about marketing as a facilitation of exchange which can include both market exchange (i.e. exchange dependent upon currency) as well as the types of broader exchange described by Kotler and Zaltman (1971). Indeed, Kotler (1972) himself based his “generic concept of marketing” upon the core concept of the transaction defined as “the exchange of values between two parties” (p. 48). The changes in the AMA definition of marketing recounted above have also brought the discipline to a position where the exchange of “offerings that have value” is seen as the final goal of the profession. While not explicitly stated in the definition, value here is clearly meant to be interpreted in its Bagozzian mixed modality as both utilitarian and symbolic. Following this long trend in marketing theorisation of the nature of exchange, then, it makes sense for us to address the question of whether ‘buying and selling can be taken metaphorically’ by determining if we can usefully frame it within the broader terms of value exchange without sacrificing the clarity of scope that our Platonic/Weinsteinian formulation promises to provide.

It will be remembered that what made the Platonic evolution to market exchange significant was the introduction of a currency as a means to allow the facilitation of the flows of the market. Without currency, the city must remain at the simple level of barter and will not be able to grow and thrive into the complex organisation that Plato (and we) are familiar with. The currency is a token of value, one that can facilitate exchange through its universal acceptance within the market. Marketing is dependent upon this token of value. When we talk of the buying and selling of market exchange, what fundamentally distinguishes it from barter is the mediating action of currency as a token of value. Of course, other things can have value for the inhabitants of a market system. As Kotler (1972) points out, “time, energy, and feelings” are also “things-of-value” (p. 48) which can be exchanged. So, to think through a typical social marketing campaign—a government department needs to reduce a particular behaviour that is considered to be deleterious to the citizens of the country. They hire a marketing agency who put together a campaign to persuade those citizens to eliminate or reduce that behaviour. The currency-mediated buying and selling here occurs in terms of the marketing service offered by the agency—the government pays them and they in turn pay suppliers, employees, media companies, etc. But, in terms of our definition above, is the marketing agency providing “intermediary services which facilitate buying and selling under conditions of uncertain demand”? No. Surely, the target audience of the resulting campaign are not being persuaded to use currency to ‘buy’ something’? The sticking point is the issue of currency, the medium that allows market exchange. Perhaps our understanding of currency needs a little revision?

Certainly, this is Richard Lanham’s (2006) point in The Economics of Attention. He argues that contemporary society, in moving from being based on tangible “stuff” to intangible “fluff”, has transformed into a “market attention economy” (p. 20). This is becoming an increasingly familiar argument as scholars adapt to the weaknesses in existing understandings of contemporary markets (Wu, 2016; Davenport and Beck, 2001; McCloskey, 1995). It is attention which firms, governments, causes, and individuals truly vie for, not capital and currency. Indeed, attention has become the prime currency—not in a metaphorical sense but in a literal sense. While money is still used, of course, to buy attention, we are moving towards a recognition that attention itself is a medium of exchange. A very simple example of this can be found in current online gaming platforms. In a mobile game such as Modern Combat 5, I have the option to acquire more in-game (virtual currency) in two ways—I can either use my own ‘real world’ pounds sterling to buy more in-game credit units or I can buy those credits with my attention, by electing to watch an advertisement. Digital marketing has become reliant upon attention- and sentiment-based metrics such as views, likes, follows, visits, dwell time, etc., not only because they are easier to measure in online environments but also because the consumer attention that they appear to index is the currency that brands, governments, causes, and individuals seek to acquire (and, even, hoard). To ‘pay’ attention is, of course, a fine metaphorical expression of just how much we value something, but it also reflects the more fundamental truth that the relationships that human society is built upon are dependent upon a currency of regard. In the generic social marketing example outlined above, the client (the government) is paying the agency to facilitate the exchange of attention. Attention is not the campaign objective (that would be some form of attitude and/or behaviour change)—rather, attention is the currency via which these can be effected. In our generic example, the government requires the attention of the target audience in order to successfully build a relationship with them that could lead to attitude or behaviour change. In the same way, the target audience, too, needs to feel that they are the object of attention or regard. An electoral demographic will desert a party if it feels that they are no longer being paid attention to, no longer held in sufficient regard. This works in exactly the same way in the context of brand relationships; a brand wants its target audience to pay attention to it, and its target audience wants to feel that the brand pays attention to them. Humans are used to equating value with attention. The apparent ease of online attention measurement is now simply allowing this equation to act openly as the foundation for economic, social and political structures and processes. From Lanham’s (2006) perspective, this naturally makes those professionals of the art of persuasion, such as advertisers, public relations agents, lobbyists, etc., central to the new ‘economy of attention’.

If we look at commercial marketing and social marketing from the perspective of Lanham’s (2006) ‘attention economy’, we would see no difference—they are clearly both facilitating the exchange of attention. As such, it is not surprising that they use the same set of strategies and tactics, for there is no question that they are performing the same professional function. Interestingly, if we momentarily turn our minds back to Plato’s original description of the place that the marketer has in society, we might also notice that it is attention which is at the root of the move from barter to market exchange in the ideal city state. The motivation for the establishment of the retailer is so that a craftsmen does not “sit idly in the marketplace, away from his own work” (Republic, II, 371c), in other words, the marketer frees the producer to pay attention to the things that are important to them. What is more, the function of retail marketer comes into existence because of attention—“there’ll be people who notice this and provide the requisite service” (ibid.)—the marketer pays attention to the agora and recognises, in that kairotic spirit which typifies his function, the opportunity. Attention, in the end, is what makes Plato’s republic function—attention to one’s reason, attention to one’s function, attention to one’s place within the city, attention to the laws, attention to the Guardians.

However, if an appreciation of the currency value of attention can collapse any distinction between social and commercial marketing, surely it also brings us back to the other dichotomy we have been struggling with, namely, the difference between the marketing elements of communication/persuasion and the elements of production, logistics, and distribution (the more traditional ‘middleman’ functions)? While Lanham (2006), like many others before him, is happy to point to the waning of the world of “stuff”, it is an inescapable fact that the global production of “stuff” continues to increase. The areas of marketing that are not directly concerned with persuasion but are instead focused on the creation, moving, storing, and shelving of “stuff” have not lost their significance. Is there a sense in which their management is also founded upon attention? Might the hints of attention in Plato’s telling of marketing’s paramyth provide us with a way of understanding how it could suffuse all aspects of marketing?

When we ‘bring something to market’ we are bringing it to the attention of the market. The various marketing processes that might be engaged in by a firm (product design, supply chain management, distribution, warehousing, retailing, branding, communication) are all part of efficiently achieving the goal of bringing the attention of the market to the firm’s offerings. Traditional marketing middlemen provided services that facilitated this ‘bringing to attention’ in the same way that Plato’s traders and merchants acted in order to bring goods to the attention of those likely to buy them. Goods have to be made physically available before a prospect will exchange currency for them, and it is this aspect of the attention economy that marketing middlemen mostly focused upon. If we return to Beniger’s (1986) description of the birth of modern market control, and his example of Henry Crowell’s oat surplus, we can understand that the principle problem besetting Crowell was one of how to facilitate the flow of attention towards his oat surplus. This facilitation was carried out through a combination of physical extensions and communication extensions designed to bring a previously unattended to commodity (in terms of human consumption) to the regard of a national household audience. The packaging choices, distribution choices, and communication choices all combined to construct a strategy designed to bring oats to the attention of the US market as a breakfast option. Once they could see the value in the product, they also found that it was physically available to them in a form and supply which made sense to their household practices. It can make sense, then, to think of the marketing job as one that involves the coordination and management of the facilitation of attention with a view to the exchange of currency for offerings that have or can be made to have value for stakeholders. Value and attention here are strangely contiguous in meaning, flip-flopping between distinction and identity. Value is impossible without attention: we value those things that our attention is drawn to, so the value you assign things is a token of how much they draw our attention. At the same time, attention is a measure of value, a token of it (we might judge that something is worthy of our attention only to the degree that we value it). While some of this haziness might simply be due to the usual semantic drift, ambiguities, and lazy usages that are part and parcel of language use, there is a real sense in which the ideas of value and attention are tightly entwined in human society. Perhaps, in English, the crux of this relationship is to be found in the concept of regard. This word synthesises both value and attention in a way that connects nicely back to Aristotle’s rhetorical proof of ethos—the way we look at, consider, judge, the character of the speaker before us.

Thinking a little more about the origins of the market place itself, we can recognise in the trading practices surrounding the Athenian Agora the fundamental importance of attention in market exchange. As Dixon (1995) recounts, the Agora was the central site for social gathering in Athens from the sixth century BCE onwards, co-locating administration offices, religious shrines, artisan workshops, and the retail marketplace. He cites an address made by Lysias to the Athenian Council in the fourth century BCE, who speaks of the fact that citizens are more likely to visit those “tradesmen who have their establishments nearest the Agora” (Dixon, 1995, p. 80). Being able to command the attention of consumers through apt location is clearly of prime importance even at this early stage of marketing strategy. The market of the Agora was also arranged in a circular manner in order to facilitate the play of the consumer’s attention (and their memory). As much shopping was done by slaves under instructions from their owners, this meant also that once a retailer had secured the attention (and regard) of a consumer, having a position in the Agora meant that they could be easily navigated to again by a simple series of directions (ibid.). The display of goods across the stalls of the Agora played with the attention, and thus the appetites, of the browsers. As one fourth-century BCE denizen of the marketplace recounts, the sight of so many wares was “a great joy for anyone who has money; a great torture for those who have not” (ibid., p. 81). Developments in retailing over the subsequent centuries have tended to focus around more and more sophisticated means to direct the attention (and regard) of prospects and consumers. The Agora itself underwent a famous period of what might nowadays be called ‘gentrification’ in the second century BCE, when an area on its east side was converted into a gated, two-storey retail mall that would be familiar in layout and atmosphere to any modern shopper (ibid.).

Attention is also directed by price. Low prices can help to initially capture consumer attention, but they more importantly then contribute to the overall ‘value proposition’ (in Lanning and Michaels, 1988, formulation) in combination with the perceived benefit, itself expressed through imagery and copy designed to capture and hold attention. High prices, as well attested to throughout years of marketing research, can also be used to capture and maintain regard. Or they can be a means whereby consumers come to lose attention in a brand, as the high price paid makes it no longer seem worthy of continued regard.

Furthermore, the way that marketing engages with a firm’s distribution system is closely connected to the engineering of attention that we can see beneath strategies of pricing, retailing, and design. The motivation behind just-in-time or lean manufacturing, for example, is the ability to respond as quickly as possible to changes in the attention focus of consumers so that products which have attracted attention are able to be placed on retail shelves as quickly as possible without the losses of producing and maintaining stock which no longer attracts attention.

It is, in other words, not difficult to shift our traditional marketing perspective (inherited mostly from the early economists and economic historians who largely established the academic identity of marketing in the US) on ‘demand’, the production, allocation, and distribution of resources, and product/brand lifecycles towards a rather different approach whereby the practice of every aspect of marketing is centred around efforts to control the attention (understood as regard) of stakeholders. The marketing goal is therefore to capture, direct, and maintain attention in order to assure as high a valorisation of the firm’s offerings as possible (with value understood in both utilitarian and symbolic senses). Offerings might be physical, service-based, or entirely conceptual. In most cases, marketing is designed to facilitate the transmutation of regard into monetary exchange. But, to shamelessly adapt Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) formulation, such exchanges mask the fundamental unit of exchange: attention. So, if offerings are largely conceptual (as they can be in political or social marketing), then an exchange of attention is the primary exchange that is designed to occur. And it is truly an exchange of attention. Marketing focuses upon the consumer—it pays attention to particular target audiences with a view to having those audiences pay attention to the offerings around which it is operating. So, a brand uses marketing to pay attention to particular audiences so that they will pay attention to the brand. And, again, this exchange is not just a matter of marketing communication; it motivates all aspects of marketing. A firm manages resources in order to bring a product to market in a way, manner, and price that it hopes will attract the regard of a particular group of consumers. All firms have an idea of the market that they wish to exchange attention with—it might be a very vague, uninformed, unrealistic idea, but there will still be an idea of who ‘our customers’ are. Marketing’s value for a firm lies precisely in researching to whom the firm should pay attention and then being able to facilitate that exchange through influencing production, distribution, company organisation and culture, and, of course, communication with those prospects and consumers.

So, let me try to finalise a definition of marketing that takes into account the intermediary nature of the marketer, the principle of exchange, and the control of attention in a way that maintains a unique scope for the profession while also being able to include the wide variety of scenarios that marketing professionals and agencies find themselves practicing in.

The definition no longer needs to speak of conditions of uncertain demand because human attention is, almost by definition, something that is constantly being redirected. The definition sacrifices the simplicity of ‘buying and selling’ because this simplicity cannot help describe areas in which marketing is clearly practiced without immediately having to be interpreted metaphorically. It seems clear that the sorts of gymnastics of metaphorical interpretation that one has to go through in order to see political or social marketing (and even some areas of contemporary branding and social media marketing) as facilitating ‘buying and selling’ are not signs of clear and useful terminology. By going back to the earliest marketing model we have, however, been able to investigate what elements of ‘buying and selling’ are essential to the marketing process. Plato allows us to see that currency exchange enables the engineering of attention in the market place. It allows those who produce to attend to production and those who wish to consume to attend to consumption when and where they wish. And the marketer facilitates this by existing in the middle, seeking to control attention via the flow of goods, display, price, and address.

Although the definition sacrifices the (always utopian) simplicity of ‘buying and selling’, it instead underlines that attention is exchanged in the marketing process. This is essential to an effective understanding of what value marketing brings to the firms, organisations, networks, and individuals who choose to use it. Marketing facilitates the direction of the firm’s attention (its regard) to the right segments of the market so that it can then organise itself to most effectively attend to those segments so that it might earn in return the regard of those segments. The definition further makes it clear that such an exchange of attention must be continually worked at—attention is a scarce resource and can be redirected at any time. If a consumer feels that a firm’s attention has wandered, if they feel that its regard has been placed elsewhere, and as a consequence their requirements and expectations are being ignored, then they will redirect their attention elsewhere, too. Marketing seeks to prevent this happening, or at least to make such shifts of attention conscious and strategic.

One important consequence of the terms of this definition of marketing is the reframing of the idea of the manipulation of demand. In particular, it collapses the traditional division within marketing between those aspects of practice that are concerned with persuasion and those which are concerned with production and distribution. If (marketing) choices around the latter elements are understood as being concerned with attempts to control the exchange of attention (‘where do we put what in order to facilitate the regard of segment x?’), then their focus becomes identical to that of marketing communication. This is an important antidote to the rather nonsensical divisions within the academic discipline of marketing that have seen marketing communication and marketing often broken into separate departments and then housed in entirely different faculties and buildings on university campuses.

In the next chapter, I will explain in detail how marketing, seen as a profession that facilitates the continuing exchange of attention between firm and stakeholders, is essentially a rhetorical enterprise.