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There exists in scholarship about marketing a significant stream of discourse that seeks to identify aspects of marketing practice with magic. This can take the form of arguing that advertising works like magic to blind consumers to the "real" nature of the world, or that it revels in the blatant use of terminology and tropes drawn from our historical understanding of the practice of magic and witchcraft (enchantment, transformation, glamours, spells, incantations, ingredient "X"), or that consumers use "magical thinking" in the way in which they regard celebrity-endorsed products, or even that the whole business of marketing is best thought of as a modern system of magic. In this paper, I will argue that this recourse to the identification of marketing, particularly marketing communication, with magic by diverse scholars using apparently diverse arguments can be brought down to a single, shared concern with the issue of persuasion.
The common portrayal of magic as something which can give one person influence over another has a very close relationship with the practice of rhetoric. I will argue that accusations and identifications of magic in marketing are essentially accusations and identifications of the presence of rhetoric in marketing and should therefore be seen as rhetorical strategies designed to persuade an audience over to a particular way of thinking about persuasion. Uncovering the core concern with persuasion which rests at the bottom of these strategies is a significant step in exploring the reorientation of marketing communication currently occurring in marketing theory. Relationship marketing scholars and representative of the broader service perspective have argued for a move away from what can be called the "traditional" marketing communication model of monological, persuasive communication designed to alter consumers' attitudes and behaviours, calling instead for a dialogical, negotiatory, and co-creative role for marketing communication which eschews the pursuit of persuasive goals. Consequently, I will be arguing that the co-identification of magic, rhetoric, and marketing is something which has reached its pinnacle in contemporary marketing scholarships' own attempt to excise persuasive techniques from the definition of "proper" marketing communication.
I begin the paper by discussing what we might mean by identifying something as "magic" and arguing for a rhetorical understanding of the term. I then continue with an analysis of the core arguments put...