Consumer Zeitgeist

Marketing rules. It plays an extensive function in business’ practice and scholars provide pivotal evidence about the phenomenon. Anyway, the academic discourse seeking to define the concept of marketing and its measurable economic relevance is still ongoing: in the wrong direction I might add.
Even though the essential marketing practice is old as human trade is, its widely accepted body of notions is rooted in the last century’s business practice. We all know what actual marketing is today: a practice mostly concerned in creating, communicating and delivering value to customers, whose dominant logic is based on the good old principle of exchange. Exchange of goods, exchange of services, whatever… But while the debate about the scope of marketing goes on, complementary business concepts are developing, shifting attention in always different directions, dipending on the hype of the moment: yesterday was total quality management, today is social responsibility, tomorrow might be progressive consumer resistance to branding strategies…

However, targeting exchanges and customer relationships as the core marketing preoccupations, lead us away from considering that the social environment, as well as cultural objects, corporations and, at last, real people, are actually components of the same balanced system. They all influence and get influenced in the ongoing cultural discourse. In the age of globalization and networking, marketing paradigms quickly appear and vanish, and while many valuable suggestions and observations may see the light every once in a while, a general perspective is still lacking today, hindered by dispersion of many research efforts into distinct islands of knowledge, exceedingly producing self-referential contributions and overall noise.

Instead, The Consumer Zeitgeist tries to open up a new perspective on marketing within a broad sociological context, where the attention is directed on the comprehension of cultural objects and on the sociological tools we all have at disposal and can effectively use to analize, understand and finally influence society at large. This dissertation is an attempt to redirect the ongoing speculation about the reality of marketing towards real people and everyday life, drawing on concepts from sociology of culture to give sense of cultural expressions, including brands, and understanding their impact on society.

This work will be discussed at the University of Trieste on december 2009. Eventually, its contents will be translated in plain english and distributed early next year.

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