Rhetorical Practices in Marketing Communication

The first concerted attempt to investigate the ways in which advertising makes use of rhetorical figures would appear to be Durand’s (1987) classificatory framework collected in Umiker-Sebeok’s (1987) edited collection of essays on marketing and semiotics. Although published in English in the late 1980s, Durand’s piece was based upon work that he conducted in the 1960s while working at Publicis and studying with Roland Barthes at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He published this work in French journals throughout the 1970s. Predictably, Durand’s way of conceptualising the rhetorical figures had little to do with the extant rhetorical tradition and a lot to do with the classificatory tropes of structuralism. Consequently, his categorisation focuses around grouping figures found in advertising into groupings of similar pattern (“figures of suppression”, “figures of addition”, etc.). There is very little sense that these figures are performing a persuasive function—instead, Durand considers them rhetorical because they embody a transformation from a simple proposition to a figurative one. The word ‘rhetoric’ has been largely stripped of its historical context, and “rhetorical operations” (p. 295) become processes of visual arrangement with largely obscured motivations.

Semiotics and structuralism provide the background for the next step in the exploration of rhetorical techniques in advertising output. Edward F. McQuarrie and Glen Mick had both been mining the vein of semiotic analysis of advertising in work throughout the mid and late 1980s (Mick, 1986, 1987, 1988; McQuarrie, 1989). Their early 1990s collaboration (McQuarrie and Mick, 1992) takes the cue from Durand’s work of adopting a semiotic approach to rhetorical figures in advertising language, in this case focusing on what the authors term “resonance” or “wordplay in the presence of a relevant pictorial” (p. 80). While they do employ a semiotic conceptual framework and this naturally influences their choice of vocabulary, they do make it clear that “resonance” is “but one example of a family of literary devices termed ‘rhetorical figures’” (p. 83). However, their understanding of what ‘rhetorical’ might mean is, as with Durand, largely absent of any historically contextualised sense of rhetoric as a tradition of persuasive communication. Instead, their identification of rhetoric with “literary devices” demonstrates their grounding of the subject within an aesthetic tradition. Nevertheless, from this beginning McQuarrie and Mick, together with Barbara Phillips, have evolved a body of research that has moved towards a more ‘rhetorical’ exploration of the use of rhetorical figures in marketing communication (McQuarrie and Mick, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2009; McQuarrie and Phillips (eds.), 2007; Phillips and McQuarrie, 2002, 2004, 2009, 2010). So, McQuarrie and Mick (1996) start off their attempt to classify the figures of speech used in advertising executions by locating them very much within the historic tradition of rhetoric, the “primary repository of Western thinking about persuasion” (p. 424). The time is ripe, they argue, for “rhetorical phenomena” to be “grasped and integrated into consumer research” (ibid.). They also note that previous attempts to classify the ways in which the figures have been used in advertising have focused “on outcomes other than persuasion” p. 425). Instead of simply framing the rhetorical figures as ‘literary devices”, we see a clear appreciation by McQuarrie and Mick of their place within a persuasive tradition. They do continue to classify rhetorical figures under the general rubric of “aesthetic objects” (p. 426)—but it is plain that this is done in order to explain their persuasive impact. All aesthetic objects, they maintain, “provide a means for making the familiar strange”, for deviating from audience expectations. When an advertiser uses a rhetorical figure, then, they are motivated by an attempt to generate “what consumer researchers might have called incongruity” (ibid.). The rhetorical figure attracts attention and causes the audience to think about the advertisement. They also maintain their earlier aesthetic perspective when noting that “incongruity (i.e. deviation) can produce a pleasurable degree of arousal” (p. 427). Finally, the authors observe that deviation can aid memorability in an audience. McQuarrie and Mick’s (1996) typology of figures is thus based upon a continuum of deviation—all figures deviate from expectations but some types of figure deviate more strongly than others.

Certainly, McQuarrie and Mick’s 1996 article marks the true start of a research stream which investigates the persuasive motivations for using certain types of rhetorical figures over others in marketing communications material. It is noticeable, however, that there is still very little contextualisation of the rhetorical figures within the larger rhetorical tradition. There is no discussion of how such stylistic devices function alongside other aspects of rhetorical practice—or even the suggestion that there might be other aspects to rhetorical practice. This pattern continues in later work and is echoed in the punning title of McQuarrie and Phillips’ (2007) edited collection on “new directions in advertising rhetoric”—“Go Figure!”. Other researchers have taken up this approach and there are now many studies which use empirical research to test the effectiveness of rhetorical figures in marketing communication executions (Tom and Eves, 1999; Stathakopoulos et al., 2008; Kronrod and Danziger, 2013; Fox et al., 2015; Theodorakis et al., 2015). There also continue to be researchers who seek to create more sophisticated or more efficient typologies to that advanced by McQuarrie and Mick (1996)—this includes work involving McQuarrie himself, such as Phillips and McQuarrie (2004), which explicates a typology specifically adapted for visual rhetorical figures in advertising, as well as work by scholars seeking to tie a classification of rhetorical tropes to various theories of persuasion drawn from the psychological literature (i.e. McGuire, 2000).

Linda Scott’s (1994) study on “the need for a theory of visual rhetoric” to conceptualise the use of imagery in advertising has been strongly influential in this research stream. Scott’s work is, however, particular in its appreciation of the broadly rhetorical nature of the entire advertising process, its non-reliance on a heavily semiotic or structuralist perspective from which to consider rhetoric, and a sophisticated understanding of the breadth of the rhetorical tradition. This means that her theory of visual rhetoric does not focus around constructing another typology of rhetorical figures—instead, she uses three of the traditional canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, and delivery) in order to organise our understanding of how images work as persuasive arguments within an advert. Indeed, Scott intends this suggested framework to begin to “unite other work towards an encompassing rhetorical theory for advertisements” (1994, p. 271) that might then be able to integrate the sort of narrow focus on stylistic figures with considerations of other aspects of rhetorical strategy and practice. Scott herself, for example, explores the way in which advertising imagery can generate and amplify the ethos of products and brands. Similarly, in an earlier piece on the rhetorical use of music in advertising (Scott, 1990), musical style is explicitly linked to ethos, as she argues that “the viewer interprets the stylistic choices as a sign indicative of the character or intent of the communicator” (p. 227). Scott’s small but highly constructive body of work on rhetoric in advertising serves as an important model for constructing an approach to marketing as essentially rhetorical. It is indicative that although the 1994 paper is well cited, its closing call for a “rhetorical theory of advertising images” (p. 271) has largely remained unanswered. Work has certainly continued on researching the effectiveness of rhetorical figures in advertising but this has stopped short of any theory seeking to integrate the conclusions of the various quantitative and qualitative studies into a larger understanding of how advertising imagery, and even advertising in general, works rhetorically. O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy (2004) do make it clear from the beginning of their book-length treatment of persuasion in advertising that the profession is one fundamentally tied to the tradition of rhetoric. They state that “in persuasion, everything depends on how things are put, that is on rhetoric” (p. 32) and they also contextualise much of their discussion of modern psychological approaches to rhetoric with reference to, and consideration of, traditional rhetorical explanations and techniques. So, for example, they discuss Aristotle’s three artistic proofs (ethos, logos, and pathos) when explaining their argument that “emotional appeals are as relevant as rational appeals” (p. 45) and also underline the heavy rhetorical use of metaphor in modern political marketing. Yet, despite their careful connecting of advertising and rhetoric, O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy (2004) spend more time elucidating the intricacies of such modern psychological theories of persuasion as the Elaboration Likelihood Model and reversal theory, and even psychoanalysis. This situation is remedied somewhat in O’Shaughnessy’s (2004) study of propaganda, his explication of which rests upon the “essential trinity” of “rhetoric, myth, and symbolism” (p. 66) and contains much analysis of a variety of rhetorical strategies and tactics (both classical and modern). However, although his chapter on determining an exact meaning for the term makes it clear that any definition of propaganda “must remain open ended since there can be no closure when a concept comes laden with so much historical baggage” (p. 13), it is quite clear that O’Shaughnessy does not make an easy equation between propaganda and marketing (or even political marketing). Rhetoric is central to both advertising and propaganda but in substantively different ways, not least in terms of the other elements with which it has to function; O’Shaughnessy’s argument that propaganda uses rhetoric entwined with narrative and myth perhaps might prompt us to ask, when considering marketing as rhetoric, what are the essential elements that interlace with rhetoric in the practice of marketing?

Finally, it is important to recognise marketing scholarship that has contributed to our knowledge of rhetorical constructs in marketing whilst not explicitly identifying itself as doing so. A prime example would be the work of Barbara Stern, particularly her early papers on the use of allegory in advertising (Stern, 1988, 1990). Stern identifies allegory as an aspect of “literary style” (1990, p. 14) and only very indirectly references the rhetorical tradition. However, her definition of allegory is heavily rhetorical in spirit—it is a flexible “persuasive tool” (p. 15), developing in the Middle Ages into an “art form with a persuasive purpose” (Stern, 1988, p. 85). Stern argues convincingly that allegory remains “particularly attractive for advertising purposes” (1990, p. 5) and her articles on the subject provide admirable detail on the rhetorical nature of the form and its practical use for marketing purposes.

Further research that either unknowingly or tangentially contributes to a rhetorical tradition in advertising scholarship would include all those authors who have investigated the place of metaphors in marketing communication. Metaphor can be, and often is, thought of as a poetic, literary device. This is how Stern (1988), for example, describes it looking all the way back to Aristotle’s first definition of the term in the Poetics. Yet Aristotle also devotes a good part of his discussion of rhetorical style in Book III of On Rhetoric to the subject of metaphor. Metaphor has the power to produce “clarity, pleasantness, and unfamiliarity” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 219) in an audience and therefore it can arrest attention and charm the understanding. Aristotle proceeds to go into much detail regarding the principal practical challenge of the metaphor—how to find the most appropriate one for a particular occasion and audience.

There is, then, a long tradition of rhetorical research into how and why metaphors persuade. In marketing scholarship, this tradition has continued and metaphor is often included in the sorts of research into rhetorical figures in advertising already discussed above. However, there is also a body of scholarship in the marketing literature that has examined metaphor divorced from a sense of its place in the rhetorical tradition. This work, nevertheless, contributes to any argument for (and understanding of) the rhetorical basis of marketing communications practice. Morgan and Reichert (1999), for example, investigate metaphor comprehension in advertisements while avoiding any reference to the metaphor as a rhetorical device—their frame of reference is drawn largely from psychology and so they do not conceive of the metaphor as an example of rhetoric’s presence in advertising practice but rather as a linguistic pattern whose effectiveness at the transmission of meaning can be interrogated by statistics. Another illustration of the sideways contribution to the ‘advertising as rhetoric’ research stream is Hirschman’s (2007) “anthropological construal of metaphor” (p. 227) in the marketplace. While not entirely ignoring metaphor’s place in rhetorical stylistics, Hirschman makes an interesting point when she notes that the extant marketing research on metaphor draws from two main traditions: one “grounded in literary theory and linguistics” and the other springing from “symbolic anthropology [and] grounded in cultural images, especially visual and musical, used to transfer meaning between the human and natural worlds” (p. 228). She does mention the rhetorical use of metaphor as being included within that “literary theory of metaphor” (ibid.) but that is the extent of her recognition of the persuasive function of metaphor within marketing. Instead, Hirschman seeks to portray the way in which brands are “mere hitchhikers” upon the “much more powerful force” of “cultural metaphor” (p. 245). Brands are ephemeral, whereas it is the “metaphor that lives on” (ibid.). This reflects her position that advertising is not a “meaning maker” but a “preeminent meaning USER” (p. 244). So, metaphors are never generated by marketing—rather, to be affective/effective marketing must “be grounded in shared metaphoric understandings, which are deemed culturally appropriate for a particular consumption context” (ibid.). It is, perhaps, indicative of the fact that the rhetorical tradition remains alien to so many scholars that Hischman’s point was made more than 2,000 years ago by Aristotle himself. For, although rhetoric is often mischaracterised as an art which exerts entirely external control over the audience (and this, as we shall see, is one of the fears of rhetoric which has often linked it with ‘magical’ manipulation) what power the rhetor wields comes entirely from within the audience in the sense that rhetorical strategies rely upon what an audience will agree with, what they already (think they) know, what they will resonate with. A rhetor must consider the “agreed premisses or received opinions” (Aristotle, 1991, p. 77) of her audience when constructing a persuasive argument for them just as she must also consider what imagery and phrasing that audience will consider to be beautiful and wise when choosing metaphors. Once more, we should remind ourselves of Protagoras’ summation that “man is the measure of all things”.

This leads us to perhaps the most intriguing instance of a piece of marketing research that makes no mention of rhetoric (or even persuasion) and yet which exhibits deeply rhetorical thinking. Zaltman and Coulter (1995) introduce the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, “a patented research tool designed to (1) surface the mental models that drive consumer thinking and behaviour, and (2) characterize these models in actionable ways using consumers’ metaphors” (p. 36). The authors make heavy use of Lakoff and Johnson’s (2003) argument that metaphor is central to the way in which humans think about the world. As Lakoff (1993) argues, “the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualise one mental domain in terms of another” (p. 203). As a consequence, “everyday abstract concepts like time, states, change, causation, and purpose all turn out to be metaphorical” (ibid.). Of course, this puts metaphor at the centre of human cognition, not just rhetorical style! Nevertheless, the use that Zaltman and Coulter (1995) make of this position is entirely rhetorical in motivation for, as they conclude, “it is only through their metaphors that we can understand consumer thinking and behavior and thus learn how to develop and market goods and services successfully” (p. 38). If we can uncover the metaphors that consumers use in their thinking about the world, then we will have the keys to talk to them effectively (persuasively) about how our products fit into that world. As I have already argued above, Aristotle’s On Rhetoric makes it clear that rhetoric is about the audience—the rhetor must always consider the disposition of the audience but also they must try to construct their persuasive gambits from elements that are familiar and acceptable to the audience. In the case of devices such as metaphor, although much of the arresting charm of such figures is to be found in their unfamiliarity, their exoticness, nevertheless, the rhetor must walk a very careful line. Metaphors must be unfamiliar enough to attract but also clear and fitting enough to be easily understood and processed by the audience. The rhetor must therefore consider carefully that the metaphor she constructs reflects a truth that is easily recognised by her audience. At the same time, Aristotle advises against using constructions that are too unfamiliar, too unnatural. In general, then, consideration of the audience is the central guarantee of rhetorical success—if you want to persuade a group of people you must first find out what they believe, what they value, how they speak to each other and themselves, and what they will consider to be just on the right side of unfamiliar enough to be led to recognition of commonality. Zaltman and Coulter’s (1995) technique is thus an insightful extension of the rhetorical tradition, aiding marketing rhetors in a deep consideration of the disposition of their audience (through an uncovering of their metaphor maps) and then also helping them to utilise this research to create more effective (i.e. persuasive) marketing material for that audience. The technique’s end-users are “copy developers, creative staffs, product-design teams, strategic planning groups” (1995, p. 40) and others who create or contribute to persuasive marketing messaging. The absence in the ZMET literature of any framing which references rhetoric or even persuasive communication is, perhaps, either a function of the authors’ desire to (rhetorically) position the approach as modern and ‘scientific’ or, once again, unfamiliarity with the rhetorical tradition. In any case, the ZMET technique fits perfectly within an understanding of marketing as rhetoric.

Marketing Writing as Rhetorical Practice

Metaphors are a good place to begin a consideration of marketing scholarship that has sought to explore the rhetorical nature of marketing writing. Again it is worth distinguishing between those researchers who explicitly use a rhetorical frame to investigate the persuasive strategies in marketing writing and those who instead either adopt a broader ‘literary’ perspective or who anchor their analysis in some other tradition while nevertheless advancing rhetorical readings of marketing discourse. As we have seen with Zaltman and Coulter (1995), the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 2003) and Lakoff (1987, 1993) has provided researchers with a cognitive linguistics paradigm to discuss the hold that metaphor has upon our minds. This means that scholars can seek to address the way in which marketing thought uses metaphors without having to engage with either the poetic or rhetorical traditions around metaphor (both, of course, originating in Aristotle’s work). After all, Lakoff (1993) argues that metaphor is not just part of aesthetic and persuasive expression but is fundamental to our everyday understanding of the world and informs “much of ordinary everyday language” (p. 203). Accordingly, marketing scholars who notice the central place of metaphors in the construction of marketing theory and discourse do not have to situate their analysis in rhetoric but can instead make use of Lakoff’s perspective. This makes sense—in rhetoric, metaphors are stylistic devices that aid persuasion attempts, in Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphor, “as soon as one gets away from concrete physical experience […] metaphorical understanding is the norm” (p. 205). Looking at the metaphors that lie at the centre of everyday marketing language, therefore, should provide us with insight into the way in which marketers think about marketing. So, for example, that familiar phrase, ‘target audience’, is one that most of the time we do not stop to consider, it is an everyday metaphor that we have come to overlook yet which influences the way in which we, as marketers, view and treat consumers. The research that inspired Lakoff’s perspective is Reddy’s (1979) essay on what he calls the “the conduit metaphor”. Reddy provides a convincing case that the metaphors that fill our everyday speech have a tremendous power to set the frames by which we perceive the world. He does this by demonstrating how English discourse about communication is pregnant with metaphors of containment, as if meaning is contained in language and then transported directly to receiving minds. This is, of course, a tremendously popular way of thinking about communication in marketing and therefore has quite a deleterious effect upon how marketers understand their communication role and their relationship to consumers (Varey, 2000, 2002, 2008; Miles, 2010).

Research into the conceptual metaphors at the roots of marketing theory and practice thus seeks to uncover their framing implications. Cornelissen (2003), for example, examines the metaphors that inform the concepts of corporate identity and relationship marketing from a perspective informed by philosophical and linguistic theories on metaphor in order to evaluate how helpful these metaphors are in helping us understand the field of marketing. So, Cornelissen is concerned to outline “a method whereby metaphors can be evaluated and used in a reasonably systematic, directed, and thoughtful manner” (2003, p. 21). As interesting as this is, it does rather ignore the power of marketing metaphors as persuasive constructions, designed to facilitate the adoption of particular marketing perspectives by publics whom various marketing scholars, authors, and thought leaders might be trying to seek support form. The “organisation is identity” metaphor that Cornelissen evaluates as “offering little heuristic value for researching and understanding the complexity of individuals and actions composing organizations” (p. 222) might nevertheless remain a powerful and persuasive one for buttressing the necessity for certain consultancy services, for example. So, the metaphor works rhetorically even if it might be judge to have “little heuristic value” for market researchers. Indeed, one might say that the less heuristic value a metaphor has for a market researcher the more interesting it becomes from a rhetorical perspective. Capelli and Jolibert (2009) take a similar approach to Cornelissen (2003, 2006) in their analysis of the “validity of metaphor” (p. 1079) in marketing discourse. Again, the rhetorical motivation for metaphor is largely ignored and the researchers focus on whether particular popular marketing metaphors (in this case, the product lifecycle and brand personality) have “validity”. Metaphors are judged according to whether they accurately reflect the reality of corporate and marketing practice rather than how they might be working to advance a particular position persuasively. This research stream appears to have a clear normative intention to expose metaphors that do not reflect reality accurately enough, which do not “advance theory by generating novel insights or by clarifying existing interpretations of organizations” (Cornelissen and Kafouros, 2008, p. 376). This position seems somewhat redolent of that taken by the Royal Society in its search for plain language in scientific discourse, and it certainly seems unwilling to admit that rhetorical motivations might be present in marketing management thinking and discourse. Nevertheless, such scholarship does at least obliquely point to the power of discourse choices to effect the way that we think about our profession and discipline.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that Reddy’s (1979) work that forms the basis of the “conceptual metaphor” approach that much of this research is embedded in is quite normative in its perspective. So, Reddy (1979) argues that the conduit metaphor is the source of much of the English-speaking world’s inability to “improve our communication” (p. 285), that it produces a “frame conflict [that] has considerable impact on our social and cultural problems” (ibid.). His argument, therefore, is that we need to change the metaphors that we use to talk about communication in order to move constructively forward. This normative attitude is certainly echoed in much of the marketing scholarship above that has engaged with metaphor in marketing discourse. Lakoff’s work is actually far less normative and motivated by an attempt to highlight and explain the way in which metaphors reflect and reproduce our mental categorisations of the world.

There is even overtly rhetorical scholarship examining the use of metaphors in marketing discourse which continues this normative theme. O’Malley et al. (2008) consider the rhetorical nature of the relationship marketing metaphor, for example. Interestingly, unlike Cornelissen (2003), they judge the metaphor at the heart of relationship marketing to be “harmful for theory and practice in marketing” (p. 177). However, at the same time, they acknowledge its “powerful rhetorical function”, which has helped its adoption and continued popularity amongst marketers. Despite this recognition of the persuasive power of marketing metaphors, O’Malley et al. (2008) appear to share Cornelissen’s discomfort with situations when “the explanatory potential of the metaphor has been extended beyond its limits” (p. 179). So, while recognising the role that rhetoric plays in marketing discourse, O’Malley et al. (2008) gently frame it as a problem, something which taints its explanatory mission.

Only when one regards marketing scholars who adopt a clearly social constructionist agenda does one begin to come across research that does not necessarily understand rhetoric as something indicative of weak or errant thinking or which insists on judging metaphors against some yardstick of reality. So, Hackley’s (2001) social constructionist investigation into the generation of “mainstream marketing” discourse is subtitled “exploring rhetorics of managed consumption”. The author is careful to explain that the rhetoric that he is concerned with analysing should not be thought of as being “counterposed to a reality of which it is a misrepresentation” but instead should be understood as referring to the “ways in which we work up common-sense forms of linguistic usage which order the ways we think and which inform our sense of the everyday, but which cast an ideological light on the ordinary” (p. 11). He notes that marketing discourse is uncomfortable with open discussion of its rhetorical character “labelling all such criticism as criticism of capitalism”, despite the fact that such discussion is critical only of “very particular ways of studying and writing about marketing” (ibid.). For, indeed, Hackley is, in the end, concerned with the damage that rhetoric does to marketing scholarship and enquiry—as he states, “marketing rhetoric used unconsciously becomes a powerful tool of dominance for relatively narrow groups of interest” (ibid.). So, while he is certainly not making the assertion that rhetoric is, qua rhetoric, destructive or manipulative, he is stating that the types of rhetoric he is focusing on in his work reproduce “relations of power and authority” which generate and maintain a dominant orthodoxy in the discipline. Hackley is, most definitely, thinking about rhetoric as a persuasive force in marketing discourse, something that serves to secure adherence to particular ways of thinking about its nature and practice. The focus of his rhetorical criticism is thus those areas of marketing that are currently in ascendance, in the dominant mainstream position. The alternative perspectives do not call out for rhetorical criticism because the power structures that they might be attempting to construct, reproduce, and amplify are disadvantaged in comparison. Of course, Hackley’s critique furthers the cause of those alternative positions because it exemplifies the insights that they can provide. His critique is a rhetorical strategy enmeshed in its own “relations of power and authority”. This is certainly the case with much of the ‘critical marketing’ (Tadajewski, 2010a, 2010b) literature which has engaged with rhetorical and discourse strategies in marketing writing. So, Hackley (2003) examines “managerial marketing rhetoric” in marketing textbooks, for example, and finds that the “bluster” of “extravagant” “militant pro-marketing rhetoric” (p. 1327) has become so normalised that reflective, critical approaches to the topic become forcibly Othered. As Hackley puts it, “marketing writing can be seen itself as a form of marketing, catering for the marketing ‘needs’ of students, and teachers, of management” (p. 329). Critical marketing scholars may therefore read the rhetorical choices made in marketing texts for what they can tell us about the persuasive goals those texts seek to advance, goals which for the most part, Hackley asserts, are ideological (marketing is “the sole source of human happiness”, “exchange value is prior to all others”, and whatever marketing does is “benign and beyond question”, p. 1326).

Perhaps the scholar who has most determinedly (and entertainingly) examined the rhetorical basis of marketing writing is Stephen Brown (1995, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010, inter alia). Yet, Brown has generally not framed his work as rhetorical criticism. Instead, he has focused upon marketing writing as “artistic endeavour” (2005, p. 14) and therefore presents his readings of Kotler, Holbrook, Vargo and Lusch, Levitt, Hunt etc., as examples of literary criticism applied to marketing writing. Brown’s argument is that the greats of marketing are great because of their writing not because of any inherent superiority of their research. It is the way that they clothe their thoughts that makes them attractive, powerful, resonant with their audience of fellow scholars, teachers, and students. In other words, he is talking about rhetorical style—style that makes an argument more powerful, a position more winning, a rhetor more credible. As we have already seen above, Brown finds the idea that marketing might be called a ‘science’ a ridiculous position. It is, quite clearly, an art. Its greatest thinkers should therefore be analysed and judged for their artistry. This gives Brown the grounds for bringing the tools of literary criticism to bear upon famous marketing scholars even though what he is actually doing is analysing what stylistic devices and argumentation patterns they use in order to achieve adherence to their positions. If Brown is saying that it is the style that they adopt which provides the energy that drives these scholar’s careers, that makes others see them as credible voices, that makes their concepts appear worthy of adoption and reproduction, then he is actually analysing their rhetoric. He is not, in the end, simply ‘appreciating’ their artistry—he has instead a very powerful point to make about what it takes to win in the agonistic realm of marketing academia. You will find very few literary scholars who concern themselves with ‘why Proust is more successful than Balzac amongst 18 to 25 year old middle class shut-ins’, or ‘why Dorothy Richardson was less successful than Virginia Wolff’, or even ‘why Calvino’s style is better than Svevo’s’—such agonistic considerations are generally considered to be too vulgar and commercial for the literary establishment. But Brown’s use of the blind of ‘literary criticism’ is designed to do just such a job—to uncover the stylistics of success in marketing writing. Indeed, his 2005 monograph concludes with the “3Rs of marketing writing” (p. 182), a prescriptive recipe for what makes great marketing writers great: “breadth of reading”, a constant overturning (“righting”) of received wisdom in the discipline, and a great facility with stylistics (“rhythmatics” as Brown calls it) that manifests in constant wordplay and neologisms even at the expense of readability. These are the instructions for ascendency, the take-away from Brown’s fearless explorations of our gurus’ outputs, that will allow the budding scholar to carve an impressive, influential career from the unforgiving rock face of marketing academe. Brown certainly peppers his work with references to rhetoric. For example, when discussing Levitt and Holbrook’s writing, he remarks upon their “sophistry” (but note the small ‘s’) and then goes on to assert that “after reading these authors’ essays, skeptics are left with a sneaking suspicion that sheer style has triumphed over mere content; that rhetorical slight of hand has disguised the perceived shortcomings in the argument” (1999, p. 7).¹ He then proceeds to equate such rhetorical tactics with illusion, trickery, prestidigitation, even (in an interesting code switch) ‘thaumaturgy’. From Brown’s postmodern perspective, of course, these are not meant to be negative value judgements but they might point to the reason why throughout his oeuvre he has remained uncomfortable with an overt rhetorical framing, preferring to retain the mantle of artistic or literary scholarship. I would hazard that Brown is quite cognisant of the central rhetorical thrust of his work, but in an act of rhetorical strategising, has preferred to present it under the guise of literary appreciation. This makes it seem so much less harmful, so much less destructive, less critical. It allows the importation of an approach to marketing discourse that is fundamentally critical while appearing to celebrate. Certainly, this might seem like a sensible course of action when pointing out that the marketing greats have no flesh underneath their stylish rhetorical clothes.

Other critical marketing scholars have also focused on the way in which marketing discourse has functioned to assert and maintain power relations, legitimise or delegitimise various practices and perspectives, and define the limits of practice and theory (Brownlie and Saren, 1992, 1995, 1997; Morgan, 1992; Lowe et al., 2008; Zwick et al., 2008; Shankar et al., 2006; Skålén et al., 2006, 2008; Svensson, 2007; Tadajewski, 2006; Ellis and Hopkinson, 2010). Most of this research originates from discourse analysis and Foucauldian frameworks and so largely bypasses the rhetorical tradition. As Svensson (2007) explains, “it is widely recognized in social sciences today that language use, or discourse, is one of the main engines in the continuous creation and maintenance of ‘the organization’” (p. 276), and discourse analysis/critical discourse analysis (vide van Dijk, 1993; Fairclough, 2013; Potter, 2005) is a methodology that has arisen within the social sciences to analyse the way in which such language use enforces, reinforces, and reproduces social structures, ideologies, cultural assumptions, power relations, etc. In other words, what van Dijk (1993) has referred to as “focusing on the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance”, where dominance is defined as “the exercise of social power by elites, institutions or groups, that results in social inequality, including political, cultural, class, ethnic, racial and gender inequality” (p. 249–250). There is, doubtless, a good deal to be written on the relationship between constructions of the rhetorical tradition and the evolution of discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis in the social sciences but this is not the place to start such a project. Suffice it to say that such research streams within marketing buttress the argument that the discipline and profession are full of discourses working strategically to influence. However, what they do not do is argue that marketing discourse is any more full of this than any other discourse. CDA/DA and the Foucauldian perspective that they originate from are used to discover the ways that language aids dominance across all our elites, groups, and institutions—marketing is one of these institutions, but not particularly special. Marketing scholars who adopt these perspectives thus demonstrate how the discourses of marketing, in similar ways to other discourses, serve to ‘(re)produce and challenge’ (though mostly the former) dominance. Of course, such analysis might well be surprising and uncomfortable for scholars (and even practitioners) of marketing who consider themselves to be working within an entirely objective, rational, scientific discipline and had never considered the possibility that their discourse was enmeshed within power relations and struggles for dominance. In many ways, we might consider some of the move towards emphasising co-creation and dialogue in contemporary marketing and business strategy theories (relationship marketing, S-D Logic, DART) as an indication that more scholars are recognising the implicit power plays that constitute much of traditional marketing discourse. Or one could simply see it as a rhetorical gambit designed to quell criticism and dissent. I will deal with this important question in more detail in a later chapter.

Fundamentally, it is important to recognise that while the concept of rhetoric might not appear to be central to DA/CDA marketing scholarship, in the sense that its legacy and terminology are not heavily used or cited, the classical tradition of rhetoric is an important foundational pillar of the methodologies. Nowhere is this more clear than in the work of Michael Billig (1985, 1996, 1998), a major theorist and staunch defender of Critical Discourse Analysis, who has engaged in great depth with the Sophistic tradition of rhetoric as a part of his construction of a rhetorical approach to social psychology. Billig’s work has been influential on other CDA scholars, most notably Potter (2005) who approvingly cites Billig’s argument that “rhetoric should not be confined to obviously argumentative or explicitly persuasive communication” (p. 106). This leads Potter to define rhetoric for his purposes in decidedly agonistic terms. For Potter, rhetoric is “discourse used to bolster particular versions of the world and to protect them from criticism” (p. 33). He later refines this to an understanding of rhetoric as “a feature of the antagonistic relationship between versions: how a description counters an alternative description, and how it is organized, in turn, to resist being countered.” (p. 108). While there is much to admire in this definition, it is clearly constructed for a particular purpose—for examining disciplinary, professional, and political and cultural discourses to uncover the ways in which positions struggle for dominance, in other words, for investigating “discourse which is constructing versions of the world” (p. 107). Potter develops this further with his distinction between “offensive” and “defensive rhetoric”, the former works to “undermine alternative descriptions” whereas the latter is designed to “resist discounting or undermining” (ibid.). Such understandings are tremendously useful for a rhetorical investigation of marketing discourse (vide Miles, 2010) but like many contemporary instantiations of rhetorical criticism, they make of rhetoric something which is entirely analytic. While Billig’s (1996) work certainly has aspects which support a rhetorical approach to communication, in the sense of celebrating the argumentative, agonistic nature of human discourse, in practice most CDA/DA work is predominantly focused upon interpretive, analytical activities. As a consequence, CDA/DA has mostly manifested itself in marketing scholarship as an aid to the exploration of how ideological dominance and governmentality are achieved through mainstream marketing discourse, which means that its understanding of rhetoric is mostly confined to Potter’s (2005) “versions of the world” thesis. This is valuable as far as it goes, but does mean that rhetoric, when invoked, is narrowly understood.

In closing this section, I shall discuss marketing research that explicitly adopts rhetorical theory as the principal conceptual framework for exploration of marketing discourse about theory and practice.

Scholarly engagement with marketing practice is gradually becoming an area in which rhetorical analysis is seen to be able to contribute. This might well be a reflection of the way in which rhetorical analysis has been adopted in management and organizational studies. As Hartelius and Browning (2008) state in their review of the area, “recent work by management and organizational researchers draws heavily on rhetorical scholarship” (p. 13). This is not surprising if one considers the practice of modern management to be “based on persuasion” (Bonet and Sauquet, 2010, p. 121) and “even if management sciences usually conceptualize management as activities led by rational arguments and decisions, management constantly involves rhetorical conversations, in which managers use language for achieving their aims” (p. 132). The organizational studies literature has, in particular, embraced the rhetorical stance demonstrating the breadth of uses that it can be put to in considering internal and external organizational persuasive strategies, enabling the identification (and interrogation) of “the multiple, overlapping, and conflicting interests that define the organizational voice” (Boyd and Waymer, 2011, p. 488) (vide Cheney, 1983; Alvesson, 1993; Watson, 1995; Zbaracki, 1998; Cheney et al., 2004; Zanoni and Janssens, 2004; Meisen-bach and McMillan, 2006; Sillince and Suddaby, 2008; Heath, 2011).

Studies in the marketing realm that have considered marketing practice from a rhetorical perspective are by comparison rare. Nilsson (2010) studies managers as rhetors in the context of change management in a technology company in Sweden. Although this paper came about as a result of Nilsson’s work for the company as an external marketing consultant, it does not specifically deal with the rhetoric of marketing practice in the environment. However, Nilsson’s work has elsewhere focused more explicitly on marketing (Nilsson, 2006), and his PhD dissertation has been recently published under the subtitle “a study of marketing work in the spirit of contradiction” (Nilsson, 2015). Here, Nilsson examines the practice of those engaged in “marketing work” and concludes that theirs is a “rhetorical business accomplished by sophistic and self-reflexive marketers who argue in, through, and in between volatile kairotic encounters commonly known as ‘marketing meetings’, in which they employ versatile and expansive language, and enact contradictory selves, for persuasive purposes” (p. 180). Marketing practice, Nilsson argues, is a rhetorical practice.

Koskull and Fougère (2011) have performed an explicitly rhetorical analysis of the arguments around the issue of customer orientation deployed by members (including marketing personnel) of a service development project at a bank. They categorise exchanges based upon rhetorical appeals such as Aristotle’s three artistic proofs and their research found that arguments relating to ethos were the most common. Perhaps more interestingly, they also discovered that, while there was much talk about the necessity for ‘knowledge’, “when team members referred to ‘knowledge’ it was almost only in the form of either ‘well-known truths’, IT-derived ‘objective facts’ or claims allegedly coming from frontline personnel about informal customer feedback”. So, even though the project team had access to significant amounts of information already collected about their customers, they did not use it. Furthermore, they made no effort to acquire any more, even though at the same time “appealing to ethos by expressing guilt and frustration for not living up to the customer oriented ideal” (p. 216). Koskull and Fougère (2011), therefore, demonstrate the usefulness of rhetorical analysis in examining the ways in which marketing practice might deviate from the expectations of marketing theory. The authors are careful to note that “service development practice, of course, is not all about rhetoric” (p. 218). They position their adoption of rhetoric to study this particular issue as an extension of the literature on organizational rhetoric and there is no sense in the paper that rhetoric provides anything more than a tool for analysis to be used by researchers.

I have also used rhetorical analysis to examine the intersection between marketing theory and marketing practice (Miles, 2013, 2014b, 2016) as well as to investigate the marketing of marketing theories to academics and practitioners (Miles, 2010, 2014a, 2017). This has often involved adopting a mixture of rhetorical perspectives—(Potter-inspired) CDA/DA-oriented rhetoric-as-version-making, Classical Aristotelian and Sophistic rhetorics, as well as contemporary rhetorical theories such as Foss and Griffin’s (1995) “invitational rhetoric”. This has allowed me to explore the rhetorical strategies involved in the adoption of contagion metaphors in viral marketing (Miles, 2014b), consider the ways in which concepts such as interactivity (2010), empowerment (2010, 2016) and co-creation (2014a, 2017) have been used by marketing theorists and practitioners to persuasively advance inconsistent or contradictory positions (often in conflict with customer orientation), and also examine the Othering rhetoric used in intellectual critiques of the marketing enterprise (2013). I have also called for a consideration of marketing as rhetoric (Miles, 2010, 2013) that goes beyond the adoption of rhetorical analysis as a methodological tool for the examination of marketing theory and practice and seeks to describe marketing as a continuation, evolution, or mutation of the Western rhetorical tradition. Obviously, this is a position present at the very core of the current work, but I will finish this section with a review of the (very few) pieces of scholarship in the marketing literature which have argued for an entirely rhetorical positioning of the marketing profession and discipline.

Marketing as Rhetoric

The first scholars to argue for the rhetorical basis for marketing are Laufer and Paradeise ([1990] 2016). They begin their book length study of “public opinion and media formation in Democratic Societies” by setting out their principal contention, that “marketing is the bureaucratic form of Sophism” (p. 2). They argue that while the negative connotations of both Sophism and marketing have weight (and are based upon “the same accusations, point for point”) they also share a “positive definition” which is “essential to an understanding of marketing and, therefore, of contemporary society”. The accusations common to Sophism and marketing are summarised by the authors as revolving around the “primary charge” that “they do not tell the truth”. They link this, of course, with a relativistic position in general and Protagoras’ statement that “man is the measure of all things” specifically. Arguing that the Protagorean perspective means that man’s “approval can be won only by influencing perception … […] … by playing skillfully on his sensations and feelings”, they remind us that both “marketing men and Sophists” claim to possess the “knowledge of how to conjure up appearances out of words and to present objects and people in a flattering light” (p. 3). They also note the similar focus on technique; they are pragmatists, uninterested in reflecting upon the “ends for which their services are bought” (p. 3). They are both “indifferent to power” (p. 5), having no interest in challenging “the powers that be” (p. 4). They are both also attacked and dismissed by those who strike a virtuous pose—the Sophists faced derision from philosophers of ‘truth’ who saw them as mere marketers of technical knowledge (as Plato says in the Sophist), while “professors of marketing face opposition from the ‘noble’ disciplines” (p. 5) who see them as concerned only with the crass, vulgar, and manipulative. And, just as Sophists were mistrusted for their roots in the colonies of Asia Minor, so are marketers in Europe treated with suspicion as outposts of a North American pragmatism and energy “besieging an ageing Europe” (p. 6).

Laufer and Paradeise ([1990] 2016) argue that marketing and Sophism are best thought of as “naive techniques of non-naive power” (p. 18). Not being concerned with the “why” they find refuge solely in the “how” and thus become naive agents of those who are concerned with the Machiavellian pursuit of power. In the modern world (“the empire of rhetoric”, p. 148), this meant the “Bureaucrat Prince”, whose “only criterion was the pragmatic one of efficiency” and whose “method consisted in the manipulation of opinion in its modern form of marketing”.

Laufer and Paradeise ([1990] 2016) equate rhetoric (Sophism) with marketing from the perspective of critical marketing scholars. Their concern is to demonstrate the identity of the two practices/traditions in order to reproduce Plato and Aristotle’s critiques of the Sophists but now directed at marketing, all within a large Weberian framework of systems of legitimacy. It is unclear what exactly the ramifications of this construction are. It seems to make of marketing little more than a technique of manipulation and it is fair to say that there is not much engagement with what marketing actually is (i.e. the richness of its scholarly and/or professional traditions) in the work. While, as is obvious from my arguments in the book you are currently reading, the similarities between Sophism and marketing are tremendously important for a nuanced consideration of marketing’s nature, once they have pointed them out, Laufer and Paradeise do little with them (the same is true for a later, rather compressed, piece by Laufer, 2016).

Tonks (2002) is influenced by Laufer and Paradeise’s 1990 text but takes a decidedly more celebratory tone. He starts from the position that “persuasion can be seen as a framing concept for marketing in general and marketing management in particular” and argues that therefore rhetoric, being “synonymous” with persuasion, “needs to have a more central location in making sense of marketing management” (p. 806). Tonks’ main concern in his paper, then, is to outline how the marketing manager can be seen as a Sophist, someone who is concerned with phronesis, or practical wisdom. The particular realm of the marketing manager’s phronesis is the employment of rhetoric to manufacture consent. Standing against the anti-persuasion arguments of Duncan and Moriarty (1998), Tonks places persuasion at the heart of all marketing exchanges and relationships. He states that it is “in large measure” rhetoric which energises these exchanges. This is a remarkably important observation and the key to Tonks’ vision of marketing rhetoric. Rhetoric suffuses all aspects of marketing work, in a way that it does not for other aspects of management and business—this is what makes marketing unique, and this is the true ‘value added’ that marketing brings to the firm, the energising of exchanges. The marketing manager seeks to “accumulate market power through initiating and controlling exchanges” (p. 812). Marketing is an attempt to control, “to beguile, to entice, to seduce and to entrap” (p. 813)—all wordings which echo not only critics of marketing and marketing communication but also the many criticisms of rhetoric through the centuries. Yet, Tonks seems to enjoy the contrarian position of affirming the aspect of marketing which so many marketing scholars have in various ways (via manqué scientism or dialogue-oriented ‘relationship’ positionings) tried to downplay or distance themselves from. Yes, Tonks is saying, marketing relationships are asymmetric, its practice does seek to “curtail consumer sovereignty” (p. 813), and it is concerned with seduction and entrapment via the energising of exchanges—but that’s what we do, so let’s not pretend anymore. While the linguistic and rhetorical turns in the social sciences can bring to marketing scholarship ‘additional framing devices’ for “contemplating marketing management and the range of marketing in its wider sense”, the truly “radical claim” that Tonks finishes with is that “marketing is a reincarnation of rhetoric” (p. 816, emphasis retained). This is something that, once realised, not only can “enhance marketing practice” (p. 813) but potentially can re-orient the spirit of the discipline as a continuation of the “ancient song” of Corax.

Of course, Tonks’ piece ends with the “radical claim”, rather than starts with it as a proposition that is then argued for. It stands, therefore, as an inspiring, indeed, energising, piece of epideictic. It remains ambiguous regarding the relationship between understandings of marketing rhetoric as instruments of governmentality and practice-oriented attempts to use rhetoric to enhance marketing techniques. It also remains unclear whether all that is required is a simple adjusting of perspective, so that we may see marketing for what it always has been, or if a more substantial re-interpretation is necessary for marketing to be successfully understood as rhetoric.

Nilsson (2006) takes up the call of Laufer and Paradeise ([1990] 2016) and Tonks (2002) and seeks to explain in more detail “how the domain of marketing is closely associated with classical rhetoric” (p. 1) by describing how a variety of traditional rhetorical approaches and techniques (the figures, Aristotle’s three artistic proofs, Quintilian’s three duties, and the five canons) can be mapped onto the types of scenarios and practices encountered in everyday marketing. Furthermore, Nilsson (2006) argues that most mainstream marketing understandings of relationships are mired in simplistic dyadic (buyer<—>seller) understandings of how people act within markets imported from economic theory. He notes that Nordic service marketing, as exemplified for example in Gummesson (2002, 2004) and Håkansson et al. (2004), calls for an alternative conception, based upon a ‘many-to-many’ theory of marketing interactivity where all members of an organization are constantly involved in interactive communication with each other and other stakeholders. This “interactive marketing process” is the dominant arena of marketing communication, not the clearly bounded, comparatively small realm of promotional communication. This means, Nilsson argues, that a “many-to-many communication challenge emerges which calls for vast and sophisticated knowledge in the science and art of persuasion”. This is why the study of rhetoric by marketing managers is essential—while there is “no specific rhetoric model that entirely matches the many-to-many communication challenge” (p. 8), nevertheless, an understanding of the rhetorical tradition will enable the construction of a “listening-rhetoric” (after Booth), which is “not another cunning persuasion strategy” but a commitment to “understand and acknowledge the deep interest of [each participant] in a communication situation” (ibid.). Nilsson (2006) is therefore proposing a rather different course than Tonks (2002), who dismisses the possibility of a non-persuasive marketing interaction. For Nilsson (2006), an education in the traditions of rhetoric can enable all actors in the marketing interaction process to communicate their “deep interest” in a sophisticated collaboration “that goes further than negotiating and bargaining”. This echoes the types of calls for a dialogue-based marketing communication that we have seen come out of relationship marketing and service marketing research (Duncan and Moriarty, 1998; Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Varey, 2000; Ballantyne, 2004).

I have also (Miles, 2010) advanced a rhetorical model of marketing communication (based upon Foss and Green’s invitational rhetoric) designed to answer the calls in the relationship and services marketing literature for symmetrical, dialogue-based interactions between stakeholders. However, I have also been generally critical of that literature (2010, 2013) in terms of its unwillingness to engage with what a non-manipulative, symmetrical marketing communication would really be like and how it would work. My suspicion that much of this literature is based on unexplored but prejudicial attitudes towards persuasion has grown over the intervening years, bolstered by my analyses of other areas of marketing discourse which use (of course) rhetorical appeals around techniques of co-creation, transparency, and empowerment in order to position particular theories and practices as inclusive, egalitarian, and non-manipulative while remaining fully engaged in control orientations (Miles, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2017).

Conclusion

There has been, then, a not insignificant amount of marketing scholarship that has to some degree engaged with the link between marketing and some aspects of the Western rhetorical tradition. The vast majority of this scholarship, however, has either been narrowly focused on particular aspects of marketing communication practice (i.e. the use of tropes and schemas in advertising executions) or has tended to adopt rhetoric as a function of power relations within a broadly Foucauldian framework (analysing rhetorical strategies that serve to legitimize dominant professional hierarchies). That work which has positioned marketing as fundamentally rhetorical (Tonks’ “radical claim”) has done so in an effort to explain marketing’s power as a legitimizing tool for the Bureaucratic Prince, or attempted to re-cast marketing rhetoric as a tool to answer the communication needs of the anti-persuasion service marketing theory platform. Only Tonks (2002) appears to be comfortable with the nitty-gritty of Sophistic persuasion as the basis for the marketing paradigm—and even then his position is somewhat ambiguous and not helped by the uniqueness of his pronouncement (the ‘Marketing as Cooking’ article remains the only engagement with rhetoric in Tonks’ ouevre).

The marketing literature that engages with rhetoric exemplifies one of the main issues besetting the discipline (and profession)—a discomfort with persuasion. Persuasion is either something that the ‘mainstream’ does (and is therefore something that needs to be exposed and resisted) or it is something that marketing has foolishly engaged in and which it should now make every effort to move away from (a typical trope in the relationship and service marketing literature). In other words, the ‘bad reputation’ that has dogged rhetoric for centuries continues in marketing’s own relationship with the pursuit of persuasion. The time is ripe, it would seem, for a fully articulated Sophistic theory of marketing which instead of demonising persuasion (or hiding it underneath layers of deliberately obfuscatory scientism) places it at the centre of the marketing enterprise. However, before we can confidently construct this Theory of Sophistic Marketing, there are a few steps left. We must first consider the nature of marketing itself. An exploration of the assumptions upon which the practice and discipline of marketing are based, and the various tensions around and between these assumptions, is essential in order to be able to distinguish the ways in which understandings of persuasion and rhetoric inform, influence, and haunt the fundamental nature of marketing. This will allow us to return to the beginnings of both Sophism and marketing in order to trace their similarities and symbioses. Once this is accomplished, we will turn to the relationship between persuasion, control, and magic. Without a full understanding of how humanity has tended to conflate these elements, we will not be in a position to place persuasion anywhere other than on the Outside of marketing, as so much modern marketing theory has tried to do.