11 - Marketing Science Fiction

Summary

The book opened by asking if marketing is really a science. It is easy to think that it is in the age of data- driven marketing, consumer analytics, and neuromarketing. But, if marketing is increasingly approached as a science, should we not study it like a science? In other words, do we not need market science studies?

Marketing science studies – the approach I advocate – explores what people who claim to be doing marketing science do. This helps us to understand how they convince others that their work is scientific. It necessitates that we investigate marketing as something people share with a range of tools, techniques, and objects. To gain this appreciation, we must go to work with marketing workers in marketing organizations and not fall victim to industry hype.

When we do so, we can see that marketing organizations like to present their activities as a form of science as a response to the ambiguities of marketing as a form of knowledge work that lacks true professional status (Alvesson, 1994). That is, it helps to build their clients’ confidence in their work. It also helps to satisfy the needs of their clients. It is too easy, and incorrect, to assume that the clients of marketing organizations are rational actors who want marketing organizations to do their marketing for them either because they are special artists or scientists.

Life would be simple for marketing organizations if this were true. If clients wanted creative advertising agencies to imagine fresh advertising campaigns or marketing research companies to report their findings, marketing action would be easy. But marketing action is based on a different idea of clients. It is based on the idea that clients need marketing organizations to help them to make decisions. They do not want marketing organizations to make decisions for them.

In short, clients turn to marketing organizations to absorb their uncertainties about their consumers and markets. On this point, Braverman, the foundational work sociologist whose thinking encouraged us to step into marketing work, emphasizes the importance of marketplace uncertainty in the historical emergence of marketing. He writes:

The overall purpose of all administrative controls, is, as in the case of production controls, the elimination of uncertainty and the exercise of constraint to achieve the desired result.