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Keywords Marketing, Consumerism, Society, Materiality
Abstract Marketing is commonly assumed to be responsible for the consumer society with its hedonistic lifestyle and for undermining other cultures by its materialistic stance. This, for many critics, is the dark side of consumer marketing, undermining its ethical standing. This paper considers the connection between marketing, the consumer society, globalization and the hedonistic lifestyle, and whether marketing is guilty as charged. After all, anything that affects the image of marketing as a profession is important, as this influences both recruitment and social acceptance.
The charge: a hedonistic society attributable to consumer marketing
This paper discusses the claim that today's consumer society is hedonistic, due largely to modern day marketing practices. To its critics, the implicit claims made by consumer marketing are that the meaning of life is discovered through acquisition; that the hedonistic experience of material accumulation is the core object of existence on earth. As hedonism in this context is meant to suggest a degenerate influence, it is important to assess whether the charge against marketing is true or the extent to which it is valid. This is the purpose of this paper. Consumer culture, and the ideology of consumerism, generally get a bad press today. The public visibility of goods is seen as becoming the core of social identity, achieved at the expense of other values such as family orientation and so on. This has now become a public issue. One piece in the Sunday Telegraph (McCartney, 2000) states:
Every night, on the television advertisements, you see smooth-jawed men driving 130,000 cars, attracting the envious, admiring glances of their peers and attractive women... Values, however, percolate through our culture (or our lack of it). Witty, moneyed advertisers have always sought to sell us more and more expensive possessions, but they now also choose to do so by relentlessly mocking any "value" which is not material: usually those found in either marriage or religion.
This process of acquiring, consuming and discarding is viewed as a novel and forbidding cultural form. Hedonism-consumerism has rapidly acquired the status of a modern bogey-man,and is seen as intimately associated with the parallel phenomenon of globalization. In fact, consumerism and globalization have become metaphors for human acquisitiveness in a revolt that...