Raymond Williams—Advertising as Magic

Raymond Williams’ (1980) essay ‘Advertising: the magic system’ is an often reproduced and well-cited example of the way in which magic can be used as a pejorative rhetorical comparison for the marketing enterprise. Indeed, it demonstrates a clearly disparaging attitude towards magic, advertising, and rhetoric. All of these things are examples of transgressions—against reality, against truth, against humanity, and against good taste. Williams is a foundational figure in UK cultural studies and the paradigm that he brings to his discussion of advertising (and magic) is that of Marxism. For him, “modern advertising” is formed in response to “certain characteristics of the new ‘monopoly’ (corporate) capitalism” (p. 177) that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Williams argues that the Great Depression made industrialists fearful of the downward effect on prices of productive capacity. As a result of that fear, industries began to behave a lot more conservatively, reorganizing “ownership into larger units and combines” and seeking to control as far as possible the market via such tools as tariffs, price-fixing, cartels, and advertising. For it is at this point in history, Williams contends, that advertising begins to switch from being a relatively small industry focused predominantly on serving the press (by selling space in newspapers and periodicals) to a vastly more powerful sector working for the manufacturers. So, modern advertising, as Williams puts it, “belongs to the system of market-control” and was soon recast as a “necessary part of the economy” (p. 178) rather than a disreputable profession with its roots in mountebanks and patent medicine quackery.

The real significance of advertising becomes realised, however, only during the First World War. Williams states that it was in the war environment, when “not a market but a nation had to be controlled and organized, yet in democratic conditions and without some of the older compulsions, that new kinds of persuasion were developed and applied” (p. 180). Most importantly, these new forms of persuasion revolved around the “entry into basic personal relationships and anxieties”. After the war, the advertising industry integrated the “old methods of the quack and the new methods of psychological warfare”. Although this evolution in market control was noted by social commentators and intellectuals of the time, producing a fair amount of criticism and alarm, Williams notes that the response of the advertising agencies was to simply develop “a knowing, sophisticated, humorous advertising” which served to forestall the critical voice by making its claims “either casual and offhand or so ludicrously exaggerated” (p. 181) that to take them too seriously would be to invite ridicule upon oneself. By the time that Williams was originally writing his essay in the 1960s, advertising had become not just an aspect of the market but an “organized extending system, at the centre of our public lives”, the financial heart of modern media organizations, a “teacher of social and personal values”, the “official art of modern capitalist society”, and employed “perhaps the largest organized body of writers and artists, with their attendant managers and advisers, in the whole society” (p. 184). Having established this portrait of advertising’s fundamental presence throughout the modern world, Williams begins his argument regarding the magical nature of the advertising system.

Instead of reasoning that advertising promotes a damagingly materialist understanding of life, Williams adopts a quite different tack, beginning with the conviction that “our society is quite evidently not materialist enough” (p. 185). Advertising has a power over us only because modern capitalist society’s focus on consumption has left us with many aspects of our lives which do not satisfy us. Consumption cannot satisfy many of our social needs such as respect, friendship, quiet to reflect, etc. For Williams, advertising “operates to preserve the consumption ideal from the criticism inexorably made of it by experience” (p. 188), by magically associating the consumption of a product with “human desires to which it has no real reference” (p. 189). Advertising persuasion is focused on making magical associations—drink this beer and you will have these sorts of friends, drive this car and you will experience this sort of satisfaction with your life, etc. If we were not enchanted into thinking of ourselves as consumers and seeing everything around us as a consumption opportunity, we would be able to engage with the real material aspect of our environment and our place within it. We would appreciate beer for what it does for us physically rather than for what advertisers have persuaded it can do for us in terms of our social needs. Advertising magic “obscures the real sources of general satisfaction” because these undermine the workings of modern capital society. If we really understood what provides the sorts of social needs that advertising claims the consumption of products and services does then we would no longer perform (or be content to think of ourselves) as consumers. Advertising (and the general marketing industry that directs it) is designed to obscure the truth from people using a combination of traditional rhetorical trickery and modern psychological warfare to reach into the personal lives of the population and weave spells of consumption as eternal satisfaction.

Williams’ accusation of magical practice here is being used metaphorically, we might argue. It is not that he considers advertising to be actual magic, but rather that he is using the term as way of explaining the sort of glamourising effect that advertising has upon the populace, hiding reality from them. However, that is precisely what Williams would consider magic to be, anyway. He is comparing the way that advertising functions in his society with the function served by “magical systems in simpler societies” (p. 185). For Williams, magic as identified by anthropologists and magic as identified by him in advertising are “functionally very similar”, revolving around “magical inducements and satisfactions” as a means of control. Yet, Williams’ own rhetoric is far from the attempted objective, non-judgemental observation of anthropological description. It is quite clear to any reader that the identification of advertising and magic is designed to damn the former via the latter’s associations with trickery, illusion, pariahship, and, perhaps, even the resonant implications of the devil’s pact. Of course, from Williams’ point of view the magic of advertising is being used by the dominant bureaucracy of modern capitalism to generate, maintain, and control consumer culture. Williams’ accusation of magic therefore appears almost entirely opposite in its framing to Ward’s (1988) narrative of the ‘plain rhetoric’ of the control-obsessed bureaucracy attempting to outlaw the rhapsodic, magical rhetoric of the Gorgian/Sophist margin-dweller. Rather, Williams is the plain-speaking critical voice speaking out against the dominating enchanted/enchanting magical rhetoric of the modern market—a quite Platonic voice, then. This is underlined by the way in which he links the more Gorgian side of rhetoric with the traditional quackery of advertising. He comments on the “commercial purple”, “puff”, and “hack verses” (p. 174) used by the advertising writers of the nineteenth century and then uses “puffing” (p. 183) as a general term to describe the techniques of twentieth-century agencies such as motivational research and market study. Like magic, puffing metaphorically resonates with the techniques of trickery, of blowing air into something to make it seem larger, fresher, more impressive. Williams early on describes the creation of “puffment” as the intense use of “all the traditional forms of persuasion, and of cheating and lying” (p. 172), making use of a despairing diary entry by Johnson from 1758 in which the writer noted the “sublime and sometimes pathetik” eloquence that advertisers had perfected for their copy. The figure of the plain-speaking, educated, sensible man railing against the dubious rhetoric of an army of persuaders who revel in the overheated sublime and the hyperbolic promise is an interesting trope. And it is, of course, a trope—we have seen many times now how those speaking against the persuasive rhapsodies of rhetoric and the enchanting subversions of magic are using their own carefully crafted rhetorical spells. What is important, here, is the way in which Williams characterises the practice of rhetorical and psychologically informed persuasion as magic in order to tar it with the brush of illusion and enchantment. Magic is bad and used for control—so, if advertising is a form of magic then it too is bad and being used for control. In the afterword to the essay (dated 1969), Williams notes that while many people complain that advertising is “vulgar or superficial, that it is unreliable, that it is intrusive”, such criticism has only a marginal effect and is of a nature that the industry can “take in its stride” (p. 193). The implication is that only when people begin to realise the truth of his own position, that advertising exists to respond “to the gap between expectation and control by a kind of organized fantasy”, will a significant mass of opinion begin to have a chance in combatting the veil of illusion that marketing has spread over the world in the service of capital’s relentless need for control of the market.

Williams’ (1980) essay obtains much of its (rhetorical) persuasiveness from the historical narrative that he constructs around advertising’s evolution. He makes it clear to us at the start that he is doing “the real business of the historian of advertising” (p. 170), hunting down the objective facts in a practical manner which ironically uses the metaphor of commerce to promote a sense of empirical, grounded work. The story that he goes on to present frames advertising proper (as opposed to simple “notices”) as arising from the “enthusiastic announcements” used to hawk “remedies and specifics” (p. 171) and freak shows. In other words, advertising is born in the margins of commercial life, with peddlers, mountebanks, and carnies, where fantasy and magic have always had an important place. Travelling sellers of cure-all pills and tonics are just a step away from the wandering magi, after all. As Williams notes, the “most extravagant early extensions” of the language of recommendation came early on from those selling medicines, which we should not forget is the traditional preserve of the magical (drugs) and (potions). Indeed, Gorgias’ comparison of the power of words over the mind with the power of drugs over the body is so strongly embedded into the latter part of the Encomium that Wardy (2005, p. 46) describes it as an ‘assimilation’ of logos to the realm of “irresistible” drugs. We have also seen in Plato’s Gorgias how the Sophist is depicted as enthralled with the power that his words have in the persuasion of patients. Of course, Williams (1980) has no intention of impugning the solidly empirical Western medical tradition. Once again, we can interpret him as a child of Plato, careful to “insist on a sharp distinction between healing doctor and amoral wizard” and denying “that the rhetorician deserves comparison with the doctor properly understood” (Wardy, 2005, p. 46). The ‘extended’ language used to persuasively promote cure-alls and patent medicines is, instead, the province of the “quack”, whose only real ability is, as with Gorgias, an understanding of the power of logos and how to use it to connect to people’s minds.

Born in the shadier, more magical, margins of pseudo-medical salesman-ship, then, advertising is slippery and liminal from its inception. It seems to attach itself almost parasitically to the rise of modern capitalism in Williams’ (1980) narrative. It is the perfect complement to industrialised production’s increasing need for market control—so much so, indeed, that one almost begins to wonder whether it is advertising that is using capitalism. Perhaps what Williams is unknowingly describing is the revenge of the marginalised Gorgian rhapsodic rhetoric, a sort of survival instinct of the Sophistic paradigm, which sees an opportunity in early advertising to achieve the sort of social dominance that has eluded its since its early days in Athens. Certainly, there is an interesting memetic perspective here behind the anthropomorphism; one which might also be read, though using rather different terms, in Laufer and Paradeise’s (2016) reading of the relationship between Sophism and marketing. I will return to this question in later chapters, but for now it is sufficient to underline the way in which Williams (1980) anchors his narrative of magical advertising in the pejorative depiction of the Gorgian, ‘extended language’ of the unsanctioned, marginal dealer in the.

Judith Williamson—Advertising as Totem

Although originally published two years earlier than Williams’ (1980) essay, Williamson’s ([1978] 2002) book on “decoding” advertising also adopted a Marxist approach to the consideration of advertising and also made much use of comparisons with witchcraft and magic. The aim of Williamson’s study was to “analyse the way ads work” through a “dismantling of their mechanisms, to how they convey meanings to their products” (2002, p. vi). In order to do this she brings semiotic and psychoanalytical techniques and a Marxist perspective to bear upon the advertising executions of the 1970s. While Williams’ Marxist lens is never overt, Williamson (2002) adopts terminology and arguments directly from Capital and the Grundrisse. Accordingly, although she ends up making many of the same points as Williams (1980) her discourse is far more theoretically elaborated. So, for example, she describes how

So, there is much similarity here to Williams’ rhetoric of advertising as a tool that cloaks or hides reality, but it is delivered in more obviously Marxist terminology. Williamson’s (2002) text also shares some of the rather eschatological tone that can be found in the latter part of Williams’ (1980) essay. She finishes her introduction section, for example, with the observation that “the need for relationship and human meaning appropriated by advertising is one that, if only it was not diverted, could radically change the society we live in” (p. 14), though this does contrast quite noticeably with Williams’ (1980) far more downbeat sign-off regarding the needs of corporations, where he warns that “unless they are driven back now, there will be no easy second chance”.

Williamson (2002) uses comparisons from magic and religion in a number of ways in her analysis. Firstly, she describes the way that advertising makes us identify with the things we buy as “a kind of totemism” (p. 46). While totemism in tribal cultures is often suffused with spiritual and magical aspects, however, this is not the side of its practice that Williamson wishes to draw a comparison with. Instead, she works from Levi-Strauss’ (1973) definition that sees totemism as a way in which human groups seek to differentiate each other by aligning themselves with differences between animals in the natural world. Williamson’s point is that, in advertising, “the objects used to differentiate between us—No. 6 smokers, or Gauloise smokers, Mini drivers or Rolls Royce drivers—the objects that create these ‘totemic’ groups are not natural, and not naturally different, although these differences are given a ‘natural’ status” (p. 46). In other words, advertising is a manqué totemism based upon false, unnatural differentiation. This produces “two sets of false differences: between products, and between people, each perpetually redefining the other, through an exchange of meaning in the ad, and an exchange of money in the shop” (p. 47). One detects a certain underlying nostalgia or appeal to the noble savage mythos here—totemism is based upon natural differentiation and is therefore not false, while advertising is doubly false because it seeks to arbitrarily differentiate between people using unnatural ‘products’ which are not in themselves different. Williamson critiques advertising on the basis of its falsity and its unnaturalness—advertising manipulates us into defining/identifying ourselves around consumption totems whose terms of differentiation are artificial and paradoxical. After all, she reasons, “one group is differentiated from another only at the price of a sameness within them” (p. 48) and so, in a beautiful phrase that demonstrates her own rhetorical magic, “we become the same, in each being made ‘different’ in the same way”. Williamson uses the idea of totemism, then, in order to contrast the paradoxical, self-contradictory, constantly shifting way in which modern consumer society synthesises ad hoc social groupings around consumption acts with the simpler, more basic, more natural acts of group differentiation described by anthropologists. Both are totemic in the sense that they share the dynamic of using something to cohere a group around and signal analogous difference. But Williamson frames her comparison within the binary relations of natural/unnatural, real/false—terms that are fundamental to the weave of her work. As with Williams (1980), advertising is presented as fundamentally a practice of deceit. As with Williams, it is not difficult to discern the heavily Platonic origins of Williamson’s (2002) perspective.

Totemism is not being used by Williamson (2002) as a way of identifying advertising with ‘magical’ practices or tropes, although its discussion is contributing to a general argument of deceitful, manipulative strategies that is familiar from the legacy of anti-Sophist thinking. However, Williamson (2002) does devote a whole chapter to the relationship between magic and advertising. Magic is “a kind of pivot around which misrepresentation can be produced” (p. 140). Advertising uses the suggestion of magic in order to ‘short-circuit’ “a multiplicity of transformations, productions, and actions”. It is an “organising mythology” which advertising harnesses in order to provide a non-explanation for its fantastical narratives and assertions—because the “explanation is that it’s magic”. Importantly, this works only because the population already has a clear sense of what magic is. It is the existence of the trope of magic in our minds that allows an advertiser to use it. As Williamson (2002) points out, so much of the modern production process does really seem to work like magic—“consumer products and modern technology provide us with everything ready-made”, so that the only thing actually left for us to do is to “buy the product or incant its name”. The tiny amount of effort needed by us to consume something “inevitably creates a ‘magical spell’ element”. In this way, Williamson (2002) concludes, “all consumer products offer magic, and all advertisements are spells” (p. 141). Furthermore, the magical nature of the products and the depiction of the transformations they can accomplish are paramount in forestalling any objections on the grounds of irrationality and hyperbole that consumers might have; “the more amazing results advertisements offer us, the more these come within the non-explanatory system of ‘magic’, and the less amazing they thus seem, because it is not amazing for magic to be amazing”. The existence of magic as a concept in consumers’ minds is accordingly framed as a weakness—it opens them up to manipulation by advertisers as it can be used “to misrep-resent any system of production”. Williamson does not attempt to locate the origins of our assumptions about magic—while she alludes to tropes from the Arabian Nights (p. 149), fairy stories that “every child” knows (p. 142), “common nursery knowledge” (p. 144), alchemy (p. 146), religious “sects” (p. 150), as well as “crystal balls” and “magic circles”, there is no grounding of these elements within a larger argument of what magic means, and how it comes to have meaning, to a modern audience (and no discussion either of what type of audience we might be talking about). The general impression, though, is certainly that advertising is relying upon a childhood familiarity with folk and fairy tale depictions of magic and witchcraft in order to create these sorts of powerful effects. Products are seen to ‘magically’ appear in our lives (divorced from any sort of production process) and then are depicted as having powerful “material effects” (p. 141) upon those lives. The “space and time of production” can thus be powerfully elided, which in turn allows the consumer to become the ‘magical’ producer, creating the effects simply by buying the product.

Williamson (2002) argues that advertising executions contain a whole host of tropes and paraphernalia from the “common nursery knowledge” of magic such as “genies in lamps and bottles, rites and spells, sudden growth or miniaturisation, turning things to gold, magic wands and implements, and a vast number of other things” which construct the “iconography of magic”. While Williams (1980) did not explicitly note the same patterns, his examples of quack cures and patent pills as well as the focus on “early commercial purple” and ‘extended’ language can be seen as covering some similar ground. Williamson (2002), though, makes a convincing case through her illustrated trawl across the iconography of magic in advertising that sorcery is an important allusion in much advertising work. Her explanation of the larger significance of magic for advertising therefore seems to be dependent upon the way in which childhood understandings of the place of magic in the world work against us in making advertising’s elisions and transformations acceptable. So much of the modern capitalist world seems to function ‘as if by magic’; indeed, so much of it is constructed so as to erase the traces of production. Tropical fruit magically appears in our supermarkets throughout the year, a constantly evolving parade of consumer electronic devices materialise in the market, from where we are never quite sure, and so many of our products contain no user serviceable parts, almost as if were we to open them up (if we could find the appropriate proprietary screwdriver) we would inadvertently let the sorcery out that makes them work. This is an ‘acceptable’ state of affairs to consumers, Williams appears to be arguing, because we are first ‘softened up’ in childhood by exposure to the “common nursery knowledge” of magic and then advertising executions directly and indirectly resonate with this knowledge in their use of the “iconography of magic”. Magic, in both its fairy tale and marketing guises, is something that enchants us, sets a glamour (in its original and modern senses) over us so that we cannot see the reality of the world and can be cheated and manipulated by the forces of capitalism. Advertising’s spell casts us back to a naïve, childlike way of thinking—it takes away our common sense, our learning, and our embeddedness in the social world.

On a meta level, Williamson’s (2002) work is essentially a study in the rhetoric of advertising. She analyses advertisements as persuasive texts, breaking them down in terms of their verbal and visual symbology, patternings, allusions, and misdirections. While her apparent sources for such an interpretive focus are semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian discourse analysis, this is simply because (as I have already argued) these are the more fashionable extensions of rhetorical work in the second half of the twentieth century. Williamson’s (2002) communicative model is entirely rhetorical—a rhetor (the advertiser) constructs a text (the advertisement) that plays upon the common assumptions of the target audience and uses verbal and visual elements to lead that audience to think about products and their relationship to those products in certain ways. Advertising is rhetoric (persuasive communication) and rhetoric both uses magic (as a rhetorical resource) and is magic (in its effect). And this is clearly to the detriment of society in general. Although we might come to it in a rather more involved and evidenced manner, the conclusion is similar to that of Williams (1980).

Sut Jhally—Advertising as Fetish Religion

The general thesis of Williams (1980) and Williamson (2002) has been developed and maintained by Sut Jhally across a number of works (Jhally, 1989, 1990; Leiss et al., 1997) where he has argued that advertising integrates “people and things within a magical and supernatural sphere” (Jhally, 1989, p. 225). Jhally uses magic in a noticeably less pejorative sense than either Williams (1980) or Williamson (2002). This is because, although he approaches the issue from a Marxist perspective, he acknowledges the limitations that Marx’s views of symbolism and religion can have on a nuanced understanding of the functions that religion (and magic) can play in people’s lives. Jhally (1990) starts from Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism in which goods are “a unity of what is revealed and what is concealed in the processes of production and consumption”, revealing to us “their capacities both as satisfiers of particular wants and as communicators of behavioural codes”, while at the same time drawing a “veil across their own origins” (p. 49) and so masking “the story of who fashioned them, and under what conditions” (p. 50). The fetishism of commodities means that commodities are first emptied of meaning, hiding “the real social relations objectified in them through human labour, to make it possible for the imaginary/symbolic social relations to be injected into the construction of meaning at a secondary level” (p. 51). This is summarised in Jhally’s memorable (and rhetorically powerful) slogan: “Production empties. Advertising fills” (p. 51). In contrast to Williamson (2002), Jhally is generally careful to avoid centring his discussion around real/false binaries. From his perspective, advertising cannot be providing false meanings precisely because, by the time that advertising and marketing enter the production process, the commodity has no meaning left whatsoever.

Jhally (1990) spends some time unpacking the word fetishism. This is the word that Marx’s thought on the subject has supplied him with, so the way that he understands it and (re-)defines it is vitally important in his careful recasting of the Marxist perspective on advertising. He notes that Marx himself “derived the term from the early anthropological writings” (p. 53) and that its use to describe religious or magical practices seems to have originally started with Portuguese sailors who used their word feitiço (for a charm or amulet) to refer to the objects they saw native Africans worshipping. Jhally (1990) describes how the term gained currency in early sociological and anthropological theories, particularly those delineating evolutionary stages of social or religious order but also notes the increasingly “fuzzy and confused” (p. 54) understanding of the word that grew as more writers adopted it for their own particular purposes. Consequently, Jhally attempts to chart some common ground across this confusing landscape. Firstly, he points out that fetishism is “not a total spiritual belief” but always exists as part of a much wider spiritual system. Such a system might well include the belief in a supreme being, but fetishism assumes that such a being, or beings, have little relevance “as regards the conduct of everyday life” (p. 55). Instead, the fetish has power because it is the abode of a lesser spirit, something which can be made to care about the day to day concerns of the worshipper. Jhally (1990) summarises that the fetish works at the “short term and immediate” level and its use is focused on the “practical welfare of its possessors” (p. 56). It might protect a worshipper from evil spirits, poison, attack by animals, or thieves, or it might confer help in fishing, the affairs of the heart, or the earning of money. The fetish is something that affords a sense of security in an arbitrary world, it uses objects as (vehicles for) intermediaries which can help ameliorate daily anxieties and risks. As well as the anthropological and ethnographic literature, the concept of the fetish has been adopted, via Freud, into clinical psychoanalysis, where it is “regarded as a ‘perversion’” (p. 58) manifested in adult males by the childhood “trauma of seeing the female genitals and is an attempt to ease the castration anxiety this causes” (p. 60). The fetish object that might be perversely fixated upon represents “the imaginary penis of the mother” and possession of it allows the fetish-ist to overcome castration anxiety. As Jhally points out, this means that the fetish is itself without actual power, “it merely completes the scene” though “without it there can be no action” (p. 61). The fetish object becomes a way of maintaining “the woman as a phallic woman, and thus denying her natural sexual definition”—it therefore aids in “distorting reality”. In all of these understandings, the fetish is a vehicle—meaningless in and of itself, significant only in so far as it contains or stands for something else. So it is with the fetishisation of commodities. Products have been stripped of meaning by the production process—they are as empty as any tribal or sexual fetish before the spirits make them their home or the sexual fetishist interprets them as the imaginary maternal penis.

In Jhally’s (1990) view, advertising is not responsible for the original emptying of meaning from commodities and neither it is to be blamed for its filling of products with meaning. Advertising derives its power “not from the ingenuity of advertisers but from the need for meaning” and “if it is manipulative, it is manipulative with respect to a real need: our need to know the world and to make sense of it, our need to know ourselves” (p. 197). In non-capitalist society, the institution that performs this meaning-giving function is religion. But earlier Marxist scholars “tended to see religion as having been superseded, as a thing of the past” (p. 197) and therefore did not appreciate the fact that advertising was stepping into the void left by a dormant or receding religious influence in capitalist society. People, naturally, will continue to search for meaning in their lives even if religion is no longer felt to be relevant them. Advertising offers up a magical religion, often couched in an irrational blind faith in the power of technology, “‘where anything is possible’, where anything can be ‘fixed’, where science can bestow miracles” (p. 199). Technology, in other words, is conflated with “magical feats of enchantment and transformation” (p. 198) in this “new religion of modern life” (p. 200). Jhally (1990), proceeds to construct a developmental history of “the different forms in which the commodity life has been cloaked through this century”, positing four “distinct chronological stages” which can be interpreted as “different religious frameworks for the commodity-form” (p. 201). The first stage, from the 1980s to the 1920s, Jhally calls the era of idolatry, in which consumers “venerated, almost worshipped” products and advertising celebrated them as harbingers of “the new age” in a spirit of discovery and exploration. In the second stage, running from the 1920s to the 1940s and dubbed the period of iconology, advertising focuses on the meanings of products “within a special social context”. Although this heralds a move towards constructing meaning in terms of the consumer, the abstract qualities attached to commodities “were still bound very tightly to the things themselves”, contributing to the construction of a “twilight world of abstract significance that is neither wholly thing-based or person-based”. The next stage, between the 1940s and 1960s, is the one that Jhally explicitly describes as the period of fetishism. The move towards locating the qualities of a commodity within the person and the act of consumption becomes absolute—“the product puts its power at the disposal of the individual and consumers are encouraged to consider what the product can do for them” (p. 202). The power of the product is evinced “largely through ‘black magic’ where persons undergo sudden transformations or where the commodity has power over other people as well”. The final stage, which Jhally judges to be between the 1960s and 1980s (i.e. up to the ‘present’ of the writing of his text), is that of totemism, echoing Williamson’s (2002) arguments regarding products as differentiators. Jhally argues that this last phase “draws together and synthesises” the other stages, with “utility, symbolisation, and personalisation” being “mixed and remixed under the sign of the group” (Jhally, 1990, p. 202).

So, although Jhally (1990) finally understands advertising “as a religion” (p. 203) it is a religion of distinctly magical elements, of idolatry, iconography, fetish and totem, where objects come to have the power of transformation and binding. Advertising has stepped in to fill the void that capitalist production (and the withering away of religion) has left in people—in a “world without meaning wherein people search for meaning arises the religion of use-value, the religion of advertising” (p. 203). Jhally’s explanation makes of advertising an inevitable outcome of the human need for meaning—he rhetorically disempowers the makers of advertising by asserting that it works not because of anything that advertisers do, per se, but rather because we are so desperately searching for meaning that even the “trivialities” (p. 52) of advertising will do when we can find nothing else. Our celebration of the ingenuity of advertising (in terms of the cunning that we afford it and the creativity that we so often reward it for) is entirely misplaced. Modern capitalism has ensured that consumption has “replaced community, class and religion as the defining feature of social life” (p. 192) and, as a consequence, the need for meaning can be looked for only within the structures of consumption. Advertising has evolved to feed that need and has grown by reflecting the fundamental nature of the object-human relationship that capitalist production dictates—the object world “performs magical feats of transformation and bewitchment, brings instant happiness and gratification, captures the forces of nature, and holds within itself the essence of important social relationships (p. 172).

Jhally’s (1990) identification of advertising and magic reflects a larger understanding of the inevitable relationship between commodities and humans in modern capitalism. It is still grounded in the narrative of an almost Lapsarian elision of the truth of production—as Jhally (1989) puts it, capitalism creates a world of goods where “true meaning has been stolen” (p. 225). In that sense, ‘consumer society’, the modern marketplace, marketing, etc., are all based upon an initial act of theft. All meaning that comes after that theft is false, but at the same time necessary. We cannot do without meaning and, as all that is left to us is the consumption of commodities, we look for meaning there. And advertising is able to provide it for us. Tragic, rather than mendacious, the magic of advertising is an unavoidably false, and inexorably weak and frivolous, construction. The accusation of witchcraft rhetorically serves to damn capitalism through fetishism’s links with sexual perversion and with a small, practically minded, quotidian subset of religious practice that has by necessity become inflated into a poor substitute for a complete religion’s propensity to answer the human need for meaning. Jhally’s argumentation is rhetorically based upon a bathos figure. This is what we have been reduced to by capitalism—searching for meaning in the low magic of detergent ads and alcohol promotions.

Tricia Sheffield—Advertising as Not-Magic

Taking Jhally’s (1989, 1990) as a starting point, Sheffield (2006) argues that advertising “is not after all, a religion, as Jhally states, but advertising has religious dimensions that reflect a totemic discourse” (p. xiii). This conclusion, perhaps, might be expected from a scholar who argues from a “perspective configured by an engagement with the religious practices of the Christian theological tradition” (p. 1). Sheffield’s (2006) main bone of contention with Jhally is that, rather than seeing advertising as a “fetish religion”, she sees it as “not a religion at all,” but rather as “having religious, or totemic dimensions” (p. 6). In this she is far closer to Williamson’s (2002) initial focus on totemism, though she does rather downplay the fact that Jhally (1990), as we have seen, also argues that the current phase of the “religious framework for the commodity-form” (p. 201) is one of totemism which draws together all the other stages “under the sign of the group” (p. 202). Sheffield seems to find the linking of fetishism with a definition of religion uncomfortable. Indeed, we can be a bit more specific in saying that the way in which Jhally connects advertising, religion, and magical practice is what unnerves Sheffield. She notes that “for many theologians, Jhally’s implied definition of religion would be problematic” because “he seems to be relating black cats, ghosts, and ouija boards to God” (p. 23). Of course, what is really at issue is the fact that Jhally sees all manifestations of religion from a Marxist perspective—religion serves to satisfy humanity’s ‘need for meaning’ and that goes for those parts of it which might be defined as magical practice as well as those more grander aspects involving a Supreme Being. Sheffield (2006) points out that Jhally’s understanding of religion would not make much sense to theologians—but then it seems unlikely that this is whom he is writing for. That said, much of Sheffield’s critique of Jhally’s use of the concept of fetishism does hit home. In particular, she argues that “if as Jhally notes, one of the main aspects of religion is to give answers to humanity’s search for meaning, his definition of fetishism as a religion does not comply with this standard” (p. 28). He has, after all, described fetishism as a basic, everyday, practical sort of thing, concerned with securing food, warding off harm, and attracting love. A fetish religion, therefore, would not seem to be attempting “to address ultimate concerns” (ibid.) but would instead give “temporary satisfaction in the realm of the magical” (ibid.). Quite how this is in accordance with the deep ‘need for meaning’ that Jhally writes of is indeed difficult to see. Certainly, we can see in Sheffield a sense that magic and fetishism do not constitute real religion. Indeed, Sheffield’s (2006) reading of Durkheim, whom she relies upon in her construction of the larger argument that advertising has totemic dimensions, allows her to remind us that magic “does not have the moral community of the Church” and, because “magic does not have a community, it cannot be a religion” (p. 39). According to Durkheim, recounts Sheffield, magic is performed individually or for clientele who might have no knowledge of each other. Sheffield concedes that magic has some connection to advertising, but this is only in so far as magical devices are occasionally used in the content of advertising executions when “normally inanimate objects come alive and speak to the consumer” (p. 27)—that old rhetorical figure of anthropomorphism, in other words. Despite this, fundamentally, “magic is not the culture created and sustained by advertising”. Instead, it is the clan creating, totemic aspect of advertising which can be seen as the driving power of advertising and supplies the religious “dimension” of marketing communication, even though it does not reach to the heights of religion proper.

Ultimately, Sheffield’s (2006) study is a repositioning of Williamsons’ (2002) argument from the perspective of theological scholarship. It is interesting because of the way that it explicitly dismisses magic as a term of comparison for advertising, attempting to erase it from Jhally’s argumentation. It is tempting to wonder whether the reason behind this is that magic is such a disturbing practice to have connected to both religion and advertising. Certainly, there are clearly dismissive rhetorical strategies employed by Sheffield (2006) to frame magic as something both unreligious and lacking power. Though the explicit identification of anthropomorphism and magic is also telling for its faint echoing of the legacy of Gorgian, rhapsodic rhetoric.

Linda Dégh—Advertising as Magic Folk Tale

The final author in my review of thinkers outside marketing who have identified aspects of marketing communication with magic is folklore scholar Linda Dégh. In two substantial chapters in her work on American folklore and the mass media (Dégh, 1994), she argues for a reading of television advertising which sees it as resurrecting the magical story traditions of the Märchen, “the classical oral prose narrative of Old World peasantry” (p. 34). Dégh notes that the Märchen tradition fell out of use with the advent of industrialisation, when its “entertaining function depending on primary communication, became dispensable, often unnecessary, and in most cases impossible” (ibid.). Instead, it lived on in a severely weakened form in children’s stories, often adopted for educational rather than entertainment purposes. Dégh argues, however, that the Märchen found a new home on television, a technology that “terminated the occasions for traditional storytelling” but which nevertheless helped the “Märchen to survive on the basis of entirely new traditions” (p. 43).

Dégh (1994) maintains that the presence of folklore magic in advertising is the result of the advertising industry reacting to the desires of their target audiences. She notes that marketing communication “never loses touch with the masses” (p. 42) and “in all its moves, it consults public opinion, which sensitively and immediately reacts to advertising strategies”. If we see the Märchen in television advertising, then, that “would seem to indicate that Märchen-like enchantment is in fashion, that magic is in demand” (p. 43). America, she reasons, is “eager to welcome” the “salesperson’s substitute: the fairy and goblin impersonators” into its homes. Mirroring Williamson’s (2002) focus on the way that advertising magic achieves its resonance from the stories of childhood, Dégh (1994) explains that modern America has a rather limited knowledge of the variegated Märchen forms and is restricted to selections from the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, and Andrew Lang” and consequently their “frame of reference is rather narrow” (ibid.). Indeed, the elements from these limited childhood sources are then further fragmented within the world of advertising—they become disseminated “in the form of disintegrated, atomized units and enter the bloodstream of communication and ‘manipulated communication’ in disjointed particles”. The fairy princesses and genies that populate advertising belong to the “Märchen world” but are disconnected from the specifics of their stories, serving only to conjure up the possibilities of magical enchantment rather than function as specific figures from specific tales.

Dégh’s (1994) explanation for the utility of Märchen magic in advertising revolves around a firmly rhetorical understanding of their persuasive nature (though she does not use the word itself). She begins by pointing out that the traditional Märchen “is not meant to be believed by its audience” (p. 44). Everything about the way that it is styled and structured suggests “that, in the everyday sense of the word, it is not true”. Instead, “what the tale demands and stimulates” is the “temporary suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience” for “artistic enjoyment” (ibid.). The magical metaphors brought over from the “Märchen world” are mean to be resolved by the audience, not taken at face value, Dégh reminds us. The “advertisement-Märchen neither needs nor tolerates belief” (ibid.) because its “enchantment is converted into features of artistic narration, figurative speech, symbols, and metaphors” (p. 48). Interestingly, Dégh is arguing that, in reception by an audience, advertising magic collapses down into obvious, identifiable, rhetoric and so loses its irrational side—it becomes, simply, recognisable persuasion (at which point we “leave the world of the Märchen behind us”, p. 49). This is not to say that the irrational is not to be found in advertising, however. Dégh (1994) suggests that “under the Märchen layer” (p. 50) there is another stratum, that of legend, which is the realm of “irrational” magic that cannot be so easily transformed into the product of persuasive patternings. In the legend layer of advertising, “magic appears, even if only latently, as a real power in real life” (p. 53). It provides a hidden message which “suggests that certain everyday situations represent intolerable and maybe ruinous deficiencies, beside which everything else shrinks into insignificance, and which can be remedied exclusively by one single solution” (ibid.).

So, the folk tale magic, the “Märchen-simulating” (p. 53) aspects, of advertisements are rational because they allow us to easily understand that they are working upon us as formal persuasive devices. In that sense, Dégh also argues, they have little actual power over us—because we recognise them as rhetorical techniques, “we viewers feel free to make our own choice” (p. 48). Yet, the layer of legend in advertising, which hides beneath the clearly fictional stratum of the Märchen, is quite the opposite—it is here that magic and the irrational are tightly bound together and (very tellingly from a Gorgian perspective) when energised by the “synergism of innumerable repetitions” (p. 53) can achieve a sort of terrible fascination upon the viewer. It “shrinks the complex problematics” of the world “to a single isolated problem” that can be solved with “a single magic trick”. Dégh describes the result as a sort of “messianic worldview”, a cargo-cult that “makes believe that the sought-after goods have already arrived and stand at cult members’ disposal” (p. 53). She then identifies this “ideology” with the same “kind of irrationality” that makes people give over their judgement to horoscopes, join religious cults, “chase monsters in the woods, summon spirits, exorcise demons, search for UFOs in the sky, and become well-versed in the legendary of such activities” (ibid.). This layer of hidden magic turns consumers into irrational ‘fanatics’ because it magically compresses all the problems of life into one point, promoting a single act of consumption as the cure for all ills. What Dégh (1994) is describing here is the enthymematic (and fallacious) nature of advertising argumentation. Rhetorical argumentation relies upon compressed structures of argumentation in comparison to dialectic’s careful steps through the syllogistic format. Instead of ‘if x, and if y, then therefore z’, the enthymeme presents the audience with a simple ‘if x, then z’—a far more ambiguous, slippery patterning that is ideal for taking advantage of the audience’s existing assumptions, prejudices, uncertainties, and fears.

Dégh (1994) goes on to examine the marketing of actual magical paraphernalia and services in modern America, making it clear that the explicit selling of magical objects (the commodification of magic) is reliant upon the same need for magic, and taps into the same irrationalism, that she identifies in the population at large when talking about advertisements for household products. For her, the ‘occult explosion’ of the 1970s and 80s, which saw a vast surge of interest in new age mysticism, ceremonial magic, and pagan and neo-pagan beliefs, is not a sign that “urban mass society has become more ‘superstitious’, only that mass communication and social stratification have made supernatural belief more visible, more normalized and adaptable” (p. 54). She further argues that “the exploitation of magic to market products” has been going on since the industrial revolution”, locating its origins in the “rough and aggressive Yankee peddling and boosterism” (p. 55) that was initially “repulsive” to the sensibilities of Old Europe but which was eventually “adopted by most industrial nations” in the decades after World War II. This is a telling reversal to Williams’ (1980) narrative where the use of miraculous and magical descriptors for patent medicines was well entrenched in Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century England. Once again, though, we have an origin tale which conflates magic, rhapsodic rhetoric of the high style (highly inappropriate for commercial discourse, of course), the irrational, and marketing.

Dégh (1994) is quite clearly not ‘accusing’ marketing of witchcraft or magic—instead, marketers are responding to the desire for magic that consumers have always had (even before they were consumers). There is a close relationship between the way that marketers use magic and the rhetorical nature of advertising in Dégh’s analysis. Magic works rhetorically in advertising at the level of figuration, metaphor, anthropomorphism, etc., but it also works at deeper levels by rhetorical strategies of compressed, enthymematic argumentation and repetition that can bind with human irrationality to produce cult-like adherence to consumption practices and choices. So, while Dégh mostly displays a detached folklorist’s perspective her analysis manifests a real sense of disturbance at the way in which the combination of marketing and magic can invoke the irrational in a consumer audience.

Marketing Academics and Identifications of Magic

Identification of magic with marketing from inside marketing scholarship is rare but does have a significant history. Perhaps the earliest example is to be found in the occasional scholarship of US advertising legend Howard Luck Gossage.¹ Gossage’s (1967) essay, originally published in 1961 in Harper’s Magazine and slyly entitled ‘The Gilded Bough: Magic and Advertising’, adopts Frazer’s anthropological perspective (including his categorisations of imitative and contagious) in order to claim that modern advertising was an example of “the most common denominator of all, magic” (p. 364). Gos-sage’s piece is mostly an early iteration through the sorts of magical content in advertising that Williamson (2002) and Dégh (1994) identify. However, it has been cited by Pollay (1986) as an example of the anthropological interpretation of advertising and, although Gossage is not usually thought of as an advertising scholar, he is an example of a careful, insightful thinker about advertising from within the industry. It is certainly a significant point of departure for a review of how marketing scholars link their discipline and the practice of magic. When given the opportunity to contribute to a collection of essays regarding current perspectives on communication and reflect upon his own profession, Gossage chooses to frame it squarely within the practice of magic as described by Frazer. It is also satisfying to note that Gossage’s essay is situated in a section entitled “The Modern Persuasion: The Rhetorics of Mass Society” (p. 333). Perhaps the most insightful element of Gossage’s (1967) piece is his argument that magic “is the most adaptable of creatures”. Magic continually blends into the background and “so thoroughly identifies with its surroundings as to be unnoticed by the inhabitants” (p. 363). Gossage then artfully explains that this propensity is why “such now obvious performances of magical thinking as the Inquisition, the Dutch tulip craze of the seventeenth century, the stock-market boom of the late twenties, Couéism, McCarthyism, and chain letters escaped recognition at the time” (ibid.). For Gossage, then, magic is always with us and advertising just makes it “more apparent” (p. 369). There might be different degrees of magical thinking present in different types of advertising, but “whatever its form, advertising’s magic is relatively lucid in that it never confuses the main issue, what it has to sell” (p. 370)—in other areas of life, in politics and the running of the larger economies that advertising serves, Gossage implies that this is not so much the case. Advertising magic is, comparatively, straightforward in its motivations. It should be noted, though, that Gossage blames the extremes of unsubtle magical thinking in advertising on the audience; “if some advertising is more blatantly guilty of magical thinking than others, it is because some audiences are more simple-minded” (ibid.). Now, while this highly condescending attitude smacks of 1960s mores, it is significant for the way in which it implies that advertising uses magical thinking because audiences are simple-minded enough to respond to it. The consumer is a dupe, then. As we shall see, this position is seriously challenged in later marketing and consumer research that invokes magic.

The next instance of ascribing magical significance to marketing practices comes in Rook (1987). This chapter in Umiker-Sebeok’s (1987) edited collection on marketing and semiotics examines what Rook calls “modern hex-signs”, namely, the “stake signs and stickers which announce that a home has been professionally secured” (p. 239). The hex-signs that Rook is alluding to are protective talismans affixed to buildings in order to “ward off harmful or evil forces”. He makes a reference to the “colorful geometric designs nineteenth century Pennsylvania Amish farmers” used to mount on their barns but otherwise does not provide much historical or anthropological detail. Indeed, beyond the initial setting up of the comparison, Rook (1987) does not really engage in depth with the connection to magic. Instead, he treats both hex-signs and security signs as symbolic ways to project strength, preparedness, and commitment to the seriousness of property protection. Having said that, there is no trace of embarrassment or a ‘need to explain’ the use of comparisons with witchcraft—although this is probably to do with the fact that the comparison is being used as a quick way to attract attention to the research on security signs rather than as a serious proposition of identity. It might also have to do with the fact that Rook had already published work from his PhD thesis that argued for a careful consideration of the ritual aspect of consumption practices (Rook, 1985). Rook sees hex-signs as evidence of protection rituals in the same way that the display of aggressive security signs threatening physical violence and legal retribution are part of modern protection rituals. What is important is the ritual nature of the displays rather than their connection to magic per se. This is an important point because it is typical of much marketing scholarship which touches on aspects of magic. Ritual is interpreted largely from a sociological or socio-anthropological perspective rather than a spiritual or religious one. Even when comparisons are made to religious, spiritual, or magical practice the frame such comparisons are made within is a sociological one. So, Rook (1985) sees rituals as “dramatic enactments” (p. 253), “expressive, symbolic” (p. 252) activities which are “constructed of multiple behaviours that occur in a fixed, episodic sequence” and tend “to be repeated over time”. His emphasis on dramatic scripting underlines his grounding in Goffman’s ([1957] 1990) theory of interaction rituals and there is certainly a sense in which we can interpret Goffman’s focus on performance in terms of rhetorical persuasion (Harré, 1985). Furthermore, Rook (1985) makes much use of Erikson’s (1982) approach to rituals in terms of stages of psychological development, particularly his focus on smaller, everyday ritualised behaviour such as grooming rituals. The Eriksonian perspective affords ritual significance to practices and habits that have traditionally been overlooked, and this means that Rook (1985) is able to identify consumption rituals that have “magical components’ to them. In his exploration of male grooming rituals, he finds that “not infrequently, the subjects described various grooming effects that can be characterized as ritual magic” (p. 261), in that they produce dramatic transformations in their users. It must be emphasised that the magical effects that Rook’s respondents are talking about here are not those depicted in advertising—rather they are reporting the effects that the grooming rituals have upon themselves. So, some of the ways in which these rituals would cause magical changes would be that “a tired drone is transformed into an energetic dynamo; an elixir makes Plain Jane look glamorous; one of the guys becomes a Romeo” (ibid.). Additionally, Rook notes that a grooming ritual might often be described as a “psychic energizer” in order to combat introversion. It is no coincidence that many of Rook’s respondents’ descriptions of the magical effects of their rituals follow quite closely “the plots of many grooming product commercials” (ibid.). Marketing communication has primed consumers to look upon consumption as a magical process that can confer extra luck, extra charisma, extra attraction upon them. And this is how they come to then incorporate their rituals involving such products into their self-narration.

There is a significant strand of literature in consumption research that has looked at the way that consumers use products as fetishes empowered with magical, transformative capabilities. Distinct from the line of scholarship I have already delineated, this research sees the fetishising of consumption as something that originates from within the consumer and has had little time for explaining it as a function of capitalist production. Instead, work by Belk (1988, 1991), Arnould and Price (1993), Arnould et al. (1999), Gmelch (2012), Newman et al. (2011), Fernandez and Lastovicka (2011) has explored the ways in which consumers bring products into their inner lives, using them to construct their identities and transform themselves in ways that display magical or fetishistic thinking. Such scholarship, of course, can be viewed as essentially supporting the points that Williams (1980), Williamson (2002), and Jhally (1990) make regarding capitalism’s presentation of products as fetish objects which have a meaning entirely separated from their original meaning erased by the process of production. In this reading, the consumer (and the researcher) are ‘dupes’ (Slater, 1997), simply adopting the meanings of the products that are projected to them by marketing communications in the service of capitalism. Their magical thinking is foisted on to them by advertising—when they fetishise a product to help in the construction of their identity they are playing into the hands of a system which desires them to define themselves in terms of their consumption. Much consumer culture theory scholarship has instead sought to investigate consumers as ‘postmodern identity-seekers’ or even ‘crafters’ (Campbell, 2005, p. 23) who are largely expressing their own agency in their magical consumption rituals—not exactly ‘sovereign’ but certainly proactive and with power to interpret and shape their own understandings.

Belk et al. (1989) uses magic as a descriptor for the way that consumers interact with product and consumption rituals that they consider to be “sacred” (p. 11). The authors use ethnographic and anthropological research to point out similarities between the ways that believers interact with sacred objects in their religion and the ways that consumers can interact with objects that have special, sacred significance for them. Consumption of marketed products, in other words, can play the same part in people’s lives as interaction with sacred objects can in the lives of those believers in magic described in anthropological accounts. Belk (1988), in his more elaborated discussion of the ways in which consumers make objects an (extended) part of their selves, uses a number of direct comparisons to Frazerian magical theory. Although he makes reference to Marx’s commodity fetishism, Belk is much more comfortable with Frazer’s terminology of sympathetic and contagious magic particularly as they enable him to consider the ways that consumers build relationships with objects. Owning objects that might have belonged to a famous or historical person, for example, is described as a “desire to bask in the glory of the past in the hope that some of it will magically rub off—a form of positive contamination”, and “just as we seek to extend ourselves by incorporating or owning certain objects, we may still seek the sympathetic magic (contagion) of possessions that retain a part of the extended self of valued others” (p. 149). Belk is offering a magical explanation for the reasons that consumers might seek out objects owned by people they admire and also goes on to note that many purchases can function in the same way “as magical amulets and totemic emblems in more traditional societies” (p. 153), helping to make someone feel that luck is on their side or that they have more chance to become part of an aspirational grouping. In Belk’s (1988) work, the consumer is the active magician—they are performing the rites, making the magic. They are rarely portrayed as responding to marketing propositions; instead, consumers are framed as imaginative symbolic manipulators of objects. Magic, here, is a positive, empowering force, helping the consumer to get the meaning that they want. It cannot be called ‘marketing magic’ because there is little sense of marketing going on—this is consumer magic.

In his slightly later paper on the “ineluctable mysteries of possessions”, Belk (1991) argues that the ways in which scholarship has traditionally seen consumption is to try to reduce it to a “hedonic calculus” which is “bound to fail” and risks supporting an impoverished conception of the consumer as a “rational information-processor or human-as-computer” (p. 17). Instead, we must “recognize, reestablish, and reclaim” the magic of our possessions. Humans “court magic in a plethora of material loci” (p. 18) and any realistic theory of consumption must acknowledge this. The entire paper is a stance against the prevailing assumptions of human rationality that drive analytic paradigms such as economics and social psychology. These disciplines tend to ignore the fact that in many of our relationships with possessions, “there is more magic than reason involved” (p. 19). Much of the reasoning here is familiar from the earlier (1988) paper but Belk (1991) bolsters much of that earlier argumentation with a wider range through different product types and possession relationships. All of the “theoretical alternatives” (p. 37) that Belk (1991) brings to bear upon our possession relationships, such as fetishism, the concept of sacredness, and self-extension, portray the consumer as an active identity constructor, using possessions to further their lives or themselves. Once again, marketers as agents are almost entirely off-stage. Rather magic is something that inhabits the relationships that consumers create with their possessions.

In their exploration of the ‘fire of consumer desire’, Belk et al. (2003) do attempt to describe more fully the exact magical relationship between the marketer and the consumer. They explain that consumers are mesmerized by the promise of “goods not yet possessed” as if they promised “magical meaning in life” (p. 327). One source of this magic are the “advertisers, retailers, peddlers, and other merchants of mystique”. However, they are quick to claim that these agents of the marketing system are not the only elements “at work in bewitching us”. Consumers themselves “willingly act as sorcerers’ apprentices” (p. 327) and take on a “more proactive role […] than prior research has typically envisioned” (p. 328). In the end, Belk et al. (2003) conclude that consumer desire is not magical consumption (which we will come to below) but rather a search for magic, the imaginative aspiration to be transformed magically by the desired for object. Similarly to Dégh (1994), then, Belk et al. (2003) imply a general propensity for magic in the population. However, they emphasise the way in which the consumer participates, via the power of their imagination, in the evocation of magical significance for the product. Marketers are brought into the equation as sorcerers, but the real focus of the authors’ scholarly attention is directed towards the creative part played by consumers.

Arnould and Price (1993) explore the consumer experience of white water rafting adventures, an experience that is often described by those involved as “magical” (p. 25). They note the ways in which river guides act as narrative designers of an “interactive gestalt orchestrated […] over several days’ journey into the unknown” (ibid.). They help to produce an experience that can lead to a profound sense of transformation in the customer, a sense of having known “river magic”. It is clear that while much of the experience is crafted by the narratives of the river guides, who provide framing language and prime customers for their experience, the actual magic that is produced is a function of the “romantic cultural scripts” (p. 41) that “evolve over the course of the experience” and which require the interaction (and imagination) of both guide and customer. Arnould and Price (1993) use the word ‘magic’ in their analysis because that is the word that the guides and customers use to describe the “sense of reverence and mystery” (p. 24) that accompanies the transformative power of the rafting experience. The term is not particularly analysed—it is taken for granted as something that comes from their respondents. Certainly, there is no effort by the authors to try to link “river magic” with any other type of magic. However, this changes substantially in Arnould et al. (1999), where the same experience (white water rafting) is interpreted by the authors in terms of its similarities to magical rituals in other societies. They describe magic as a “moral practice that concerns itself with establishing proper modes of living in relation to others”, and that also “concerns itself with the relationship between human beings and the natural world”, and often involves the “activation of certain indefinable ‘latent virtues’ in the immaterial world” (p. 36). Importantly, they also note that “unlike Cartesian science, magical thinking and action is straightforwardly rhetorical, based in metaphor and simile” (p. 37). In terms of its motivation, Arnould et al. (1999) assert that magic “is a non-Cartesian strategy for resolving intractable social problems” (p. 37). White water rafting, then, becomes a “magical consumption system” (p. 38) that “mirrors traditional magical systems in intent and effect” (p. 38). Their descriptions of the way that the river guides prepare and guide their customers through the magical transformative experience makes them consumption shamans, saying the right words, providing the right atmosphere, invoking the spirits of the river so that the magic will be manifest. “Central to the rite” (p. 48) are the rhetorical narratives that the guides use to prime and prepare their charges for the dangerous but exhilarating experience they have ahead. Such narratives also are important for the way in which they reproduce the magic of the experience long after it is over, providing stories that can spread to others the magic a customer has experienced (as well as recreating powerful feelings in the storytellers themselves). Arnould et al. (1999) also identify the power of formalised/formulaic utterances, or “magical language” (p. 56) in the rafting rituals, noting the presence of verbal taboos (which help to engender a sense of power around the word/thing elided) and other “innovative, locally situated rhetoric” (p. 54) devices that are “designed to elicit cooperation from symbolic forces” (p. 52).

Arnould et al. (1999) paint a convincing portrait of the magical nature of the rafting consumer experience. At the centre of that picture, too, is rhetoric functioning as a magical, performative force. The guides are marketers, of course, though the authors are careful not to cast them in quite such terms. Yet, despite the fact that much of the magic that is experienced by the customers is generated as a result of the guides’ careful preparation, priming, and nurturing of the customers’ understanding and interpretation of events, there is never a sense in the article that customers are being manipulated, tricked, lied to, or duped. Indeed, Arnould et al. (1999) conclude their article by stating that “at least some customers are indeed in search of encounters such as Stoller’s struggle with the sorceress Dunguri cited in the epigraph” (p. 59). Customers are active seekers, not passive receptors. They willingly “lend their bodies to the process, both consuming creatively and aesthetically” (ibid.). Further, the authors ask whether modern Western consumers, perhaps, “need magic […] to reconstitute their life worlds and intentionality in postmodernity” (p. 63)? Again, this is a very different perspective from Williams (1980), Williamson (2002), and Jhally (1990). For Arnould et al. (1999), magic is something that people might need, actively seek out, and benefit from. They contribute to the creation of magic through their immersion in the consumption process.

While it is encouraging to see magic treated as a natural part of the consumption process and, also, to see magic and rhetoric so fully entwined in their analysis, Arnould et al. (1999) nevertheless perform an important piece of rhetorical magic themselves that is typical of much consumer culture theory. As noted above, the guides are not called marketers, they are not even really framed as marketers—they are framed as providers of a service but not one that is described in marketing terms. It is almost as if the authors are more comfortable portraying a river guide as a shaman or sorcerer than they are with referring to them as a marketing agent. Granted, the focus of the research is on the consumer experience, but when so much of that consumer experience is guided, directed, suggested, midwifed, by the guides and their ritual it is very curious that there is so little overt consideration of the guides as marketers for the experience. When so much of the language in the paper supports an interpretation of the consumer as an active creator, one wonders why there was not more discussion of the problematic question of how much one can be creating when others script the experience for you? I would suggest that the impression of the rafting consumers as active is heavily influenced by the fact that the guides are not framed as marketing agents. Indeed, it might even be said that the adoption of magic as a comparator term (and the casting of guides as shamans) allows Arnould et al. (1999) to downplay the controlling, directing nature of the experience in order to celebrate the consumer empowering aspects more clearly.

As in the case of Belk’s work, Arnould et al.’s (1999) framing of magic is certainly positive. It provides a transformative experience that aids the consumer in their self-construction. It is not associated with practices that are duplicitous or malevolent but rather is linked to the elective creation (or, at least, co-creation) of rewarding encounters with the power of nature. This is world’s away from the framing that magic is given in the work of Williams (1980), Williamson (2002) and Jhally (1990). However, we should be careful to remember that Arnould et al. (1999) are not implying that all service encounters are suffused with magic. The white water rafting adventure is dangerous, carried out in the midst of nature, and comparatively prolonged—it shares little with, say, cashing a check at our bank. ‘River magic’ is not being investigated for what it can tell us about all marketing encounters or consumer experiences. Indeed, it is because of rafting’s unusual nature, or ‘river magic’s’ extra ordinary status as a consumption experience, that it becomes worthy of investigation. While Dégh (1994) talks about how the “masses” (p. 42) seeming to have a need for magic, Arnould et al. (1999) are content to point to “at least some” consumers (p. 59) who can be identified as craving the transformative power that it can provide. Perhaps, though, Arnould et al. (1999) are simply reflecting something of the conservatism that they describe as existing in “post-Enlightenment scholarship”, where “magic is virtually taboo” and even “ethnographies that take magic seriously” can “evoke controversy” (p. 63). It might well be the case, then, that Arnould et al. (1999) are using ‘river magic’ to carefully introduce their concepts into the marketing and/or consumer research scholarly arena—using a small, unusual case to subtly suggest its ramifications for the larger discipline. Certainly, some of the phrasings towards the end of the article can be interpreted in this way, particularly when they wonder whether “western consumers” (ibid.) might need magic to “reconstitute their lifeworlds and intentionality in postmodernity”. The final sentence of the piece, it should be noted, hopes that their “work inspires further reconsideration of the role of magical practice in Western social life” (p. 64).

This hope certainly seems to have had some performative power. Muñiz and Schau’s (2005) influential investigation of religiosity in the Apple Newton community contains much discussion of the presence of “magical motifs” in the narratives constructed by community embers around the object of their affection. They link these motifs directly to the “consumer magic” described by Arnould et al. (1999) and they note that “our findings suggest that “consumer magic need not be limited to such intense experiences as white-water river rafting but can also manifest in the mundane world of everyday technological goods” (p. 740). They use as an example the way in which, in responding to the disparaging comments from outsiders regarding the Newton’s abilities, they fervently demonstrate its features, asserting that the community members “are using technopagan magic to demonstrate the Newton’s powers” (ibid.). They also note that much of the magic around the narratives constructed by such communities is dependent upon the “suspension of rational disbelief” (p. 741) when consuming them. Once again, we see that consumers are complicit in co-creating the magic around the product—their willingness to be part of a magical experience is central to the strength of the magic that is produced. This magic helps to sustain members of the Newton community through tough times, disparagement, anxiety around the continued viability of their devices, abandonment by the parent brand, etc. The magic is useful, valuable to them. And it helps to galvanise the community: “through the invocation of magico-religious narratives and complex consumer sacralization rituals, this community is renewing and reinforcing beliefs about the brand, the relationship to the market it implies, and their support of it” (p. 745). Muñiz and Schau (2005) conclude that “a common aspect of brand communities could be the potential for transcendent and magico-religious experiences” (p. 746). Again, we seem to be coming back to Dégh’s (1994) observation that consumers have a deep need for magic—and brand communities are just one of many reflections of this.

A number of recent articles in the Journal of Consumer Research have continued to mine the seam of consumer magic. Fernandez and Lastovicka (2011) investigate the way that consumers turn products into fetishes, which they define as “a magical object of extraordinary empowerment and influence” (p. 278). Their particular focus is upon “replica-fetishes”, objects which achieve their fetish status due to their designed similarity with a famous object, such as a “rock star’s personal instrument or a warrior’s battle shield” (ibid.). They note that there has been little research of the way such objects offer “the promise of magical meaning” that consumers believe will ‘alter their state of being’. The key to explaining such beliefs is magical thinking, “the attribution of meaningful connections to correlated actions/events and/or objects” (p. 280). Fernandez and Lastovicka (2011) argue that “consumers can utilize magical thinking to imbue objects with cues that then signify that magical thinking has occurred” (ibid.). Replica objects use semiotic cues that can strengthen the link to the replicated object, the original. This ‘tangibilizing’ helps to trigger magical thinking in the consumer, making them think that, if the replica is this much like the original, then perhaps it contains some of the magic of its pseudo-original-owner. They note that this is a form of “imitative magic” (echoing Frazer’s original categorisations). Contagion magic then becomes manifest when the consumer feels that, by physically handling the replica, using it, wearing it, coming into contact with it, the power of the pseudo-original famous owner will be transferred to them.

The examples that Fernandez and Lastovicka (2011) use demonstrate the ways in which artists, marketing agents, and consumers come together to co-create a magical experience based upon the marketing and consumption of replica objects (guitars, in the case of the extended case used in the paper). The marketing agents here are true intermediaries, taking the original guitars and distilling their essence down into a replica which can then be packaged with paraphernalia, documentation, and all sorts of “indexical cues” (using the Peircean term the authors adopt) that serve to heighten the imitative magic. Consumers are then able to ‘activate’ this magic through their imagination, and their willingness to experience magic, or their need for it, serves as the foundation for the marketing interaction. The marketer uses the consumers’ need for magic (and the ease with which they apply magical thinking patterns) in order to weave their own magic.

Newman et al. (2011) also examine the contagion magic that works in the market for celebrity-owned objects. They frame it, also, as a form of magical thinking on behalf of the consumer, glossing it as a belief “that a person’s immaterial qualities or essence can be transferred to an object through physical contact” (p. 217). While only a small point in their general exploration of the celebrity collectibles market, it is nevertheless a measure of the level of acceptance in consumer research that magical thinking and consumer fetish-ising of products has achieved that they can be easily presented as part of a wider explanation of consumer thinking around certain product categories.

St. James et al. (2011) seek to give magical thinking a fundamental place in modern society. They note that, although the “Western intellectual tradition” has treated magic with “suspicion, fear, and ridicule” (p. 632), magical thinking is something that has always had a presence in our civilisations and continues to play a vital part in our “contemporary, technology-based culture of consumption”. For St. James et al. (2011), magical thinking is typified by “creating or invoking extraordinary connections—symbolic relationships founded on a belief or intuition in the presence of mystical forces in the world—in order to understand, predict, or influence events” (ibid.). They contend that it becomes particularly important when people are faced with “loss or the inability to attain a desired outcome”. Importantly, St. James et al. (2011) point out that magical thinking is often characterised in the anthropological, psychological, and marketing literature as “irrational” and depicted as an indication of an inability to apply logical thought, or properly understand cause-effect relationships. They argue that this characterises the consumer as “helpless and misguided” (p. 633). As a result magic is often seen as a way of dealing with a lack of hope, in that it provides a sense of control and certainty. However, in their research with consumers, St. James et al. (2011) find that in their “informants’ coping efforts uncertainty becomes a source of hope since it transforms impossibilities into possibilities” (p. 647). Magical thinking for consumers in the sorts of difficult personal circumstances experienced by the authors’ respondents provides a creative way of dealing with uncertainty. This further leads St. James et al. (2011) to suggest that the fundamental difference between magical thinking and ‘scientific thinking’ does not lie in the area of ontology (fantasy versus reality) but instead “in a different position towards the possible” (p. 647). Science “seeks to empirically validate or invalidate possibilities to classify them as reality or fantasy”, whereas magical thinking “maintains ambiguity around what is possible in order to provide meaning and sustain hope in the context of stressful situations” (ibid.). The cultivation of uncertainty and ambiguity around a situation means that its outcome is still in flux, can still be effected, can be transformed. Consumers use the “creative persuasion” of magical thinking upon themselves (a form of self-persuasion, or what Nienkamp, 2001, calls “internal rhetoric”). In this way, they are displaying what the authors call “chimerical agency”, wherein the “consumer invokes, alters, and constructs the dual strands of reality and fantasy to create a realm of possibility that is a hybrid of the two” (ibid.). As St. James et al. (2011) assert, such an interpretation of magical thinking and the agency it brings to consumers is very different from more traditional views of magical thinking which have seen those who use it as “irrational dupes, unable or unwilling to understand causal relationships” (ibid.). However, as we have seen above, consumer-oriented research has been largely celebratory of consumer agency since the early 1980s. The problem, indeed, has been that consumer research has tended to divorce consideration of consumer magical thinking from the influence of marketing agents. While this has the benefit of redressing the imbalance generated by years of ‘consumer as dupe’ woolly thinking, it does rather throw the baby out with the bathwater, producing a scholarly landscape wherein exploration of consumer magical thinking rarely acknowledges the existence of marketing communication which seeks to work magically (let alone rhetorically). While consumers might well “creatively forge meanings to claim agency over marketer-determined practices and solutions” (ibid.), they are also subjected to, targeted by, exposed to, a myriad of marketing communication efforts that also harness magical thinking (and Gorgian as well as Aristotelian rhetorical techniques). “Celebra-tory” examinations of how consumers think magically are fascinating and useful but surely touch upon only half the story. How does magical thinking employed by marketing agents interact with the magical thinking employed by consumers? According to Dégh (1994), the advertising industry is highly sensitive to the ways in which consumers desire magic and employ magical thinking—might it not make sense to wonder if marketing magic and consumer magic are far more symbiotic than the consumer research scholarship above might lead us (or wish us) to believe?

To finish this examination of the way in which marketing scholars have engaged with the idea of magic, I will move on to Brown’s (2009) article on “the equivocal magic of marketing”. This paper might also be described as celebratory in nature, but it is not directed at the celebration of consumer agency as expressed in their repurposing of magical thinking. Instead, Brown (2009) wishes to celebrate the magical nature of marketing. As we have seen in previous chapters, Brown has been involved with the great science versus art debate in marketing scholarship for some time. In his 2009 article, he takes the contentious stance that marketing’s ills and “scholarly shortcomings” cannot be improved by the vain attempt to become more scientific but can be countered only by adopting an “essentially magical” worldview which is “much closer to what managers actually do on a dayto-day basis” (p. 163). Brown (2009) begins by noting the dire position of marketing in general public opinion that sees it as “a term of abuse, a synonym for charlatanry, a word freighted with negative connotations” (p. 164). This, despite so many decades of marketing scholars declaring to anyone who will listen that “marketing is a force for the good, that customer wellbeing is our calling’s raison d’être, that the marketing philosophy must permeate every organisation, for-profit or otherwise” (ibid.). Yet, when marketing academia is faced with the evidence of its failings, its inability to effectively market the profession to everyone else, it falls back to blaming those “bad apples” amongst practitioners, who let the side down by falling into cheating, manipulation, and deceit. In other words, marketing has a bad reputation because people don’t market in the way that we tell them to. As Brown (2009) perceptively argues, this is just “blaming the customer” (p. 165), the customer here being the marketing professionals who have failed to understand and implement scholarly marketing advice correctly—“the people who buy our concepts and ideas and scholarly insights are at fault because they don’t listen, they don’t do as they’re told, they don’t take their marketing medicine as instructed” (ibid.). And marketing should be the last discipline that falls back on blaming the customer.

In Brown’s (2009) opinion, the main problem that marketing has as a discipline is its reliance upon the “marketing science mentality that pervades our discipline”, and he further notes (with what seems like a battle-weary sigh) that “the belief system is so deeply internalised that criticism only makes science stronger” (p. 165). The result is a discipline that is “increasingly arid, barren, contaminated, diseased” (ibid., fn. 4). However, Brown (2009) declares that, despite its almost complete dominance of the discipline, marketing science is not the “the only life support system that’s available to us” (p. 166). Instead, he suggests, we would be well served by remembering Sir James Frazer’s anthropological distinction between the religious, the scientific, and the magical worldview. While Frazer originally saw these paradigms as evolutionary stages, with magic being associated with an earlier stage of social development than religion and science finally capping them both, Brown is quick to note that “no one subscribes to such views today”. Instead, we recognise that “worldviews co-exist”, and even in the West the “old ways, the allegedly abandoned ways, have never really gone away” (ibid.). So it is with marketing itself—magic is “clearly discernible in the practice of marketers themselves” (p. 166) and consumers also “consistently refer to marketplace practices in magical terms” (p. 167). As a way of giving a sense of just how fundamentally magical marketing is, Brown then proceeds to sketch out “ten salient themes” which link marketing with magic. So, we read that marketing works with magical incantations and spells in the form of straplines and slogans which, if they are repeated enough times (so “managers believe”) will “bestow great wealth and fortune on the organisation or brand responsible” (p. 167). The “primal magical urge” (p. 168) of animism can be found in marketing’s ‘incessant exploitation’ of anthropomorphic imagery, while the spirit of alchemy is alive and well in marketing’s own presentation of itself as a “corporate philosopher’s stone” (p. 168) that “turns the base metal of production orientation into the 22-carat gold of customer-facing marketing orientation” (p. 168–9). Brown also includes the theme of “shamanism”, comparing the power that marketing management gurus have over organisations with the “extraordinary power and immense prestige” (p. 169) that traditional shamans have in their societies. The practice of marketing segmentation, so fundamental to the strategic identity of the profession, is compared to the way that astrology divides all of humanity into the twelve different personality types of the Western star signs—both are also calculated “through occult statistical procedures” (ibid.). The Frazerian categorisation of imitative and contagious magic is invoked in order to explain the power of celebrity endorsement as a marketing technique where “in return for immodest remuneration, [celebrities] graciously transfer a modicum of their personal magic onto the supplicant product or service” (ibid.). Finally, marketing’s obsession with resurrecting old brands, products, and promises is declared a form of necromancy.

Brown (2009) is not concerned with providing exhaustive argumentation or empirical data for his set of analogies. The thrust of his argument does not require it, for “just as marketing can be imagined as a science, so too it can be re-imagined as magic” (p. 170). Although marketing scientists might quarrel with every comparison he makes, Brown (2009) is confident that the “ever-widening gulf between the ivory tower and the oak-paneled boardroom” undercuts the relevance of such naysayers. The solutions that they are coming up with, solutions such as Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) Service-Dominant logic, are simply more of the same scientism. Brown argues that we would be far better off presenting ourselves as “management magi” (ibid.) who “mysteriously sprinkle magic dust on otherwise unremarkable new products, promotional campaigns, strategic plans, you name it” (p. 170–71).

While arguing that what marketers really do is perform magic, Brown (2009) also adapts for his examination the popular distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic. “White marketing” is “socially responsible” marketing which acts to support consumer choice, achieve socially desirable aims such as fair trade, healthy eating, waste recycling”, etc., while “black marketing” is the sort of reprehensible consumer manipulation designed to persuade people to buy goods which are “unnecessary or unsafe or exploitative or wasteful”, or “the invention of non-existent ailments or anxieties or concerns” (p. 171). While this sort of distinction might make sense for those marketers who wish to create a clear ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy (usually in order to then perpetrate some form of ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy), Brown (2009) remarks that it is a misrepresentation of both magic and marketing. You can’t have the ‘black’ without the ‘white’; they are “intertwined, interdependent, inseparable” (ibid.). Marketing, we have to recognise, is “at least partially responsible for the iniquities that we’re accused of”. Even when a marketing campaign might appear to be tremendously successful in creating money, jobs, entertainment, and ‘culture’ it will most likely also have a “dark side” (p. 172). Brown (2009) uses the Harry Potter phenomenon as an example. Despite the Harry Potter brand being “enormously impressive for a cultural product” and having an “incredible economic impact on the cultural industries” as well as giving a vaunted boost to “teenage reading habits” and even “boarding school enrolments”, the Harry Potter books have also had a seriously debilitating effect upon the book trade. In particular, the “ever-steeper discounting” that the phenomenon triggered “has proved ruinous for traditional independent booksellers” (ibid.). Brown’s point is that “even a feel good brand like Harry Potter can have negative marketing consequences” (ibid.). So, marketing, like real magic, needs both the white and the black. We cannot pretend that correct marketing is a force for social good while only incorrect, faux marketing is responsible for social problems and abuses. Not only does this tend to naturally pitch academics (the source of marketing purity and correctness) against marketing practitioners (the source of misunderstanding, poor implementation, and venality) but it also strips the discipline of any real connection to human truth. Brown (2009) places this sort of attitude firmly at the feet of the management science movement that resulted from the Ford and Carnegie reports and which is “at least partly responsible for the catastrophic mess that capitalism now wallows in” (p. 73). A marketing based around the pose of science has not, in Brown’s view, helped practitioners, who “look elsewhere for insight and guidance” and it has also left critique to “crusading journalists like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore” (ibid.). Instead, marketing scholarship has become a “dry-as-dust desert of unreadable articles and tiresome textbooks” that has succeeded in banishing the “superabundant supernaturalism of the marketplace”. The war against magic has been a truly Pyrrhic victory, consigning the academic discipline to irrelevance, disconnection, and posturing.

Brown (2009) does not offer a clear way out—he ends the paper with a momentary glimpse of a future where “students are sated, practitioners are appreciative and academics have stopped scraping the barrel of science” (p. 173) but it shimmers like a mirage and offers little to buttress hopes of a magical marketing renaissance.

A Way Forward

We can see that there are a number of different motivations for marketing and non-marketing academics to identify marketing with magic. For some, particularly those outside the discipline, accusing marketing of being a magical system is a way of explaining how marketing is used to support modern capitalism through a form of enchantment, pulling the wool over human eyes, leading them to lives centred around satisfying their desires as consumers rather than social beings. Here, the magic of marketing is designed to mask the emptiness that industrialised production generates and it is quite clear that this is meant to be understood as something undesirable, unfair, manipulative, foolish, and wrong.

At the same time, within and without marketing there are voices that situate the magic of marketing first and foremost within the consumer. These scholars mostly focus upon the incredible resonance that magic and magical figurations appear to have for general populations. Magic is seen as something that people need and which they can find, or construct, in the act of consumption. These perspectives treat magical thinking as something we should not be ashamed of. Instead, they frame consumption magic as celebratory and liberatory, helping the consumer to approach the future positively or construct their identity in empowering ways. Yet, whilst the power of magic is acknowledged and explored, the place of marketing in the generation, direction, and navigation of that magic is artificially suppressed. In trying to move away from a construction of the consumer as a dupe, in focusing on interpreting the consumer as an agent in full control of their own identity, the marketplace is presented as something which is only tangentially connected to marketing—marketers are ghosts in much of the consumer culture research on magic, they flicker vaguely on the margins of awareness, with little consequence.

What we have, then, is a literature of extremes. Both poles embody truths but neither can ever hope to tell the whole story, or even present narratives that stand up to much scrutiny. The ‘marketing is magic designed to keep us under control’ perspective ignores the ways in which consumers use magical thinking to engineer their identity and facilitate their path through life. The ‘consumer magic’ discourse stream chooses to ignore the tremendous power of marketing to dictate the magical paradigms adopted by consumers, to influence their imagination and symbology. It refuses to engage with the necessary, constant interface between marketing magic and consumer magic.

A magico-rhetorical approach to marketing, rooted in the tradition of Gorgian Sophism, provides a far more nuanced ‘third way’. Across all of the different perspectives and motivations we have explored in this chapter, the importance of rhetoric has been clear. Of course, rhetoric has been present in the way all of these scholars have been using the identification of marketing with magic in one way or another as a part of a larger rhetorical strategy, a persuasive gambit to serve a higher argumentative purpose. More fundamentally, however, it is clear that rhetoric is a central part of magic in all of these perspectives. Metaphors of transformation, verbal and visual patternings that entice and play with audience expectations and which echo sacred language and ritual speech, figurations which reach deep into the emotions of the audience and resonate across their desires, exaggerations which conjure worlds of magical relations and effects, webs of words and imagery which snare attention and enchant thinking—rhetorical techniques, magical techniques, marketing techniques.

Yet, we must not miss the lessons of consumer magic—marketers do not simply do magic to consumers. Consumers are witting, enthusiastic, co-creators of magical enchantment—so much so that when left to their own devices (as in the case of Muñiz and Schau’s [2005] community of Newton fans) they can make just as much magic as marketers. However, given the ubiquity of marketing and the long historical links with the magical side of rhetoric that scholars such as Williams (1980) (inadvertently) pick up on in the evolution of advertising and marketing communications, it is surely the case that in most instances the magic of the marketplace is going to be a product (to some degree) of marketing agents. It is does not even make much sense to say that marketing agents take advantage of the consumer propensity for magical thinking—instead, perhaps it would be more truthful to say that both marketers and their audiences live within the same imaginative realm. Certainly, Brown (2009) seems to be suggesting that the scientism of marketing scholarship entirely misses the magical reality of marketing practice. As he notes, it is not just marketers who exhibit the “magical perspective”, but “consumers too, I’ve discovered, consistently refer to marketplace phenomenon in magical terms” (p. 167), “incessantly” employing “supernatural language” when discussing the relationships they have with brands, shopping, and the consumer experience. Marketing scientists have exorcised the magical from their discourse and so ensured that their scholarship is similarly exorcised of relevance. Such statements must surely remind us of the many variations of the Gorgian versus Platonic/Aristotelian narrative that we came across in the previous chapter. Marketing scholarship, in adopting the discourse of scientism, embodies the Platonic, bureaucratic conception of rhetoric as the dialectical establishment of administrative truth and knowledge boundaries. Marketing practice, on the other hand, is still far more strongly attached to the Sophistic, Gorgian obsession with the performative, magical power of language, with crafting the object of attention (Cassin, 2014), with crossing boundaries, or dissolving them. As so many of the scholars we have discussed in this chapter have intimated, consumers are far more attracted by the Gorgian, by the magical, by the transformative, and by the rhapsodic. And they are not just attracted to it as audiences—but also as creators, as “sorcerer’s apprentices”. For the academic discipline of marketing to be able to engage with this magical community of practitioners and consumers, it must re-found itself on a recognition of its liminality, its awkward, almost ritual, middle position, and on an understanding that the Sophistic celebration of the performative nature of language sits at the core of all marketing practice.

In the final chapter of this monograph, I will attempt to lay out the elements I consider to be necessary for such a re-founding.