Hyperconsumption
Diving deep into the world of corporate marketing, this incisive and eye-​
opening work shows how, in the hands of the corporation, business has
become manipulative, divisive, and disastrously at odds with the needs of
the natural world. It calls on us to rethink and rebel.
The corporate marketing blitz is driven by a crass economic truth: profits
depend on demand always exceeding supply. A multi-​
billion-​
dollar
global industry has therefore been created with the sole aim of turning us
into devout consumers. Gerard Hastings invites us to explore alternatives
to a system that is threatening our survival. He explores what it is to be
human, how marketing can be used to do good rather than harm, and
the potential of alternative models that empower us to be citizens, not
just consumers.
Professionals and students in the business, marketing, public health,
environmental and political sectors –​as well as concerned citizens who
know that business as usual is not an option –​will value this accessible
guide to what is going wrong with our current business models and how
these failings can be addressed.
Gerard Hastings is Professor Emeritus at Stirling University, UK. For the
last four decades, he has studied the damaging impacts that commercial
marketing has on our health and wellbeing, publishing his findings widely
in both academic and non-​academic outlets. He is a sought-​after keynote
speaker, and his work has attracted both the attention of the media and
the ire of some multinationals. He continues to act as an expert witness
in litigation against the corporate sector in the UK and overseas.
Hyperconsumption
Corporate Marketing vs. the Planet
Gerard Hastings
Cover image ‘New York’ by Alain Flesch
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Gerard Hastings
The right of Gerard Hastings to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Hastings, Gerard (Professor) author.
Title: Hyperconsumption : corporate marketing vs. the planet / Gerard Hastings.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021051843 | ISBN 9781032214702 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032214641 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003268567 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Consumption (Economics)–Environmental aspects. |
Industrial marketing. | Branding (Marketing)
Classification: LCC HC79.C6 H37 2022 | DDC 381/.1–dc23/eng/20211228
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051843
ISBN: 978-1-03-221470-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-03-221464-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-00-326856-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003268567
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
For Robyn and her generation who will have to clean up
the mess made by us
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Contents
Introduction: Human Beings Not Customers PA RT I
1
The Corporate Marketing Machine 7
1
Original Sin: The Spawning of Corporate Marketing 9
2
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying 20
3
The Machinery of Marketing 33
4
Grooming the Next Generation 44
5
Surveillance Capitalism 56
6
Marketing, Power, and the Demise of Democracy 69
PA RT I I
We Shall Overcome 81
7
Deep in My Heart 83
8
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand 93
9
The Whole Wide World Around 107
Notes Index 117
126
Introduction
Human Beings Not Customers
Look inward, to your origins. For brutish ignorance your mettle was
not made; you were made human to follow after wisdom and virtue.
(Dante Alighieri)1
Section 1: The Corporate Marketing Machine
Marketing in its modern form emerged just over a century ago in
response to two forces, which started in the US but swiftly globalised.
First, commerce, which had until then been dominated by lots of small
businesses, began to coalesce into a much smaller number of bigger companies. Capital became concentrated in fewer hands and the modern
business corporation came of age. Hand in glove with this, mass production methods were developed which vastly increased the availability of
consumer goods. Cars, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners could be
produced in unprecedented numbers at much reduced cost. For us in the
rich north of the planet, it was the dawn of an age of plenty.
The emerging corporations were, from the outset, acutely aware of the
danger of supply exceeding demand and a parallel industry was therefore
spawned to turn us into eager customers. It began with advertising, a
tool as old as human commerce, but now taken to an industrial scale and
informed by the latest social science. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s
nephew, was a leading light, and his book, called simply “Propaganda”,
published in 1928, provided the road map. The aim was to wage “on
behalf of the producers and sellers of consumer goods, a relentless war
against saving and in favour of consumption”.2 The importance of this
work to keeping the economic show on the road was appreciated way
beyond the business community: Bernays became an establishment figure
and was toasted on Capitol Hill and in the corridors of academe as well
as Wall Street. He had worked out not just how to turn us into customers,
but into biddable and needy ones.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-1
2
Introduction: Human Beings Not Customers
Robotisation, computers, global supply chains, and the digital revolution have continued to make production increasingly efficient and
supply ever more abundant (for us rich ones), and the customer-​building,
demand-​stimulating industry has more than kept pace. In the 1950s the
focus on advertising expanded to take in the broader field of marketing.
This introduced the idea of “customer orientation” and the benefits of
using market research to learn as much as possible about us and so sell to
us even more effectively. In principle, this is a good idea: manufacturers
can produce things we want to buy, rather than making things and
then trying to sell them to us. In practice, though, studies of our needs
soon became studies of our wants and whims; of our frailties and
aspirations; of how to create needs; of the best sales pitches and so on.
So the war in favour of consumption continued, and was now informed
by a sophisticated intelligence service. The spoils of victory were also
immense –​once you start digging into the human psyche there are no
limits to our needs, wants, and whims.
Marketing also provides a better range of tools for forming and
shaping us customers. Advertising has morphed into “marketing
communications” and grown to include all types of publicity, from the
pack to the sponsorship deal to the global brand. These communications
are not expected to stand alone, but are developed and honed in close
conjunction with the rest of the marketing effort: product design, packaging, pricing, distribution, and point of sale activity. Each of these
tools is also informed by careful market research: which colour of
widget do we prefer? Would a price cut compromise our perceptions
of quality? Which aisle of the supermarket best triggers us to buy?
Everything is then brought together into a coherent marketing strategy
which is engineered and perfected to ensure the continual maximisation of profits.
Turning us into customers is a lifelong project, so corporate marketers
take a particular interest in our children –​indeed, as we will see, they
reach even into the womb. We adults have done little to protect them
from this grooming: in most of the world, for example, it is still perfectly legal to advertise junk food to 8-​year-​olds even though we know
(a) it is very bad for their health and (b) they can’t even understand what
an advert is. Fortunately our kids have more sense than we do, and the
Thunberg generation is rising up against this madness.
At the same time, however, digital is turbo-​charging the power of the
corporate marketer. The data being trawled from our online activity puts
analogue market research in the shade. Corporate marketers now know
more about us than our own mothers ever did, and we pay for the privilege of keeping them informed. Algorithms and artificial intelligence
have honed the rest of the marketing effort: we can get whatever we
Introduction: Human Beings Not Customers
3
want, whenever we want it, and at bargain prices. At the same time, our
greed and materialism is justified and primped with comforting lies about
lovin’ it and being worth it.
Corporate marketers also work diligently with politicians to ensure the
business environment remains favourable –​that ads to children aren’t
banned, for example, or social media more tightly regulated. To a large
extent they push at an open door: marketers and politicians have a great
deal in common and have long worked closely together. Their shared
agenda dates back to antiquity but has become much stronger over the
last hundred years with the growth of corporate capitalism. CEOs and
Presidents have a mutual interest in economic growth and increasing
consumption: the corporation gets profits; the politician reliable tax
revenues –​and both gain power. Furthermore, the marketing techniques
used to manage customers work just as well on voters. Political policies
can be branded, packaged, and sold as successfully as burgers and booze.
Digital technology, as Cambridge Analytica revealed, has made this
alliance particularly sinister.
The Age of Rebellion
From a consumer perspective corporate marketers provide the goodies
and lots of superficial pleasure. It is agreeable to have FaceTime with
family on the other side of the world and to be able to buy grapes
365 days a year. Only a bore would mention the conflict minerals and
food miles; the digital surveillance; the harm to nature.
From a human perspective it is utterly debilitating, trivialising our lives
and turning us into spoiled brats who want ever more and care ever
less. We are locked into the marketing machine and condemned to a life
of compulsive consumption. Think how much more we now consume
compared to our parents and grandparents. Ponder the insanity of an
average supermarket stocking more than 40 thousand different items.
Consider that our smartphone has more processing power than the
Apollo mission needed to land a man on the moon. And remember that
there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this bewildering excess has
made us one jot more content.
From the perspective of our fellow creatures our thraldom to the corporate marketers is nothing short of a catastrophe.
The spectacular success of corporate marketing is showing itself today
in two ways. First the persuasion business has grown exponentially. By
the turn of the millennium, in the US alone, a detailed review showed that
the “aggregate marketing system” employed some 30 million people and
drove consumer spending worth $5 trillion a year. To illustrate the magnitude of this figure, the review authors explain:
4
Introduction: Human Beings Not Customers
if we were to try to count it at the rate of $1 per second, it would
take more than 150,000 years, or much longer than the history of
civilization. Although the aggregate marketing system in the United
States may not stretch quite to “eternity” it certainly does stretch a
very long way.
This is just in the US, and marketing is now very much a global force.
It has become even more invasive and powerful in the 21st century, and
latest figures show that more than $550 billion is spent on advertising
alone every year.3
On the back of this maelstrom of marketing, corporations have grown
exponentially. A recent analysis by Oxfam4 shows that the combined
revenue the world’s 10 biggest corporations –​among them Wal-​Mart,
Shell, and Apple –​is greater than the combined revenue of 180 countries
(including Ireland, Indonesia, Israel, and Greece). They couldn’t have
done it without our (carefully choreographed) support.
The second indicator of marketing’s success is the woeful state of the
planet. We have become so beguiled by consumption that we are despoiling
nature, destabilising the climate, and threatening our children’s survival.
A recent study published in Nature5 notes that in 2020 the amount of
stuff we humans produce each year now weighs more than all the life,
plant and animal, on earth. There may be no limits to our needs, wants,
and whims, but the planet is finite and reaching exhaustion. Covid-19 is
just the latest warning that we need to reduce, not increase our consumption. Corporate marketing is indeed bringing us all closer to eternity; we
need to rebel and rethink.
The second half of the book discusses how.
Section 2: We Shall Overcome
Despite the predations of the corporate marketers there is much hope.
For a start, not all businesses have been corporatised. Take Michael
and Morag, for example. They run a small green grocery in my home
town and remind us that business can be a joyful occupation and a welcome presence in all our lives. Life is complex and sometimes difficult; we
depend on others to meet many of our material needs and bring us joy
and fulfilment. Self-​sufficiency maybe a noble endeavour, but for most of
us it is impossible: our lives work in collaboration with others, by doing
deals and working collectively. Business is the name we give to this communality and a shop is its most obvious manifestation. The problem is
that doing deals and working communally depend on the parties having
a similar level of power. When one is bigger than a country but lacks
any democratic checks and balances, this parity evaporates. Michael and
Morag remind us it need not be so, that small is beautiful and there are
Introduction: Human Beings Not Customers
5
alternatives to the corporate marketing machine. They will keep us company as we analyse, deconstruct, and rebuild.
The other profound source of hope is that we are still very much human
beings: the corporate marketers have demonstrably failed to turn us into
mere customers. I wouldn’t have written this book, and you wouldn’t be
reading it, if it were otherwise. This means, in Dante’s rousing words, we
are more than capable of following after wisdom and virtue. This makes
us more than a match for the admen.
The key human quality is critical thinking: we need to consider and
understand the implications of our own behaviour and when the corporate marketer’s offer is found wanting we can refuse our consent. The
marketer will do all they can to disguise the downsides, but once we
know how their black magic works, their spells lose their power. When
the curtain is drawn back we can easily see that there is no wizard or
wizardry –​only tricks and gullibility. This knowledge enables us to rebel.
And once we start to recognise the flaws of the system we connect with
our fellow human beings –​in Albert Camus’ words: “I rebel therefore
we are”. In the last century this collective responsibility achieved global
recognition the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These rights
include the right to be actively involved in improving our polity; the
planet urgently needs us to exercise it.
We could start by rethinking how we do business. In the over-​powerful
hands of the corporation it has become debased and manipulative. But
this is an aberration, a corruption of how things once were and could
be again –​as Michael and Morag show. Marketing is not a 20th-​century invention; it is as old as human society. Human beings have always
done deals, made exchanges; alone we are weak and vulnerable, together
we can flourish. We have developed complex protocols to manage this
collaboration. These protocols have been usurped by the corporate
marketers in the pursuit of excess profit; it is time we reclaimed them and
set them to better purpose.
Marketing in this original form furnishes the invaluable ability to see
the world from the viewpoint of others as well as ourselves; to strive for
mutual benefit. This can guide not just the way we consume, but how we
deal with other important issues like justice, race relations, inequalities,
and public health. We will call it marketing for the angels.
And so we come, inevitably, to capitalism itself, and the need to question
our whole geopolitical system. To demand a fundamental rethink. Why
has modernity hitched its cart to the insane notion of perpetual growth?
How did we ever allow the corporations to become so powerful and
their marketing so insidious? What are the alternative models which
don’t depend on us being customers rather than citizens? What can we
learn from indigenous cultures, “the people who”, in Arundhati Roy’s
words, “still know the secrets of sustainable living” and who “are not
6
Introduction: Human Beings Not Customers
relics of the past, but the guides to our future”.6 What is the purpose of
the human project? Can we learn to think like an ecosystem? How can
we create a world where we all have the chance to follow Dante’s advice
and seek out wisdom and virtue?
These are profound and daunting questions to which answers have
to be found, if only because the current direction of travel is so clearly
wrong-​headed. Issues which this book surely can’t resolve alone –​but
hopefully it will encourage and inform the conversation.
Part I
The Corporate Marketing
Machine
All good rebellions are built on counterintelligence. This first half of the
book looks in detail at the methods and tools of the corporate marketer.
At the power these deliver to the corporation, and the problems they
cause –​but also at their flaws and weaknesses. These insights set the
scene for the alternatives we discuss in the second half of the book.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-2
Chapter 1
Original Sin
The Spawning of Corporate Marketing
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
(Edward Bernays 1928, Propaganda)
Of Confidence Tricks and Rebellion
Business is a thing of beauty. It makes manifest the human need for
cooperation. We have always done deals and made exchanges. Our local
shops and street markets give us pleasure as well as a vital service. Things
only get ugly when power intervenes; when some businesses become too
big and dominant. This imbalance is writ large with the modern business
corporation, driven by investors’ scruple-​free funds and a psychopathic
focus on profits.
These corporations have now grown bigger than many countries, can
sidestep government control and avoid taxes. We see their predations very
clearly from time to time –​the too-​big-​to-​fail banks of 2008, the farmers
suffering at the hands of bloated supermarkets, the arrogance of the tech
giants –​but mostly they hide very successfully behind the synthetic charm
of marketing. Their logos and slogans, celebrity endorsers, sponsorship,
bargain prices, and the rest calm our concerns and pull us into the consumer capitalist project. So instead of rebelling, we join loyalty schemes;
rather than man the barricades, we buy the bargains; in place of criticism
and recrimination we make sad jokes about retail therapy.
There is Business and There is Big Business
We human beings are sociable creatures. We need each other. If we are to
eat, get shelter, have comfortable and safe lives we have to work together.
Back on the Savanna we collaborated to survive: if I could hunt and you
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-3
10 The Corporate Marketing Machine
could cook, together we ate. If the prey was big we would hunt as a team.
As human society grew, we started trading, exchanging corn for chickens
or furs for iron. We got on by doing deals and making exchanges that
benefit all those involved. This early commerce was vital to the development of sophisticated human culture. As Yuval Harari1 explains in
Sapiens, it even drove the emergence of writing. The first written words
archaeologists have found are on 5000-​year-​old Sumerian tablets and they
didn’t concern literature or high-​minded ideas, but facts and figures about
transactions. The first writers weren’t poets but accountants. Their contribution to human progress was nonetheless profound: without these early
bookkeepers there would be no poets –​or at least no record of their work.
Martin Luther King’s celebrated Christmas sermon emphasised the
potential joy of this mutual dependence. By breakfast time, in his words,
we had shaken hands with people from France to West Africa, from
China to South America.
Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the
morning without being dependent upon most of the world? You get
up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the
sponge, and that’s handed you by a Pacific Islander. You reach for a
bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And
then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning and
that is poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you
want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese.
Or maybe you desire to have cocoa for breakfast, and that’s
poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for
your toast, and that’s given you at the hands of an English-​speaking
farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world.
This is the way our universe is structured. It is its interrelated
quality.2
Business is the system we have developed to organise all these transactions,
and at its best it is indeed a source of joy. Small shops and street markets
epitomise these benefits. We have already met Michael and Morag, who
run my local green grocery and provide a great service: quality produce
at a competitive price delivered to your door if needed. They are also
an important part of our local community: they are friends as well as
providers.
But not all business is like this. Indeed in many places Michael and
Morag are a dying breed, replaced by a much bigger and less attractive
form of commerce. Think back to 2008 when too-big-to-fail swindled
their way to extravagant bonuses and then got bailed out. Think of the
oil companies’ efforts to downplay the dangers of global heating. They
Original Sin: The Spawning of Marketing
11
spent decades denying the problem, despite their scientists being among
the first to know about it. As long ago as 1959, before the Beatles
had cut a record or Kennedy been assassinated, the US oil industry
was clearly warned by Edward Teller, the guest speaker at their centennial conference, about the drastic harm carbon fuels were doing to the
climate:
Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide …
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light, but
it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its
presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect … It has been
calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent
increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and
submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and
since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal
regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious
than most people tend to believe.3
Sixty years later, in 2019 an investigation by InfluenceMap shows that the
five largest global oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a
year lobbying to delay, control, or block policies to tackle climate breakdown, whilst at the same time parading bogus, “Beyond Petroleum”,
green credentials in their advertising.4
Or consider the tobacco industry. For decades it denied the dangers
of smoking and continues to make enormous profits from an addictive
product which kills half its customers. Addiction is such a profitable
business model –​which is why it is now busily hedging its bets with
vaping products. The World Health Organisation estimates that tobacco
multinationals are killing five million people a year now and this will
increase to ten million by 2030.
Then there is Big Tech’s dominance of the digital world. A recent US
Congress investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google said it
had found in Silicon Valley “the kinds of monopolies [last seen] in the era
of oil barons and railroad tycoons”. The European commission has fined
Google a total €8.25bn for three separate antitrust violations since 2017 –​
not that the company will be struggling to pay up as it made profits of
$34bn last year alone.5 Or think of Facebook, the so-​called social network
which actually makes 98% of its revenue from advertising. It is not putting us in touch with one another; it is teeing us up for advertisers.
Enter the Corporation
These were not just businesses, but corporations and are financed by
investors –​shareholders in the UK, stockholders in the US. This means
12 The Corporate Marketing Machine
that corporate execs are always spending other people’s money so, to
keep things straight, the “fiduciary imperative” requires that the corporate marketer always prioritises the interests of their investors. All
too often these interests are narrowly defined as financial returns, so
profits come before all other considerations –​fairness, the climate,
health, privacy. It is this single-​minded focus on the bottom line that
led to the corporation to be diagnosed as a psychopath over a decade
ago. Joel Bakan, with the help of a leading psychiatrist, concluded that
the corporation’s institutional character has all the key symptoms,
including being: irresponsible, manipulative, superficial, lacking in
empathy, asocial, and shameless.
This does not mean that everything corporations do is wrong. They can
bring jobs, support good causes, provide useful services, and (sometimes)
obey the law. But they do these things for selfish reasons: because they are
good for profits. When there is a conflict –​for example, research shows
that tobacco kills or fossil fuels are wrecking the planet –​the response
will inevitably be denial and cover up.
Nor does it mean that all corporations are equally ruthless. Some, particularly in western Europe, retain a broader perspective. But the neoliberal agenda led by the US in recent decades is making all multinationals
focus ever more narrowly on profits. Milton Friedman the Chicago
School Economist and guru of Margaret Thatcher summed it up with his
dictum: “the business of business is business”. The corporations which
do this tend to be more profitable. In a competitive marketplace, this has
inevitably triggered a race to the bottom.
From the corporate perspective this system is working just fine.
Shareholders and senior executives are making enormous sums of
money. As a recent Oxfam report points out a FTSE-​100 CEO earns as
much in a year as 10,000 people working in garment factories (in the
1970s it would have been a differential of 30) and 70% of profits go
to shareholders (it was only 10% in the 1970s), who have become an
increasingly wealthy and elite group.
As we have already noted, corporations have also grown enormously,
outstripping many countries. The combined revenue of the 10 biggest
corporations now exceeds that of 180 countries put together.6 Shell and
Volkswagen are both bigger than India; Apple is bigger than Switzerland
and the Netherlands. And they continue to grow. This gives them great
power. They can control the market, and in our materialist times,
that means just about everything. If Michael or Morag displease their
customers, we can go elsewhere –​and they know it. Walmart or Tesco
are so big they can wipe out any potential competition, use their commercial muscle to bully suppliers, and lobby politicians to keep the laws
supportive. Google now controls 90% of web searches. Amazon is laying
waste to the high street.
Original Sin: The Spawning of Marketing
13
As corporations get bigger and extend beyond national boundaries
they become even more difficult to regulate and control. Minimum wage
laws can be side-​stepped and wages bills slashed by moving production
to poor countries. One jurisdiction can be played off against another, so
countries end up competing to attract companies to their shores. Think
about that for a moment. A country, with all its democratic checks and
balances, its duty to provide for its citizens’ needs –​education, health,
pensions, its security, and public health responsibilities –​is beholden to
a corporation whose only concern is to make more money. Perhaps most
disturbingly corporations have now grown big enough to escape taxation. Again it is worth pausing. Taxes are the bridge to civilisation; they
enable governments to do all the good stuff.
The vast sums involved don’t even make common sense. Imagine you
got James Quincey’s job as CEO of Coca-​Cola. You now have a salary
of just over $16 million –​let’s call it $10m after tax. What are you going
to spend all this loot on? $5000 a month will cover living expenses
according to Investopedia,7 even in an expensive city like San Francisco,
but let’s add a couple of zeroes onto that to allow for a big family and
a bit of luxury. That leaves $9.5m. Your own Lear Jet perhaps? Buying
and running one will set you back about a million.8 A Ferrari will be
another million or so. Jewellery? High fashion? Fancy holidays (but
remember you have an important job to do, so time is limited)? The
choices are many. Perhaps too many. If you are feeling overwhelmed,
you could click on “How to Spend it”,9 “a website of worldly pleasures
from the Financial Times”. There you could go for a nice Aston Martin,
the designer ignition key for which is a snip at £695. Or choose from the
“11 of the best shirt dresses” –​ranging from £750 to just over £10,310.
And when you have made all your choices and managed to spend the
full ten million, remember you have to do it all again next year.
Charm School for Psychopaths
Why have we let this happen? Afterall, big though they are, all these
multinationals depend on us –​if we didn’t use their services, buy their fags
or shackle ourselves to their devices they would soon dwindle. Instead
of rebelling, we join their loyalty schemes, wear their brands, and pay
to give them our data. We do all these things because the corporations
are so persuasive. They have grasped and nurtured the final and most
powerful characteristic of every psychopath: charm.
This charm, this ability to please and seduce, is delivered by marketing,
an approach to business that has quietly taken over the world. The story
begins just over a century ago when two phenomena, which emerged in
the US but swiftly globalised, combined to revolutionise business. First,
the Michael and Morags were bought out. The many small companies
14 The Corporate Marketing Machine
which had dominated commerce up until this point in history were
swallowed up by a smaller number of much bigger and wealthier companies.10 Capital became concentrated in a few powerful hands and the
modern business corporation was born.
Hand in glove with this, mass production methods were developed,
which further concentrated money and vastly increased the availability of
consumer goods. Cars, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners could be
produced in unprecedented numbers at much reduced cost. It also raised
an existential threat to the project. If supply increased so much that it
exceeded demand, then the new corporations’ wealth and power would
quickly seep away. It is relative scarcity that determines value: if there
are more things to sell than needs to satisfy, the buyer becomes more
powerful than the seller. They can determine the price, depress sales, and
dominate the transaction.
This made advertising a vital function, and its production became
an important industry in its own right. Its demand-​increasing purpose
and manipulative methods were surprisingly overt. Edward Bernays, the
nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a leading light of the new venture and
spelled it out in his book, “Propaganda”, published in 1928. The book
explains that advertising, “the new propaganda”, would become “the
mechanism which controls the public mind” … “manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or
commodity”.11 The new order was not lacking in confidence or ambition.
Both were justified: success was stratospheric. Henry Ford could not
make his cars fast enough, and such was demand that he could get away
with offering only one colour. Other business sectors flourished in the
same way, producing the generation of robber barons and tycoons so
disliked by today’s US Congress, along with massive inequalities and economic upheaval. However, it would be wrong to blame advertising for
these ructions.
The Michael and Morags of this world use it to benign effect. In enables
the transactions we discussed at the outset of the chapter which Martin
Luther King extolled. To aid our cooperative human project, we long ago
developed the ability to tell each other that we had something useful to
offer. This was advertising in its original form; it clarified each person’s
role as a provider to the group and helped everyone to make decisions
about how they managed their resources and met their needs. A cobbler
would flag up her shoe mending skills and a baker put up a sign saying
bread for sale –​and potential customers could make informed choices
about footwear and food. And yes, we were ever capable of putting an
overly positive spin on these offerings (the Ancient Greeks did a great job
of selling the wooden horse to Troy) but overt deception was kept in train
because the baker needed her customers as much as the customers needed
bread. And if the baker became insensitive to this reality, then there were
Original Sin: The Spawning of Marketing
15
other bakers, or bread could be made at home (the Ancient Greeks had
the Gods on their side and so could afford to risk telling a whopper).
Grab for Power
So the problem lies not with advertising per se, but with how it is deployed
and by whom –​and this, as with so many human dilemmas, is a question
of power. The robber barons had far too much of it. Bernays book opens
with the observation:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of
our country.
The language is astonishingly direct; it is an overt grab for power. Bernays
was extremely successful, became an establishment figure and was
honoured in 1949 by the American Psychological Society. By this time
you would think that the word propaganda, with its chilling association
with Dr Goebbels and the Nazis, would have lost some of its allure. It is
also unnerving to note he got the award for his work on “Engineering
Consent”, which also has totalitarian echoes. Surely consent has to be
negotiated and agreed, not engineered.
The Robber Barons also managed to elbow their way through the
Great Depression and the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s. They even
turned the Nazis into a business opportunity. New York Times journalist
Charles Higham uses declassified government documents to show how
major US corporations –​including the Chase Bank, ITT, and the Ford
Corporation –​were doing business with Nazi corporations like IG Farben
(who built Auschwitz) throughout the war. ITT even helped to perfect the
“doodle bugs” or robot bombs which rained down on London in the last
years of the war.12
So these were powerful and ruthless operators, but they could not
defy the laws of supply and demand. The consent they had so carefully
engineered began to flag because they took their eyes off the demand ball.
The obvious problem with the “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em fast” model
is that sooner or later you run out of customers. Once everyone has a
car, a washing machine, and a vacuum cleaner who do you sell to? This
inevitable impasse was reached by the middle of the last century in the
US –​just as Bernays was getting his award.
The new corporations, far from being the “invisible government”
Bernays envisaged, risked becoming price-​taking servants. An excess of
supply also gave the actual government –​the one that had taken the
16 The Corporate Marketing Machine
trouble to get elected –​a headache: if people don’t buy enough goods, the
economy stagnates, growth falters, unemployment rises, and tax revenues
decline. Difficult questions then have to be broached about what to do
with limited resources –​missiles or hospital beds –​and voters become
much harder to please.
So, both CEOs and presidents had a difficult circle to square. The
obvious solution was to boost demand by uncovering or inventing new
needs and wants. It was time to double down on Bernays’ propaganda.
As a contemporary text explained, advertising was “waging, on behalf
of the producers and sellers of consumer goods, a relentless war against
saving and in favour of consumption”13; its job was to induce “changes
in fashion, create new wants, set new standards of status, enforce new
norms of propriety”.
Other choices could have been made. There may have been oversupply in the US, but the global south remained in dire need, not just
of vacuum cleaners but enough to eat. As the historian Clive Ponting14
points out, by the second half of the last century, there was enough
food for everyone, it was just being very unfairly shared out, and many
in the global south were suffering from malnutrition. This would have
been a good moment at which to rethink the model; to stop chasing
yet more profits and start redistributing global resources more fairly.
Instead, the advertising war on behalf of the producers and sellers
continued unabated and by the end of the century the people of the
northern hemisphere were eating their way through double their share
of the earth’s harvest –​even their domestic pets were better fed than
the poor of the south. These problems of inequity continue today and
not just between hemispheres: witness the rise of foodbanks and the
free school meals scandal in the UK and the Financial Times15 report
that 15% of US citizens go to bed hungry –​and this in two of the
world’s richest countries.
There were plenty of critics of this direction of travel. 1962 saw the
publication of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in which the ecological impact of excessive consumerism was made clear. But nature was
pushed to the back of the queue. The economic illiteracy of the model was
highlighted by Fritz Schumacher in “Small is Beautiful”, and the moral
bankruptcy of advertising by Vance Packard in the “Hidden Persuaders”,
each to no avail. There was, then, no shortage of critiques calling for
change, but far from rethinking the model, the invisible government went
into overdrive.
Corporate Marketing: “New Improved Advertising”
To be fair, business thinkers did see the need for the system to change –​
but they were not concerned about the environment or inequalities, just
Original Sin: The Spawning of Marketing
17
effectiveness. The propaganda model was too crude. There were limits
to how heavily and insistently you could advertise without seeming a
little desperate. Furthermore if people already had all the products on
offer, high-​pressure selling16 was not going to get you very far. You might
sell them a second car, but a second washing machine or a third vacuum
cleaner?
Business, it was argued, needed to become more sophisticated, to
adopt what was called a “marketing perspective”. This turned existing
commercial principles on their head by starting with us consumers rather
than the product. Successful companies, it was argued, produce what
can be sold, rather than trying to sell what has already been (mass-​)
produced. The new discipline of marketing stressed the importance of
market research to provide each business with an understanding of their
customer’s needs and wants, and track its success in satisfying these.
You didn’t try and sell them a second washing machine, but sought out
all sorts of other needs, wants, or whims you could satisfy instead. The
watchwords became “customer defined quality”, “customer satisfaction”, and “consumer sovereignty”. Competitive pressures would weed
out all those businesses which didn’t adapt and make the market lean
and efficient.
Marketing revolutionised business and did bring genuine benefits,
as the concept of “customer defined quality” illustrates. Inventing the
world’s most effective mouse trap may seem like a guaranteed route to
business success. However, sales will depend on your customers agreeing
that yours is indeed a great mouse trap, and their opinions on what a
good mousetrap is –​just as much as its technical performance –​will
have a fundamental bearing on this. If, for example, your customers can’t
condone the idea of killing mice, no amount of technological wizardry
will convince them to buy a lethal trap. The most ineffective humane
alternative will be preferable; will be a better product. Thus, the business
school argument continues, the market has been enhanced and genuinely
democratised.
The Reality of Corporate Marketing
There are three counterarguments to this. First, as we have already noted,
the fiduciary imperative, which requires every corporation to put its
shareholders, not its customers, first shows consumer sovereignty to be
no more than a sleight of hand. Second, it is difficult to square a concern
for customer needs with harmful products like tobacco and junk food.
Can an industry like big tobacco, which knowingly addicts children and
then kills one in two of them, be said to be delivering “customer defined
quality”? Carbonated drinks companies are masterful marketers, but
how can authentic customer satisfaction come complete with diabetes?
18 The Corporate Marketing Machine
According to WHO data 90% of Europeans now die of diseases of
consumption.17
Thinking more widely, how can any genuine concern for our wellbeing have led to a situation where our overconsumption of everything
is destroying the environment on which we depend? Bernays and the
robber barons only ran out of customers; the marketers have run out
of planet. So it turns out that our sovereignty isn’t over matters of any
importance –​our health, or that of the environment for ­example –​but
over whether, at a given moment, we buy a green widget or a yellow
widget; this toxic combination of fat, salt, and sugar or that one. This is
not sovereignty, it is servitude.
Third, if the marketing revolution had really resulted in corporations
producing exactly what people want, rather than force-​feeding them
preprepared stuff, you would expect advertising to reduce in importance.
It could go back to its original job of flagging up cobbling and baking
skills. It would have to do no more than a bit of awareness raising: the
perfectly targeted, bespoke products and services would sell themselves.
In fact the reverse has happened. Advertising expenditure has
increased continuously for over a century,18 untroubled by the apparent
rise to supremacy of consumers. The arrival of the new discipline of
marketing into 1950s America made no dent in the steady increase in
national adspend (from 25 to 300 billion dollars) between 1920 and the
millennium.
At the same time, promotional techniques have multiplied. Mass
media advertising is now just one of many communications tools which
make up what marketers call the “integrated marketing communications
mix”. This is devised and honed to ensure that promotional messages
are coordinated through every possible channel. Supermarket shelves,
tickets, shops, taxis, clothing, bus stops, screens of every type –​every
possible surface is pressed into service. One ad agency even proposed that
their cigarette company client should consider using lasers to project its
logo onto the moon.19
And, of course, the promotional campaigns go way beyond the provision of information, as we will discuss in Chapter 2. Every emotion is
tapped, every instinct triggered, every weakness exploited, and every creative trick pressed into service. These feelings and associations are baked
into the brand –​the personality of the product or company, which is as
powerful as it is difficult to define. How can the UK Advertising Standards
Authority claim to have ensured that advertising has been “legal, decent,
honest and truthful” for the last 50 years? At the most obvious level,
as noted above, how can the promotion of overtly harmful products –​
tobacco, junk food, guns, leaded paint –​qualify for any of these epithets?
How honest are the oil companies when their ads are being deliberately
undermined by their lobbying? How can you even guess at the honesty
Original Sin: The Spawning of Marketing
19
or truthfulness of a brand? Is VW either of these following the emissions
scandal? How honest is Coca-​Cola’s sponsorship of the Olympics?
Furthermore, marketers hunt in packs, and all this promotion is
tightly knitted into the wider business effort. Decisions about product
design, packaging, pricing, and distribution are all subject to the same
careful planning to ensure maximum appeal to us consumers. A cigarette
company, for example, will put a great deal of thought and consumer
research not just into the development of its brand, but also into package
design (to reinforce the brand values such as femininity or independence), price (to reflect our perceptions of quality or value), the product
itself (adding flavours perhaps, or going organic to suit our tastes), and
distribution (in the case of an addictive product like tobacco, this means
ready availability).
Marketers also target their charm at politicians. We have already noted
that the two groups have a shared agenda; that happy consumers tend to
make happy voters. In addition, marketers are well aware that context
matters. That the laws, infrastructure, and political decisions made by
our leaders will have a big impact on their ability to do business. So they
do all they can in the form of lobbying and corporate reputation management to ensure favourable business conditions.
This edifice working tirelessly from the high street to the cabinet office
is corporate marketing, the bastard child of Bernays’ Propaganda. Its
methods are equally unscrupulous; its arrogance just as obvious and its
determination greater than ever. The key task is unchanged: to ensure, at
any cost, that demand continues to outstrip supply; to get us to consume
ever more, however harmful this might be for us and the planet.
The consequences of this madness are being spelled by the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and becoming all too clear to the rest
of us. When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last
stream poisoned, it becomes much easier to see corporate marketing for
the needy confidence play it really is.
Time to Rebel
So the battle lines are drawn up: corporate marketers on one side; people
and the planet on the other. It is time to pick up the gauntlet. Then the
rebellion will proceed with an intelligence gathering mission among the
organised liars of adland.
Chapter 2
Advertising and the Art
of Organised Lying
Before protest there is truth. Before the conditions that make us
abandon beauty for a while, to lift up our voices against that which
insults our dignity, that which oppresses us, that which deprives us of
hope, before all that is truth … You may think of it as the third point
of a triangle, uniting this way and that, heaven and earth, extreme
individualism and extreme socialism. You may also think of it as
something beyond any one side, truer than either, true as the sea, true
as the wind on our faces, true as the peace on the face of a sleeping
child, true as the rose, the storm or the heron in flight.
(Ben Okri 2017)
The Truth About Advertising
We are taught from a very tender age that lying is wrong. The Boy Who
Cried Wolf, Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, Pinocchio –​all hammer home a
message about the importance of honesty. This is serious stuff; the
punishments for lying are severe: the boy is eaten by the wolf, Matilda is
burned to death and, in the original version, Pinocchio is executed. At the
same time, the importance of telling the truth is powerfully reinforced.
Think of the story of the six-​year-​old George Washington who was forgiven for chopping down the cherry tree because he owned up. His honesty easily offset his offence; as his father said, it “was worth more than
a thousand trees”. In adult life, this lesson is further emphasised. Lying
to our partner about anything but the most trivial matters threatens the
relationship. Lying to a friend kills the friendship. Lying under oath is
perjury, one of the most serious crimes we can commit.
We set such great store by the truth because trust is so important to
the human project. Without it we are lost and alone. We depend on our
fellow humans not just for the basic necessities like food and shelter, but
for all that makes life worth living –​company, recognition, friendship.
Without honesty, without truth these perish. As Ben Okri says, truth is
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-4
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
21
there before protest and politics, before outrage and oppression; it is in
the child, the rose, and the heron.
A Good Liar Knows Her Mark
When Orson Welles broadcast his radio production of War of the Worlds
in 1938 the effect was dramatic. Around a million Americans actually
believed that the science-​fiction story was true, and men from Mars were
invading Earth and about to march on New York. The result was widespread public anxiety, panic on the streets, and even deaths in the ensuing
rush to avoid the invaders. The US rules of public broadcasting were
changed for ever as a result.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that the media is extremely
powerful, and the public correspondingly easy to manipulate. A clever
message, it seemed, could persuade anyone of anything. The contemporaneous rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and the central role played
by Goebbels’ infamous Ministry of Propaganda, served to reinforce this
omnipotent reputation. The word propaganda had not yet acquired its
sinister connotations, and as we have already noted, under the guidance
of Edward Bernays, was readily adopted by the growing business of mass
advertising.
The reality has turned out to be more complex than this. Subsequent
research has shown that audiences –​people like us –​are not nearly as
gullible or passive as the Orson Welles story would suggest, nor is mass
persuasion easy. Decades of careful research have shown that we are not
just blank pages onto which advertisers can right their messages, but
active participants in the communication process. We choose what we
attend to –​we have to, otherwise we would drown under the deluge of
ads (some 4–​10,000 a day), let alone other media messages. Of the small
minority we do attend to, we might take them on board or not. Or we
might take bits of them on board, misunderstand or reinterpret them –​
even contradict them. And what are the chances that we will actually do
something as a result? Buy the product or visit the shop?
These effects are all dependent on us. Our current state of awareness,
priorities, concerns, and needs will have a big influence on how we
respond to ads. If my car is starting to fall apart a car ad is far more
likely to get my attention; if I am an insecure teen a cigarette ad might
offer something of interest; if I am in my third week of lockdown Netflix
might find it easier to get my attention.
So the first job of any successful advertiser is to get to know us as well
as possible. To walk a mile in our shoes. To share our worries and fears,
our hopes and dreams. Only when such detailed consumer insights are
in place can the marketer begin to use all the promotional tools at her
disposal. As we will see, these are many –​from billboards to TV ads,
22 The Corporate Marketing Machine
sponsorship to packaging. But only once the understanding is in place,
once they have got under our skin, do these tools become truly effective.
Which brings us back to Mr Welles. He was undoubtedly a very talented communicator and his production was immensely innovative. He
tried to imagine how the media would cover a real alien invasion, and
then painstakingly set about creating this effect. Although a radio theatre
slot, the production began as a concert which was then interrupted with
increasingly alarming news flashes building up the story from Mars. It
was brilliantly original; no one had done such a thing before.
But the real power came from the audience. In 1930s America the radio
was a new and highly respected source of information; its speed of dissemination meant it had displaced the press as the primary channel of urgent
news. At the same time the stock market crash and resulting depression
had shaken belief in capitalism and the American Dream. Fascism was
also on the rise in Europe and Asia, and there was genuine concern of
an invasion of the west coast by Japan (Pearl Harbour was only 3 years
away). So the US population was both trusting and vulnerable. More
specifically, those who tuned in late, and so missed the announcement
that this was a piece of theatre, thought they were listening to a real
concert and were much more likely to be taken in by the phoney news
flashes. They then rang friends advising them to tune in, adding people to
the audience who were already convinced they were listening to a news
broadcast. These two groups drove the panic.
The lesson for advertisers, then, is not that the media is in and of itself
all powerful, but that if you get to know your audience well enough –​
their hang-​ups and vulnerabilities, their aspirations and disappointments,
the times in which they live, who they listen to and believe –​you can sell
them anything. Even little green men from Mars.
Tirelessly Studying Us
Welles’ genius lay in his ability to see his production through the eyes of
his audience. He understood their trust in the radio, their susceptibility
to word of mouth, their insecurity caused by the depression and the rise
of fascism in Europe and especially Japan.
Advertisers, for the most part, do not have Welles’ artistic sensibilities
or skills, so they compensate with research. They interview, watch, and
count us before, during, and after every campaign. A vast “advertising
research” industry has grown up using focus groups, social surveys,
observation, and secondary statistics on what we watch, read, and
attend. This is married with the vast academic literatures from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and even theology which give powerful
insights into human behaviour: why we do what we do, how we give
our lives meaning. But these aren’t social scientists with an enlightened
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
23
intent to understand the world and thereby help make it better; they are
corporate marketers who just want to know how they can get better at
selling us things.
If you want to understand teen smoking, ask a tobacco advertiser; if
your interest is in the challenges and joys of breast feeding speak to a
formula rep; and if the complexities of children’s play intrigue you, contact a toy marketer. Their jobs depend on them fully understanding these
issues in all their intricacy and intimacy, and if they work for a multinational corporation their research resources will be virtually unlimited.
The quest for understanding will also be sustained: Philip Morris has
been studying young smokers for the best part of a century and Danone
is on its third generation of mothers.
Advertising research is actually just a small corner of a burgeoning
field called “consumer behaviour”, about which countless courses are
taught in our business schools and detailed tomes are written. I am
looking at one such now, called “Consumer Psychology for Marketing”
written by a professor which has distilled all that marketers need to know
about the psychology of our behaviour into accessible, bite-​sized, practical lessons. And you thought psychologists all worked tirelessly for our
mental wellbeing?
The research continues throughout the development of the ad campaign to work out what resonates –​the language, images, role models,
moods we use and defer to. It is painstaking and delicate work. Every
element that makes up an ad –​every slogan, character, role model, word,
situation, colour, and sound –​is subject to perpetual and very sensitive
checking. Does it get –​and keep –​our attention? Will we understand it?
Will we relate to it? Above all, how will it make us feel?
These insights provide the footholds for their messages, guide their
design and deployment, and as a result help make them more persuasive.
They also bridge the gap between the marketer and his or her customer,
who typically come from very different backgrounds and life stages. How
else is a 40-​year-​old advertising creative going to be able to sell a new toy
to an eight-​year-​old girl? To tease that whim to a want, to a need, and
thence to a must-​have? Or an affluent non-​smoking tobacco executive
design a brand that resonates with a poor, blue collar smoker? This latter
gulf was brought blinking into the sunlight a few years ago when an RJ
Reynolds executive was asked why he and his colleagues did not smoke
and he answered, on camera and with no apparent sense of shame: “We
don’t smoke this shit, we just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the
young, the poor, the black and the stupid”.1
The task of understanding us is made more complicated because most
advertising does not provide much in the way of facts. There is really
very little new information that Philip Morris can give us about its
cigarettes –​or Mars can tell us about its chocolate bar, or Ford can about
24 The Corporate Marketing Machine
the long-​running Focus. They have been pushing them so intensively for
so long we know them better than we know our bodies or the planet.
The problem for the advertiser, indeed, is that their offerings are all too
familiar –​they need to find ways to intrigue and interest us; to tempt our
jaded palates and tantalise our over-​loaded inclinations to consume.
So with advertising the emphasis from the outset is on persuasion
not information; on us not the product. The message content is devised,
and the product descriptions chosen to maximise persuasive power.
Advertising is not there to inform us, it is there to win us over. Facts
and truth if they are there at all, are chosen for their capacity to seduce.
This dates back to Edward Bernays and the robber barons we discussed
in Chapter 1. Rosser Reeves, a leading advertiser of the time, used to
show new recruits to his ad agency two identical silver dollars and
explain: “Never forget that your job is very simple. It is to make people
think the silver dollar in my left hand is much more desirable than the
silver dollar in my right hand”.2
It is exactly the same today. Sociologist Richard Sennett in the Culture
of the New Capitalism provides multiple examples of how advertisers
manipulate our view of products so that minor differences become greatly
exaggerated –​a process he calls “gold plating”. In this way, he explains, car
manufacturers don’t sell us an engine and four wheels but “the view from
the car window”, and tech firms sell us computing capacity we can never
begin to grasp, let alone harness, because “the dramatization of potential
leads the spectator-​consumer to desire things he cannot fully use”.3
Business academics freely accept this sleight of hand. Product differentiation is essential in a competitive market, so much so that if necessary
it is fabricated. As a business text explains:
preferably this will be achieved through the manufacture of a product
that is physically different in some objective way from the competitive offerings but, if this is not possible, then subjective benefits must
be created through service, advertising and promotional efforts4
(emphasis added).
Just to be completely clear, “creating subjective benefits” means lying.
Of Cowboys and Weasel Words
Tobacco provides the most outrageous illustration of such lying. Before
the disreputable practice was finally banned in the UK, a government
inquiry interrogated a cadre of tobacco advertisers. Their findings began:
This report makes shocking reading. It shows how powerful and cynical marketing campaigns have been used by the tobacco industry to
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
25
encourage people to start and continue smoking … Perhaps most
shocking of all is that this damning evidence comes, not from new
research by the public health community, but from the industry’s
own advertising agencies.5
The language the admen used explain exactly how manipulative “creating subjective benefits” is. The strategy for Marlboro began: “We want
to engage their aspirations and fantasies –​I’d like to be there, do that,
own that” … “the most powerful thing we can say to achieve this?” (the
advertising “proposition”): “escape to Marlboro Country”. The brief
continues: “the best way of supporting this proposition (facts, emotions,
values): Strongly conjure up Marlboro core values: individuality and
freedom and real and America”. Meanwhile, a leading UK brand “needs
an infusion of style, coolness and aspiration. Our objective is to produce
a piece of communications that will boost B & H’s image with style conscious 18–​24’s”.
And the marketers know no shame, as the inquiry noted: “in all these
pages there is not one hint of ethical concern or moral doubt. The naked
pursuit of profit and market share overrides all qualms”.
Marketing Communications
Advertising takes many forms, and business textbooks wrap these up
in the phrase “marketing communications”. What this means is that
marketers will use every possible channel, surface, and device to get
across their message. You can’t log on to your computer, check your rail
ticket, follow sport, or even have a pee without being confronted by yet
another impertinent sales pitch. Thanks to branded clothing we have all
been turned in to walking billboards. Even in the wilds of the Scottish
Highlands you can’t escape the odd bit of product placement in the form
of an empty lager can or discarded crisp packet. They surely do protest
too much.
All these pitches have the same flaky relationship with the truth; that
is no relationship at all.
Sponsorship is a typical example. It works by companies paying money
to sports or cultural events and celebrities in return for marketing opportunities. There are lots of commercial benefits; a leading marketing text
lists five: “gaining publicity”, “creating entertainment opportunities”,
“fostering favourable brand and company associations”, “improving
community relations”, and “creating promotional opportunities”.6 The
great strength of sponsorship is that it operates indirectly or –​to use
the more contentious (but perfectly correct) term –​subliminally. It slips
under our critical radar. The marketer gets the benefits of the sponsee’s
high standing just by being in close proximity with them. It doesn’t need
26 The Corporate Marketing Machine
to make implausible claims about being wholesome or healthy, cool, or
courageous –​an astutely chosen sponsorship will do this by default and
much more convincingly.
An internal document from leading UK brewer discussing its music
sponsorship strategy explains this delicate deception neatly: “Ultimately,
the band are the heroes at the venue and Carling should use them to
‘piggyback’ and engage customers [sic] emotions”.7 The marketing textbook spells it out: “the audience, finding the sponsor’s name, logo and
other symbols threaded through the event, learn to associate sponsor
and activity with one another”. So the beer brand acquires the attractive
qualities of the band –​coolness, modernity, rebelliousness, for ­example –​
qualities they would never plausibly lay direct claim to in a conventional
ad. A slogan like “drink our beer because it will make you look cool” is
doomed to fail. It would also be forbidden by the Advertising Association’s
own rules on alcohol advertising, the side-​stepping of which is another
benefit of sponsorship.
The technical term here is “source effect”. Messages are made more
credible if they come from a respected source. Whilst I may question
the pronouncements a brewery makes about its beer, when the information comes via my favourite musician it becomes much more plausible.
Particularly if I am an insecure teenager. Commercial sponsorship puts
this source effect, this credibility, up for sale to the highest bidder. The
other technical terms which spring to mind are bribery and corruption.
Or just plain old lying. And, as John Ruskin reminds us, the more subtle
and indirect the lie, the more powerful it becomes:
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told
in silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance
of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence; but all of
these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie
plainly worded.8
Advertisers do tell a shed load of lies, but they are rarely plainly
worded.
Olympian Lying
The astonishing reach of this culture of deception is demonstrated by,
of all bodies, the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The Olympic
Games are the ultimate global celebration of humankind coming together.
They recreate one of the noblest aspects of antiquity: the Ancient Greeks
and then the Romans ran the tournament every four years for over a
millennium. As the IOC website celebrates this impressive history and
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
27
enshrines the ethos of the Games in five Fundamental Principles, the first
of which reads:
Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a
balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport
with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life
based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example,
social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical
principles.
What could be more wholesome and uplifting?
Enter the corporate advertisers. Thanks to sports sponsorship, as
the IOC website goes on to explain, the Games are also great global
marketing opportunity. It boasts of how successful this commercialisation of the Olympic ideal has been ever since the modern Olympics began.
It doesn’t explain how the Ancients managed without corporate sponsorship for a thousand years (perhaps the IOC got confused because in the
original games winners’ wreaths were bestowed by Nike, and it mistook
the goddess of Victory for the footwear corporation). The magic money
tree of corporate sponsorship has, it seems, had a spurt of growth in
recent decades with the instigation of the “TOPs” scheme, which enables
an elite group of particularly powerful and wealthy multinationals to buy
“Olympic Partner” status, and with it enhanced marketing privileges.
Coca-​Cola has been exploiting the commercial opportunities of the
Olympic Games since 1928 and became an Olympic Partner 30 years ago.
The IOC is delighted with the arrangement, which has now been extended
until 2032. Its website proclaimed: “THE COCA-​COLA COMPANY
MAINTAINS THE LONGEST CONTINUOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH
THE OLYMPIC MOVEMENT”.9 The announcement continues: “The
company sponsored the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, and has
supported every Olympic Games since. Coca-​Cola refreshes Olympic
athletes, officials and spectators with its beverages during the Olympic
Games”. It makes it sound as if Coca-​Cola has been doing this out of the
kindness of its heart (always supposing the corporation had one).
The IOC then goes on to remind us that: “The Coca-​Cola Company
is the world’s leading manufacturer, marketer and distributor of non-​
alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups used to produce more than
230 brands of products. The company has local operations in over
200 countries around the world”. Why the IOC needs to advertise the
Coca-​Cola Corporation, when the multinational is more than capable
of blowing its own trumpet, is not explained. Nor is any reference made
to the fact that its proficiency in non-​alcoholic beverage production and
marketing makes the Corporation the leading producer of the sugary
28 The Corporate Marketing Machine
sodas that have driven the obesity epidemic out from its HQ in Atlanta
and across the world. Nor how such an unhealthy corporation can be
said to “bring the spirit of the Games to consumers [note, we are no
longer citizens] in Olympic host cities and around the world”.10 Finally,
we should note that in many jurisdictions, such blatant advertising for a
junk food would require a clearly stated government health warning; the
IOC provides none.
From Coke’s perspective the IOC, with its unrivalled global reach and
impeccable sporting image, is the perfect partner. Especially if your core
product is associated with diabetes and obesity rather than health and
fitness.
From the perspective of the IOC’s reputation, this doesn’t look like
such a great deal. The IOC is taking money from the Coca-​Cola corporation in return for an association with its core Olympic values and
imbuing its products with wholly undeserved healthy associations. From
a public health perspective it is also deeply problematic. A third of the
UK population is now clinically obese, and another third overweight.
But the most serious casualty is the truth. A body that is an iconic
global symbol of human decency and cooperation, with a provenance
dating back to Homer, which boasts of its commitment to “combining
in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind … and respect
for universal fundamental ethical principles” is helping promote deeply
unhealthy products in exchange for cash. And it is proud of having done
so for nearly a hundred years.
This same sleight of hand, this same institutionalised dishonesty, runs
through the whole marketing communications mix. It is there with celebrity endorsement and internet influencers when, in exchange for money,
these individuals and organisations, pretend to like a particular product
or company. It is there in product placement when a film studio is paid
by a brewer to have James Bond drink a particular brand of beer to help
push it to credulous teens. It is there when the New York Times sells
its journalists and credibility to Netflix to promote their new series of
“Orange is the New Black” in paid content.11
It feels almost naïve to say it, but this is just lying. It is poisonous. And
the dissembling continues.
Branding: The Crack Cocaine of Organised Lying
All this advertising and marcoms is focused on building and honing the
brand. In the words of the American Marketing Association a brand is
“a name, term, symbol, or combination of them that is designed to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors”.12 However, it has grown into
much more than a simple identifier. Indeed in many ways it has become
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
29
the antithesis of an identifier, in that its principal role is to lull us into a
false sense of security, to deceive us. Joel Bakan points out that the first
brand was developed by the giant US corporation, General Electric, to
try and give a human face to what was in reality a monolithic conglomerate focused on delivering maximum returns to its shareholders and
management. The company approached the task quite literally by using
the couthy photos of their workers in an ad campaign. Since General
Electric’s first foray into this field, the brand has become the crucible of
corporate attempts to win us over. Rather than identifying and clarifying,
it blurs and seeks to possess our souls. In the process it has become a massively successful driver of corporate power.
As a leading business thinker concludes after reviewing the
field: “Branding effects are pervasive and the effects of virtually any
marketing activity seem to be conditioned or qualified by the nature of
the brands involved”.13 In other words, everything the corporate advertiser does can be magnified through the lens of the brand. Furthermore
the many facets of the brand, “names, logos, symbols, slogans, etc., all
have multiple dimensions, which each can produce differential effects on
consumer behaviour”.14 It is the advertiser’s cluster bomb. Not surprisingly, the commentator also confirms that brand equity (the value that
is attributed to a particular marque) has been shown to link directly to
shareholder value.
Forbes puts a price on this power. Its 2020 analysis values the Coke
brand at $64 billion, Marlboro at $27 billion, and L’Oréal, the iconic
“because you’re worth it” beauty marque, at $22.8 billion.15 You may
well not think that any of them are anything like worth it, but it does
demonstrate that a century of organised lying pays handsome dividends.
Mind you, the new kids on the block can give them a run for their
money: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook brands are
together valued at just under $750 billion –​which exceeds the GDP of all
but 20 of the world’s countries.16
Remember these are the values not of the companies, just their brands.
They have acquired their immense worth because of their ability to persuade, to manipulate, and to sell us stuff. The power of the bitten Apple,
the swirly Coke font, or the Marlboro chevron lies in their capacity to
control us: they are the crack cocaine of organised lying.
And still there is more lying.
Advertising Works
If you ask an advertiser whether her advertising works, whether it gets
people to buy the product, her answer will depend on who you are.
(Call it a reverse source effect.) If you are critical journalist or a government official concerned with advertising regulation, the answer will
30 The Corporate Marketing Machine
be a resounding no. The party line trotted out by business schools is
that: “both the empirical evidence and logical deduction offer compelling evidence that marketing communication does not create demand: it
is a response to demand. People buy things because they want them,
not because advertising somehow compels them to purchase”.17 The
variation used by tobacco, fast food, and alcohol execs down the years
in public pronouncements is that advertising simply helps current consumers to choose between brands. It is never explained how they prevent
non-​users, especially children, from seeing or responding to their ads.
Nor how effects on brand choice can be distinguished from those on
product choice. A car ad will surely push a particular brand, but it also,
by default, presents the benefits of driving –​of the “view from the car
window”. And what about iconic products like the iPhone, where the
brand and the product have become one?
On the other hand, if questions about the effectiveness of advertising are
being asked by a client, the answer will be quite different. I have worked a
lot with advertising agencies over the years, and never met a single account
planner or creative director who thought their output had no effect on consumption behaviour. And, contrary to the business school dogma, there are
plenty of studies demonstrating the effect of advertising on demand.
Many of these concern the advertising of tobacco, alcohol, and
fastfood because of the devastating effect these products are having on
public health. They include large scale and long-​term surveys detailing
the impact of particular campaigns have over time. Like the Joe Camel
cartoon character devised by R J Reynolds Tobacco who became more
familiar to kids than Disney.18 There are small-​scale qualitative studies
that enable children to express in their own words how appealing is the
Marlboro Cowboy, or the McDonalds clown. We will discuss these further when we look in more detail at the impact of marketing on children
in Chapter 4, but suffice it to say now there are literally hundreds of
studies that have demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that advertising encourages both initial uptake and continued consumption.
In addition, thanks to litigation and public enquiries there are also
ample internal industry planning documents (such as the creative brief
quoted above) that leave no doubt about the focus on consumption
behaviour. Furthermore, how else would a corporation, driven by the
fiduciary imperative and the need to maximise shareholder returns, justify their vast expenditure on advertising other than by increased sales?
Such is the evidence showing that advertising does what it is intended
to do and drives consumption, that in the case of tobacco governments
around the world have outlawed all marketing communications. The
same data is there for fastfood, alcohol, and infant formula, and logic
dictates the same must be true for all consumer markets. But corporate
marketers continue to deny the effects of advertising beyond brand
Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
31
choice. Not content with lying to us for a hundred years in every possible
medium, they also insist on lying about their lying.
Meanwhile, What About Michael and Morag?
Michael and Morag do not do any advertising research. There are two
reasons for this. First of all their advertising budget is tiny; campaigns
are limited to hand written signs in the shop, word of mouth, and the
reminder of Michael’s white delivery van criss-​crossing the town. There
are no briefs to write, three-​word slogans to concoct, or Olympic sponsorship deals to sign. The second reason Michael and Morag do no advertising research is because they already know their customers extremely
well. They meet us face to face every day. They ask us how we are, and we
ask them. They know when we have difficulties or successes in life. They
congratulate and commiserate as needed. And we reciprocate. Michael
doesn’t need a Director of Marcomms or an ad agency to keep him right,
he has direct experience and innate intelligence to do that –​and if these
fail him, Morag will happily fill the breach.
Nor have team Michael and Morag employed a branding consultancy
to help them appear more human to their customers. We already know
they are human; they are our friends and neighbours. They smile and
welcome us even on a bad day; they go the extra mile if we ask for an
unusual item. They forget things, make mistakes, and tell the same jokes
(well Michael does, Morag just sighs) –​and we like them the more for it.
In short, they are authentic –​genuine people, fellow citizens we can
naturally relate to. It is this authenticity that the corporations are trying
to fake. This is a particularly noxious sort of lie because it messes with
our social relationships and our ability to distinguish the genuine from
the bogus. It undermines our ideas of what it is to be human.
100 Years of Mind Control
We began by recognising the importance of truth to humankind. It
underpins everything of worth, from cherry trees to poetry. This elemental human value has been under siege from corporate advertising for a
hundred years causing immense individual harm. How many have been
bamboozled into addiction or hood-winked into obesity by cowboys
and clowns? How much pollution has “the view from the car window”
caused? How much money has been wasted on “dramatized potential”.
More insidiously, we are continually reminded that there is more,
better, new-​improved stuff to be had, making us continually needy. As
Jeremy Seabrook points out: advertisers are “the keepers of a dangerous
and highly profitable secret”, they know “how to promote a sense of
universal neediness, to set up a wanting without end”.19 An economic
32 The Corporate Marketing Machine
system, built on the myth of perpetual growth, has to have an endless
supply of hungry customers; omnipresent advertising ensures it gets
them. On a philosophical level the relentless sales pitch convinces us that
materialism is the answer. That our problems can be solved by shopping.
That meaning in life is found in a carton.
The harms are also communal. Individualised consumer satisfaction
fragments us, even as our collective consumption harms the planet.
Consider how much unnecessary shopping a hundred years of nuclear
grade lying has generated. Ben Okri’s words which began the chapter talk
of the truth vested in the natural world –​the sea, the rose, the heron in
flight; how much harm have we been induced to do to these wonders by
corporate advertising?
But the most profound damage from this swirling tide of deception is
to the human spirit. These perpetual attempts to trick and hoodwink us
from every conceivable angle toss us between gullibility and cynicism.
Caveat emptor –​let the buyer beware –​has become the watchword of
our era, putting us ever on our guard, ever uncertain. We no longer know
who to trust or what to think. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt warns:
When everyone lies all the time, the result is, not that you believe the
lies, but that nobody believes anything anymore. A people who can’t
believe can’t form opinions: they are deprived, not just of their ability
to act, but also their ability to think and make judgements. With such
people, you can do whatever you want.
And what the corporate marketer wants to do with us is to turn us into
hyperconsumers.
Chapter 3
The Machinery of Marketing
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-​
contained, I stand and look at them long and long … Not one is
dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
(Walt Whitman 1881)1
This has been the time of the finishing off of animals. They are going
away –​their fur and their wild eyes, their voices. Deer leap and leap
in front of the screaming snowmobiles until they leap out of existence.
Hawks circle once or twice above their shattered nests and then they
climb to the stars.
(Hayden Carruth 1994)2
Getting Down to Business
This chapter shows how marketers prod, nudge and trick us into yet
another purchase: another child down the mine, another blow against
nature. It is an astonishing success story for big business: we do buy the
stuff; we do buy into the nonsense. Astonishing because our marketing-​
driven “mania of owning things” offers such pitiful consolation for our
complicity in “the finishing off of animals”.
Once again they start by studying us. All the advertising research we
discussed in Chapter 2 is joined by an avalanche of market research. The
same diverse mix of methods are employed –​opinion polls, focus groups,
observation, telephone surveys, and library searches –​whatever it takes.
The same ologies-​for-​hire. The same anxious-​to-​please business schools.
The same give-​us-​the-​grant-​and-​we’ll-​do-​the-​study academic mercenaries. But now the focus gets much more practical. The concern isn’t just
with hunting down our hopes and dreams as in Adland, but also with
basic questions about our behaviour. What we do, why we do it, and how
this can be influenced.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-5
34 The Corporate Marketing Machine
The whys and wherefores of our “consumer behaviour” are a massive
area of study in business schools. This has generated many complex theories and incomprehensible formulae. There is, for example,
the “Behavioural Perspectives Model”, which generated the “BPM
Contingency Matrix”.3 Or there is the Booz Allen Hamilton Model of
New Product Development which breaks the process down into eight
stages, from “new product strategy” through to “launch”.4 These, along
with countless other ingenious notions, the textbook explains, help with
“understanding complex human behaviours that comprise purchasing
and consuming”.
The obscure language can make this seem high-​minded and cerebral.
But the aim is simply to help marketers to understand and manage our
shopping behaviour, and “the probability of a response (or better still, a
sequence or pattern of behaviour)” as a result of their marketing efforts.
They just want to know how they can sell us more stuff.
Divide and Conquer
The answers will vary from person to person. Indeed if marketing ideas
like consumer sovereignty and customer orientation are taken to their
logical conclusion, each one of us should be getting bespoke offerings.
This is too implausible even for a corporate marketer –​and certainly
uneconomic –​so they compromise by dividing (or “segmenting”) us into
similar types (at least as far as our consumption habits are concerned)
and then choosing particular “target groups” on which to focus.
Again, given the marketers’ rhetoric about consumer orientation and
satisfaction, one might expect the priority target groups to be those with
most need. The textbooks correct this confusion: the marketer’s hunt is
not for the target groups in most need, but ones which are easy to reach,
open to persuasion, and (above all) able to pay. The key concerns are to
identify these people, reach them with persuasive marketing campaigns
and be confident that they will then succumb and buy the product.
The divide and conquer tactics of segmentation and targeting cause
three sets of problems. First they exacerbate inequalities: to those who
have is given more; whilst the have-​nots are ignored. The damaging
effect of this favouritism is illustrated by the Covid-19 vaccine, which
has been sold with such alacrity to the “viable target markets” of the rich
developed world, but barely reached poor countries.
Even within wealthy enclaves like western Europe there is also a big
social cost to segmentation and targeting: it divides us into exclusive
groups. We find ourselves feeling superior because we drive a certain car,
or sneering at someone for buying what we see as a second-​rate clothing
brand. We might hate this condescending tendency, but somehow it
insinuates itself. At the same time we feel left out by the conspicuous
The Machinery of Marketing
35
consumption of others; a little bit of us does envy the corporate CEO his
millions –​why else would we do the lottery?
The second major problem with segmentation and targeting is that it
institutionalises the notion that being able to afford something justifies
its consumption. The ludicrous wealth of CEOs leads seamlessly to Lear
jets; the buying power of us in the global north normalises our crazy
overconsumption. The bank balance pre-​empts moral judgement or intelligent debate.
Third, and most fundamentally, segmentation and targeting hones
the aim of corporate marketers and makes everything they do more
powerful, just as a magnifying glass concentrates the power of sunlight.
And so we shop.
The Product: All Stuff and Nonsense
Having split us into segments, and chosen which to target, corporate
marketers then use three tools to reel us in: the Product (what things are
we likely to buy and how can they be made more attractive); the Price
(how much we are prepared to pay); and the Place (how best to distribute
and present the offer to seal the deal). When combined with the P of
Promotion (all the we discussed in Chapter 2), business texts refer to this
bag of tools affectionately as the “4 Ps”, or the “marketing mix”. It is the
beating heart of the marketing machine.
Arguably the product is what it is all about; this is where the marketing
ends and the focus turns to our real needs. We have done with the sizzle
of advertising, now we are onto the sausage. I’m afraid not. For a start
we don’t really know what we want. As a marketing textbook explains,
prospecting for new products “goes beyond merely asking customers what
they are looking for” it involves “creatively seeking to discover needs that
customers cannot articulate because they are unaware of the possibilities
offered by new technology and the changing environment”.5 “Creatively
seeking to discover” means using in-​depth psychological questions or
“projective techniques” to dig into our psyches and unearth associations,
urges, vulnerabilities that we are barely aware of but may have market
value. This is worth a moment’s pause for reflection. In a finite world,
where the need is to reduce our consumption is becoming ever more
pressing, we have countless teams of corporate marketers devoting their
careers to uncovering “needs” that we don’t even know we have.
This has delivered the ludicrous plenty with which we rich folk are now
surrounded. Tesco, for example, currently lists 273 variations on “crisps,
nuts and popcorn”, 390 different sorts of biscuits, and 440 alternatives
in the category of “cooking sauces and meal kits”, including ones from
Asia, India, and Mexico.6 A bewildering array –​it is hard work being a
consumer.
36 The Corporate Marketing Machine
It is also hard work being a corporate marketer –​the vast majority
(around 80%) of new food products fail. This might evoke pity: who
would want a job where four times out of five your efforts come to
nought? Alternatively, it can be seen as another indication of profligate
waste. Our “needs” are so well pandered to that we yawn like Roman
emperors as yet another tantalising but pointless sweetmeat is dangled
before us, and the marketers rush off to try and find some other means of
piquing our jaded appetites.
New product development is just a fraction of the effort that goes into
product management; most of the corporate marketers’ energy is focused
on bolstering existing offerings. The principal problem here is differentiation. There is such a plethora of stuff out there that it is hard for
the marketer to convince us that their product has any additional tangible benefits to offer –​not least because most of the time they don’t.
As a leading business academic explains: “Comparably priced washing
powders, cars, computers or auditing firms are usually much alike in the
performance they deliver”.7 In a sane world, the solution would be some
form of rationalisation, some sifting of the obvious over provision –​some
move to a less wasteful system. In a corporate marketing world it takes
us to the brand: “consequently, firms must find other ways to differentiate themselves, to create awareness and recall among customers. Hence
they turn to design, colour, logos, packaging, advertising and additional
services”. But the academic warns, “while differentiation creates recognition it does not necessarily create preference”. For this you have to dig
deeper: “increasingly it is the emotional or experience associations that
a successful brand promises that creates customer value”. We are back
to buying hopes and dreams and the potential of brands to influence and
manage these. Bringing us full circle, it also greases the wheels of new
product development: “new products launched under a strong brand
name are more likely to be trusted by consumers and to achieve a faster
market penetration”.
The Silent Salesman
The pack also plays a vital role. As well as its functional purpose –​
protecting the product, keeping it fresh, making it easier to carry and so
on –​it is a powerful marketing tool which helps sell us the product and
reassure us of its value. Think of the iPhone box, which, with all its symbolism of cutting-​edge quality, is almost as alluring as the device itself. Or
the cigarette pack which has become so seductive in recent years that many
governments have moved to ban all the fancy colours, designs, and brand
liveries, and compelled tobacco companies to use the plainest of boxes.
It is no surprise that in the business world the pack is dubbed the
“silent salesman”.
The Machinery of Marketing
37
The Price of Everything
Setting the price of a particular product or service sounds like a straightforward task. You work out what it costs to produce and add on your
profit margin and away you go. Okay, it is a little more complicated
because you need to factor in the expense of telling people about your
offering and getting it to them (or the nearest shop), but again the principle is straightforward enough. However, to the corporate marketer such
“cost plus” thinking completely misses the point; as a leading text book
puts it: “it is not the cost that matters, but the perceived value”8 –​what
we the customers think it is worth. This is not about rational calculation,
it’s about emotional commitment.
On one level this makes sense: if I am spending my own hard-​earned
money I am going to have very definite opinions on what represents good
value, and these will not necessarily align with costs of production. For
instance, Loreal is unlikely to come up with a price for any of its 124
men’s haircare products that I will think is good value even despite the
company’s “ground-​breaking molecular precision technology”,9 because
I don’t give what little hair I have left any real thought. On the other
hand, a bargain price for a new clutch for my defunct car will get my
attention. In neither case does the cost of production really interest me.
On another level, however, pricing things on the basis of what we think
they are worth encourages us to ignore real costs. If we don’t know how
much was spent making our new phone, the mark-​up remains a mystery
and we can’t judge whether the price is reasonable. We also remain in the
dark about how others are being rewarded in the transaction: the person
who made the phone or dug up the conflict minerals. We have no idea
about potential exploitation and our role in it.
More fundamentally, it is an inability to recognise the broader costs of
our consumption that is driving our unsustainable lifestyles and climate
breakdown. We drive our SUVs, take long-​haul holidays, and live on our
phones because we manage to forget about the pollution being caused
and the energy being used. Pricing built around our perceptions actively
encourages this short-​sighted selfishness. It promotes the sort of behaviour we try to combat in five-​year-​olds: I want an ice cream now! (regardless of how far daddy has to drive to get it, the fact that the shop is shut
or that it is made from union-​busting pineapples). But for the corporate
marketer none of this matters: just so long as we keep on shopping and
don’t start behaving like adults.
This way of pricing things, then, should more properly be called
“spoilt brat” pricing. Marketers, however, prefer the term “market” or
“consumer oriented pricing”, which has their familiar glister of seeming
democracy; we can determine what we pay for our new car or washing
machine. But as we have noted, corporations are not democratic, and
38 The Corporate Marketing Machine
in marketing, as in Shakespeare, all that glisters is not gold. Problems
emerge for two reasons, both now familiar to us. First the corporation
is driven by the need to increase shareholder value, not our value. Our
desire for cheapness, for instance, will only be entertained provided it
contributes to corporate growth.
The second problem comes with the all-​important qualifying term
perceived value. Perceptions can be adjusted and managed; we are back
with Rosser Reeves making one silver dollar seem more desirable than
the other. Robert Cialdini’s book Influence10 shows how easy it was for
him to do this because we have developed psychological short-​cuts to
cope with a world packed with too many decisions (not least thanks to
corporate marketers).
Thus car sales staff know we are more likely to purchase extras once
we have made the much bigger commitment to buy the car, because of
the “contrast principle” which makes the radio or alloy wheels seem such
trivial decisions. Similarly the famous “reassuringly expensive” ad campaign for Stella Artois lager builds on the knowledge that we will actually
buy some products more readily if the price is higher, because we have
learnt to associate expense with quality (the “consistency principle”) and
can be tricked into using the heuristic when it doesn’t apply. Cialdini
identifies five other psychological drivers, and shows how, what he terms,
the “compliance professionals” exploit these with numerous examples,
most of which have a queasy resonance to them. Just last Saturday I fell
for the “reciprocation principle” after I accepted a free sample of expensive ham at the local market and then felt obliged to buy a whole joint.
And I’ve read Cialdini’s book; I should have been fore-​armed.
So spoilt child pricing doesn’t even work for us spoilt children.
Beware of the BOGOF
Corporate marketers populate this hazy perceptual space with a vast
array of sales promotions. One comprehensive text11 lists no fewer than
20 variations on the theme, including discounts, competitions, free
samples, money-​off coupons, loyalty cards, and cashback offers. The
multifaceted nature of sales promotion and its deployment in so many
outlets makes it difficult to estimate expenditure, but sales promotion is a
massive business, far outweighing all the marketing communications we
discussed in Chapter 2.
The BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free), along with similar multi-​buy
offers, is one of the most common types of sales promotion. Marketers
wax lyrical about the power of “free”: we are all programmed to look for
downsides in any transaction; but when something is free there is, seemingly, no downside. There are in fact many drawbacks to free –​not least
that in the world of corporate marketing it is as mythical as the unicorn.
The Machinery of Marketing
39
Newton’s Third Law of Motion is every action has a reaction; the first
law of sales promotion is every pitch has a payback.
We know this to be the case; we know there is no such thing as a free
lunch. That the free sample pulls us into the purchase and the “free”
extra bag of kettle crisps comes at the cost of our diet. That a third of the
fresh fruit and veg we buy ends up being thrown away because we have
bought too much. And yet the power of free holds us in thrall, and the
corporate marketer uses the BOGOF to exploit it.
It needs some careful handling though. The danger for the marketer is
that the promotion simply telescopes our shopping; we buy two today
and none tomorrow, rather than paying the full price two days running.
In the jargon of retailing, the promotion is “mortgaging future sales”. The
best bet from the marketers’ perspective is therefore to go for products
with “elastic consumption”, that is, ones we will use up as fast as we buy
them –​or at least faster than we would if we were to buy them one at a
time. Non-​essentials such as cakes, biscuits, soft drinks, and alcohol are
good examples; mundane necessaries like cleaning products are much
less elastic. If a promotion encourages us to double our purchase of toilet
rolls in our weekly shop the chances are that we will simply leave them
off the list the following week. If it’s a chocolate biscuit or beer promotion, on the other hand, we will just eat and drink twice as much and buy
again next week.
A Place for Everything
Sales promotions owe their power to the fact that they come into play in
the shop just as we are choosing what to buy, and very often we do this
impulsively, without prior thought or consideration. Apparently 85% of
us are, at least on occasion, impulse purchasers –​and extensive market
research has identified the “key situational factors” “such as the store
atmosphere and display, product novelty and attraction, and the price
promotion”12 that can trigger this profitable inclination. Cialdini draws
a comparison with jujitsu: mimicking the martial art, the “compliance
professional”, he explains, uses our own weaknesses against us; the sales
promotion takes this power to scale. And it works: promotions have been
shown to increase our “spontaneous” buying by between 2 and 65%.
Again it is worth pausing to think about these figures: these are purchases
we didn’t mean to make, carbon we wouldn’t have burnt, if it weren’t
for some marketing novelty messing with our perceptions of value. So
we end up with more stuff, and forget to question the stupidity of it all.
In-​store display, labelling and shelf facia each also play key roles in the
ceaseless fight to stimulate our shopping. Nothing is left to chance. As we
have already noted, a standard supermarket in a country like the UK will
offer us some 40,000 different products. It takes more than 11 hours just
40 The Corporate Marketing Machine
to count to 40,000, and heaven knows how long to work out what that
number of different items are and appraise their qualities. “Slotting fees”
are paid by producers to get prime shelf locations: being on the main drag
of a supermarket, as opposed to a side aisle, can deliver a 400% increase
in sales.13 Again this is worth thinking about: we will buy four times as
much stuff just because it is on a different shelf.
An extremely technical paper in the world-​leading and highly academic
Journal of Marketing (JoM) explains how careful eye-​tracking studies
are conducted to find out exactly what we look at and attend to.14 The
authors confirm how fickle and superficial we are: “a majority of brand
choice decisions are made inside the store, yet consumers only evaluate a
fraction of the products available”. In a sane world this lack of consideration about a behaviour that is destroying our planet would be a cause
for deep concern, but for the corporate marketer it’s an opportunity. The
JoM article continues: “In this context, improved attention through in-​
store marketing activity should strongly influence consumer behavior at
the point of purchase, and our results show that this is indeed the case”
adding, with a note of regret, “but only to a certain extent”. The authors
then suggest ways in which this unfortunate imperfection can be ironed
out and our shopping behaviour properly managed to maximise sales.
In similar vein a UK marketing textbook explains that “models have
been developed to allocate display space”.15 It seems some items are
“space elastic”, “with sales increases in response to higher allocation
of space, others are not”. Care is therefore taken to study our behaviour in great detail so as to “allocate space to yield the best returns”,
always allowing for “direct product profitability”, “estimates of shelf
replenishment/​frequency costs”, and of course, impact on the “image
of the store”. As a consequence, a whole body of market research
has grown up on what are termed “retail atmospherics”: how music,
colours, and even scents can be used to affect our mood states and
hence shopping behaviour –​an influence “that often operates at the
subconscious level”.
Convenience Shopping
Corporate marketers also think carefully about distribution, and again
the purpose is to encourage us to buy and this will vary by target group.
A smoker can tell you where she can get cigarettes at any time of the day
or night. Tobacco companies understand that an addictive habit needs
constant feeding, so deliberately distribute their products as widely as
possible. Coke has traditionally adopted a similar approach –​in the
1980s it famously had a one-​line marketing strategy: to put a can of its
sugar-​water within arm’s reach of everyone on the planet. Other corporate marketers adopt a more bespoke policy and deliberately keep their
The Machinery of Marketing
41
outlets exclusive: Porsche want their showrooms to be select rather than
commonplace and airlines reserve their business lounges for a chosen few.
The two sets of strategies are completely different, but the objectives
are the same: to keep us shopping.
Back to the Brand
As with marcomms, all this jiggery-​
pokery with the marketing mix
comes together in the brand. “Today, marketing professionals prefer
to talk about brands rather than products. This reflects the recognition
that consumers do not buy just physical attributes, but also the psychological associations associated with a supplier’s offer”. All in our best
interests of course: “choice today is difficult for customers because of
the myriad competitors seeking patronage”.16 (In other words, as with
in-​store entrapment, corporate marketers are desperate to sell us so much
stuff they have had to invent branding to help us cope with the resulting
bedlam.) Hence a pair of generic trainers multiplies in value once it
acquires the Nike swoosh; Marlboro cigarettes can command a premium
and Heinz beans are well worth the extra cost.
So what is the problem? Surely value is being created and shared by
both the customer and the marketer? We don’t just get a pair of shoes we
also get a guarantee of quality, a stylish accessory, a fashion statement,
and a boost to our confidence. What is more this added value is seemingly planet-​friendly: the carbon footprint of a Nike Airmax is not going
to differ much from that of a generic trainer.
The problem is consumption; branding begets buying –​our buying –​
and does so in three dubious ways. First, the additional emotional benefits
it seems to offer give us more reasons to shop (“seems to” because there
is no evidence that buying stuff makes us happy). Second, emotional
benefits are much more fleeting than physical ones; a shoe’s capacity to
keep our feet comfortable can last for years –​it is only a cool fashion
statement for a season. So, while the brand may be long-​lived, it builds
obsolescence into the product. Finally, all this is under the control of
corporate marketers, who deploy everything from celebrity link-​ups to
cool in-​store promotions to build and hone brand image, and they, as
always, have a single-​minded focus on selling us more stuff. From their
perspective that built-​in obsolescence is a glorious opportunity, and our
vulnerability a fruitful sales territory.
Michael and Morag Run a Simpler Ship
Meanwhile back at Michael and Morag’s greengrocery things are
more straightforward. The local population is segmented into just two
groups: those who come into the shop, and those who don’t. The product
42 The Corporate Marketing Machine
is arranged on boxes outside and inside the shop. I am pretty sure no
one has ever paid a slotting fee (anyway there is only one aisle). Prices
are chalked up, handwritten, or forgotten (resulting in feverish checking
of wholesaler invoices). The nearest I’ve ever come to BOGOF is the
odd double-​yoked egg; but this seems to be completely random –​not
part of some ingenious marketing strategy. So not much evidence of sales
promotion here. However, there is one selling technique that Michael
and Morag deploy that the big boys can’t compete with: in the growing
season, allotment owners can try their hand at bartering.
And then there is the brand strategy. Overseeing and guiding this well-​
oiled marketing machine, Michael has his own special brand of humour,
which Morag manages with sensitivity, charm, and the meaningful
raising of eyebrows.
Buying More and Buying In
The clue is in the word “brand”. It started with cattle and cowboys as a
way of confirming ownership. Its modern meaning is much the same: we
are chased down and corralled by corporate marketers; fed and cherished
supposedly in our own interests, but actually in theirs. Okay we demand
more than a bit of fenced off prairie and some hay; we want comfort,
respect, and meaning. The corporate marketers understand this; they
study our needs carefully. They flag up their bogus concern for our welfare with advertising and insincere cries of consumer sovereignty, then
they draw us into the corral with appealing products, seductive packs,
and tempting prices. The corral itself is designed to engage us more
deeply, keeping us consuming, seeking contentment through the acquisition of ever more stuff. And from our Nike trainers to our Loreal haircare we, like the longhorns of Wyoming, wear their brands. The only
difference is that the cows had to be lassoed and wrestled to the ground
before they would submit to this indignity; we pay for the privilege.
This brings us to the most disturbing part of the story. The fact that
we are conned into buying too much stuff, or products that are individually harmful, is sad. But arguably, at least to some extent, it is our own
sorry, over-​privileged fault. The people of Cuba aren’t foxed into over
filling their shopping trolly because there simply isn’t that much stuff
on the Island; the men of Burkina Faso won’t be swithering between
124 types of haircare anytime soon –​most of them are still waiting for
drinking water. The really alarming issue is that we are being so successfully recruited into such a toxic system: the me, me, me culture; the
profit before planet economy; the myth of perpetual growth. We don’t
just buy the stuff, we also buy into the nonsense. Corporate marketers are
turning us not just into loyal customers but devoted collaborators. This is
The Machinery of Marketing
43
bad news for us, but as Hayden Carruth warns, it is worse news for the
planet. His essay about animals concludes
I have lived with them fifty years, we have lived with them fifty
million years, and now they are going, almost gone. I don’t know if
the animals are capable of reproach. But clearly they do not bother
to say good-​bye.
Such foolishness takes time to instil, so corporate marketers pay particular attention to children.
Chapter 4
Grooming the Next Generation
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-​yard when barley is scattering,
Out came the children running.
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after,
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
(Robert Browning)
Innocence Is so Profitable
The problem is that children are extremely important to corporate profits.
From an early age they have their own pocket money to spend: this starts
flowing as early as their first birthday and collectively builds to a very
substantial market –​in the UK, for instance, it’s worth nearly £3 billion
a year.1 Children also influence parental spending, not just through their
“pester power”, but because parents consult them on family purchases
like cars and holidays. Most importantly children offer the promise of
immense long-​term returns. They are just setting out on a lifetime of
shopping, so for the corporate marketer it is vital to instil the correct
habits and loyalties. In the cash book, as in life, they are the future.
Business textbooks explain all this with chilling clarity. Remember
“Consumer Psychology for Marketers”, which we consulted in Chapter 2?
It tells us that: “Children are important to marketers for three fundamental reasons:
1
2
They represent a large market in themselves because they have their
own money to spend.
They influence their parents’ selection of products and brands.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-6
Grooming the Next Generation
3
45
They will grow up to be consumers of everything; hence marketers
need to start building up their brand consciousness and loyalty as
early as possible”.2
It all works, as Aldous Huxley explains in Brave New World,
not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear
holes in the hardest granite; rather drops of liquid sealing-​
wax,
drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they
fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob. Till at last the
child’s mind is these suggestions and the sum of these suggestions is
the child’s mind.3
It is troubling indeed when business textbooks and dystopic science
fiction are in such close accord. It raises profound questions about why
we have allowed this obvious injustice to prevail. Perhaps it is because
we too have gone through the corporate marketers’ machine and so the
whole shocking charade has ceased to alarm us. Huxley words continue: “And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too –​all his life
long. The mind that judges and desires and decides –​made up of these
suggestions”. The commercialisation of childhood has become so familiar
to us adults that it seems routine, commonplace. Almost more shocking
than the exploitation, is that it has become so completely normal.
To bring about this disturbing turn of events marketers set to work
early and target children throughout their development: babies, toddlers,
tweens, and teens are all in their crosshairs.
Marketing to Babies
For many mothers-​to-​be the first official recognition of her condition will
come not from a gynaecologist or prenatal nurse, but from an infant formula marketer. A recent study4 shows a post on Facebook about buying
folic acid supplements or missing a period, and your details are captured.
Sign up to a manufacturer’s Baby Club or ring their helpline, they’ve got
you. Then “you step into a series of emails that are timed to your stage
of pregnancy”. What may seem like an objective source of help (brand
names are kept deliberately low key) is straight marketing: as a former
marketer explains, companies have “very good evidence to show that if a
woman is in the [baby club], if a woman has called the [telephone advice
line], there is a significant correlation with her ultimately buying [corporation name’s] products”. So “The first key moment [of pregnancy]”, “the
departure point”, is “really not addressed by anybody except the brands”.
And “first time mothers are the holy grail” because “how a woman feeds
her first baby is how she is likely to feed her subsequent babies”.5
46 The Corporate Marketing Machine
But formula, as the companies all agree, is markedly inferior to breast
milk. Most obviously, it does not provide the antibodies which enable
the mother to pass on her hard-​won immunities to the baby.6 As well
as optimal nutrition, breast milk provides custom-​designed preventive
medicines. This quality gap has an enormous impact: a WHO review7
published recently in the Lancet shows that if all babies were optimally
breastfed over 823,000 infant lives would be saved every year. If we think
from the baby’s perspective, then, instead of the company’s, the only justification for using formula is when the real alternative is unavailable.
These circumstances do occur and formula fulfils an important role;
it can be a lifesaver –​but the industry’s assiduous marketing from the
earliest point in the parent’s journey means it is used way more often than
is necessary or desirable.
Believe it or not, though, the formula marketers are actually slow off
the mark in the game of corporate influence, as an epigeneticist at WHO
explained to me. His job, he said, is to study the short-​term effects of
genetic makeup on our health and wellbeing. Whilst our genetic code
changes very slowly, he elaborated, the (epi-​genetic) switches that make
it function are more malleable. So a child born to parents who eat a lot
of junk food will enter the world with an established liking for foods high
in fat, salt, and sugar. If they are then bottle fed (another ultra-​processed
food) and move onto a diet like their parents’, these tastes will be further
reinforced. Epigenetic mechanisms hardwire these developments, pre-​
programming future weight problems. So he concluded: “by age ten it
is game-​over”.
Marketing to Toddlers
By age ten the average child has not even fully worked out what an
advert is. A 5-​year-​old struggles to distinguish a TV commercial from a
programme. They have no idea that the message it contains is innately
deceitful; that it will tell you all the good things about a toy, but none
of the downsides. Nor that their new toy is actually connected to the
internet, as is the virtual assistant (aka a marketer’s bugging device)
in their bedroom, and is busy betraying their secrets to the corporate
marketers. The brand, with its emotional short-​circuits, is completely
beyond their comprehension; they are sitting ducks.
In chapter 2 we met Joe Camel, the RJR tobacco company’s cartoon
mascot so beloved by pre-schoolers. A sister study to the one which
revealed its paediatric appeal, also showed that the campaign worked
better on children than it did on adults.8 Similarly, a more recent investigation in California among 3–​5-​year-​olds showed that children’s food
preferences are being moulded by branding even before they have learnt
to tie their shoelaces.9 The children were served food in both branded
Grooming the Next Generation
47
and unbranded packaging. Items that came in McDonald’s wrappers
were thought to taste better, even if they were foods like carrots, which
McDonald’s didn’t sell. On the other hand McDonald’s products didn’t
taste as good without the liveried packaging. These effects were apparent
across the group, but most marked amongst those who had been more
exposed to McDonald’s and its advertising. These same toddlers will also
be exposed to the marketing for the Olympics-​sponsoring brown sugar
water, which calls itself “bottled happiness”, and countless other junk
foods and sugary drinks.
Why do we continue to allow this sort of exploitative marketing? In
the UK more than 6 in 10 adults are now overweight or obese, making it
the fattest country in Europe, and the second fattest in the world. Around
30,000 die each year as a result.10 And yet the marketing continues; it is
as if we want our kids to follow us down this disastrous road.
Marketing to Tweens
The toddler has barely drawn a breath before the marketer has tagged
them as a “tween” (“a child between middle childhood and adolescence,
usually between 8 and 12 years old”11) and lined them up for more
organised lying, more unnecessary and undesirable consumption. In the
case of girls, the beauty industry is a particularly enthusiastic player. Take
a look online at industry websites and think about the promises being
made about beauty and eternal youth, be it Gavinchy’s perfume making
“you look irresistible today”,12 Max Factor’s colour correcting cream
which ensures that you are “perfected” and can make your “glamour
statement everyday”,13 or Oil of Olay’s “Total Effects Fragrance Free
Anti-​Aging Moisturizer” “Developed by Olay skin experts to give you
younger-​
looking skin … delivers 7 anti-​
aging benefits in 1 formula”
which “visibly smoothes fine lines and wrinkles, instantly evens skin tone
appearance, smoothes and evens skin texture and instantly reduces the
look of age spots”.14
Adults are vulnerable enough to this sort of self-​indulgent guff, but
how much more so are children? This has not escaped the notice of the
corporate marketer –​take a look, for instance, at 25 Best Makeup &
Beauty Products for Teens 2020,15 or Best Starter Makeup for Tweens.16
The latter site does a clever job of easing any parental qualms about
encouraging 8-​year-​olds to start using adult makeup:
It seems impossible to me that my sweet baby girl, who not long
ago was playing princess dress up, is now interested in wearing
makeup. For real this time! Not the “let’s dress up and pretend”
kind of makeup, but the actual LEAVE THE HOUSE wearing it kind
of thing. It has now come time to look into finding the best starter
48 The Corporate Marketing Machine
makeup for tweens. Now, to me this seemed like another version of
“dress up”.
It’s a little hard to see your daughter go from “child” to “teen”
with one sweep of a mascara wand … Despite the initial shock, I also
admit that this has the potential to be fun! I’ve always loved makeup.
And so they are pulled in after us. Into a lifestyle that involves getting up
half an hour early every day to “put your face on”; makes it difficult to
meet the world without a mask and locks you into spending a small fortune on equipment and chemicals for the rest of your days. One estimate
is that users will spend an average of £22,000 on cosmetics during their
lives.17 Why do we allow this to happen?
Marketing to Teens
Despite the perpetual fawning and flimflam of the corporate marketer,
the duplicities of the commercial world do gradually come into focus
and by the time their teens begin the young have learnt to mistrust
Wall Street. But then their hormones get going, insecurities break out
along with the acne, and glib solutions to life’s challenges seem convincing. The Lynx effect, the Marlboro Cowboy, the bottled happiness
offer solutions that in a year or two will seem farcical, but when lost
in teenage angst are all too tempting. Remember this isn’t just about
advertising, but the whole marketing machine. The studying of our
every move and intention. The product design, the distribution, the
shop displays, the price promotions, the packaging –​all honed to
entrap. This real-​world campaigning is bolstered with multiple online
equivalents, and all these snares are encapsulated and boosted in
the brand.
The teenage years are, as every parent knows, about trying to construct an independent identity and fit into the adult world. It is a precarious and agonising process; a time of great insecurity. Unfortunately,
corporate marketers are also well aware of this, having, as usual, done
screeds of research to understand every step of a child’s journey. Not,
of course, because they have any concern for the youngster’s wellbeing;
their attention is as always, focused on the bottom line and teenage vulnerability offers profitable opportunities. In particular the brand, with
its ready-made emotional supports, its evident acceptance, its coolness
and celebrity connections can offer the insecure adolescent short-​cuts and
props. All synthetic, but looking oh so authentic. As the old quip goes,
once you can fake authenticity you’ve cracked it.
Tobacco is the time-​
honoured example here, as we discussed in
Chapter 2, and so blatant have the industry’s corporate marketers been
that many countries, including the UK, have banned them from marketing
Grooming the Next Generation
49
altogether. As we will discuss below this has played a great role in helping
children turn their backs on tobacco.
Turning Beer into Social Glue
But it is the exception that proves the rule; in almost every other product
field the emotional manipulation continues unabated. A campaign for
UK beer brand Carling, uncovered by a government enquiry,18 shows
exactly the same exploitative approach. The campaign built, as usual, on
research with the target market (teens and young men) which revealed
that they are anxious about socialising and being able to gel with their
peer group. In the words of the ad agency PowerPoint entitled “From
Leadership To Dominance”, the “Consumer Insight” is that “Young
drinkers live, think and drink together in packs” (illustrated with a picture of a wolfpack). This led, in the same presentation, to what was called
the “Category Insight” that: “to own sociability is to dominate the booze
market”. More specifically: “Carling celebrates, initiates and promotes
the togetherness of the pack, their passions and their pint because Carling
understands that things are better together”. It calls on the target group
to “Join Us” because Carling is the point “When I Becomes We” and so
can “Invite the Individual Into The Group”.
Sponsorship, with its short-​
cuts and duplicities, offers one way to
“own sociability”:
currently Carling has two very specific routes to sociability, through
the brand’s association with football and music. A dominant brand
goes further. Carling can own all routes to sociability: football, music
and everything else that brings the lads together. In short, Carling can
position itself as social glue.
Another document gloats about how close the alcohol multinational is
to succeeding: “They [young men] think about 4 things, we brew 1 and
sponsor 2 of them”.
The campaign culminated in a beautifully produced cinema commercial featuring a flock of starlings swooping to a compelling and well-​
known soundtrack; the birds gradually come together to reveal the word
“BELONG” in a design mimicking the Carling logo. It is extremely
powerful.
This is worth a little reflection: having worked out that teenage boys
and young men are lacking in social confidence, the company decides to
exploit this weakness for profit by selling them a psychoactive, addictive
drug –​and they do this by buying the complicity of sporting and cultural
icons. And all this is done with immense skill and subtlety to get under
any critical radar. It reveals an extremely adept understanding of both
50 The Corporate Marketing Machine
adolescence and consumer behaviour; the team in question must have
studied “Consumer Psychology for Marketers” very well. It also provides
an evocative glimpse of brand-​building in action. An additional point
on that slide presentation is the “brand insight”: “Carling is Britain’s
most sociable, most sessionable pint”. The strategy personified: a brand
constructed out of youth insecurity.
Again we are letting our children be pulled willy-​nilly into a hazardous
market. WHO data shows that alcohol kills 3 million people a year, despite half the world’s population being tee total, and that it is particularly dangerous for the young –​13.5% of deaths among 20–​39-​year-​olds
are caused by alcohol.19 This is not to argue against new generations
drinking alcohol; in many countries, like the UK, it is and will continue to be the norm for adults and they have to start somewhere. It just
begs the question why do we leave their induction into this potentially
very dangerous behaviour to a posse of manipulative marketers whose
overwhelming priority is to maximise their profits.
A Culture of Consumption
There is a mass of scientific evidence showing that the marketing of
hazardous products like tobacco, alcohol, and ultra-​processed food to
children works. That, as common sense would suggest, the multimillion
pound campaigns do encourage the young and innocent to smoke, drink,
and eat junk.20 We also know it is causing obvious and immense harm –​
cancers, diabetes, heart disease are all driven by our consumption habits,
and as we have already noted most of us now die from these lifestyle
illnesses.
But the dangers our children face go way beyond individual products,
however hazardous and cunningly promoted. The totality of marketing,
of a system devised to scan and understand all our desires –​physical, emotional, even spiritual –​and then deliver to them with material possessions
is corrosive for all of us. It makes us selfish, needy, and shallow. For our
children it is doubly so. We want them to outgrow selfishness, to become
less egocentric, to share, to learn, to think of others. And yet we expose
them to a tsunami of marketing designed to do exactly the reverse.
The philosopher David Foster Wallace tells a story about two young
fish who are swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish
swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys,
how’s the water?” And the two young fish reply “It is lovely thank you”.
They swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and
asks: “What the heck is water?”21 It is like that with marketing to children; they are swimming in a constant stream of commercial persuasion
about which they have little knowledge or understanding.
Grooming the Next Generation
51
Foster Wallace22 also reminds us that we have a natural tendency to
see the world in an egocentric way. What we see, hear, understand, and
experience is filtered through our own senses –​through what he calls the
“lens of self”; everyone else’s views and experiences come to us second
hand; they have to be passed on to us. This creates a default position of
perceiving everything as revolving around ourselves. He goes on to highlight the dangers of this perspective. When things go wrong –​the train
doesn’t arrive or the computer crashes –​we take it as a personal affront,
and give no allowance to the fact that other perfectly legitimate –​indeed
more important –​priorities than our own might exist.
Buddhists agree with Wallace about the dangers of such an egocentric
perspective, and the need to avoid it: “to conquer oneself is a greater victory than to conquer thousands in a battle”.23 The alternative, Wallace
warns, is fruitless and self-​destructive: “worship your own body and
beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time
and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally
plant you”.24 Think for a minute how the cosmetics marketer ignores
these stark warnings.
It is hard to determine what the precise effects on our children are
of “swimming in marketing” partly because it is all so normalised, that
people have stopped asking. But there is also a technical obstacle: a robust
study would need to draw comparisons with control groups of children
who have not been subject to constant stream of marketing –​and these
simply don’t exist.
The UK Government tip-​toed into this space a decade ago when it
commissioned the Bailey Review, which resulted in a report called
“Letting Children be Children”. It concluded that thinking was divided
into two contrasting positions: on the one hand “that we can try to keep
children wholly innocent and unknowing until they are adults” and on
the other “we should accept the world for what it is and simply give children the tools to understand it and navigate their way through it better”.
The naïve versus the jaundiced.
Playing in Traffic
One argument that is sometimes used to justify this disturbing state of
affairs, to excuse advertising and marketing to children, is that each new
generation needs to learn about the ways of the commercial world. They
will have to navigate them when they grow up –​when, in the textbook’s
words, they become “the consumers of everything” –​so better they start
learning early. Academics call this “consumer socialisation” and define it
as the “processes by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and
attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace”.25
52 The Corporate Marketing Machine
It has triggered much study, and it is this work that has confirmed that
younger children don’t understand marketing, and older ones remain vulnerable to it.
There are two problems with consumer socialisation. The first is a
matter of process. That children need to learn about commerce, capitalism and how markets work is a valid point; that they should learn
about it by being directly and continuously exposed to its risks is much
more questionable. It is like teaching road safety by letting children
play in the traffic. Yes of course they should learn about our economic
system, not least about its increasingly apparent tendency to wreck our
planet –​but they should do so in the home and the classroom not the
shopping mall.
The second concern is a matter of outcome. The implicit assumption
underpinning consumer socialisation is that we actually want our children to grow up like us, to become proficient shoppers and develop into
“the consumers of everything”. Surely at this time in history, when UN
Scientists have given us just 12 (now 10) years to act before climate breakdown becomes unstoppable, this is not what is required? When by “act”
they mean cut emissions by half and reach zero carbon by the 2050,
which, they add, “requires nothing less than a total and rapid reversal of
our present direction as a civilisation” the last thing we need is another
cohort of SUV-​loving, stuff-​hoarding shopaholics consuming way beyond
the earth’s natural resources. What we should be seeking instead are new
ideas and different ways of living.
An Older Wisdom
Or maybe we should start with older ideas and ways. The Carling
marketing team’s reference to the wolf brings to mind a Cherokee folk
tale. An old man is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on
inside me”, he says to the boy.
It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil –​he is
anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-​pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-​doubt, and ego.
The other is good –​he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility,
kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and
faith. This same fight is going on inside you –​and inside every other
person, too.
The grandson thinks for a minute and then asks his grandfather “Which
wolf will win?”. The old man replies: “The one you feed”.26
We are teaching our children to feed the wrong wolf.
Grooming the Next Generation
53
A Younger Wisdom
Fortunately, not all our children have been feeding the wrong wolf.
Experience from tobacco proves that, given some relief from the incessant marketing, new generations will nourish the right one. In the UK
over the last 20 years robust action has been taken to eliminate tobacco
marketing. Advertising, sponsorship, in-​shop displays, and all types of
promotion for cigarettes and other tobacco products have been systematically banned. The packs have been stripped of their branding and
covered in stark health warnings, and taxes have made prices prohibitive. Over the same period we have moved from a position where our
teenagers were familiar with the imagery of multiple tobacco brands to
one where they can’t even name one –​and teen smoking has fallen off a
cliff. So when they are defended from the corporate marketers, our children can make sensible, progressive decisions.
And, like the children of Hamlyn, our young people are beginning to
see through adult deceit on a much wider scale; they are demanding and
pursuing change. Despite the remorseless corporate marketing and the
materialistic creed of the adult world, the Greta Thunberg generation
has arisen. Here the Swedish teenager explains how she convinced her
parents of the need for action:
They just told me everything will be all right. That didn’t help, of
course, but it was good to talk. And then I kept on going, talking
about this all the time and showing my parents pictures, graphs and
films, articles and reports. And, after a while, they started listening
to what I actually said. That’s when I kind of realised I could make
a difference.
And her father corroborates her success: “Over the years, I ran out
of arguments. She kept showing us documentaries, and we read books
together. Before that, I really didn’t have a clue. I thought we had the climate issue sorted”, he says. “She changed us and now she is changing a
great many other people”.27
Thunberg has been equally forceful with the UN: “People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales about eternal
economic growth. How dare you!”28 There is a wonderful irony in a
child telling some of the most powerful adults on earth to stop believing
in fairy tales.
Impressive though she is, Thunberg is not an exception. As Danielle
Lawson, the author of a recent study looking specifically at children’s
ability to mobilise their parents about climate, explains:
54 The Corporate Marketing Machine
There’s a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their
parents’ behaviour and positions on environmental and social issues,
but this is the first experimental study demonstrating that climate
education for children promotes parental concern about climate
change.29
Experience from tobacco also underlines the power of children to bring
about change for the better. During the push to regulate its marketing,
the tobacco industry put up a massive rear-​guard action. Every ploy was
used to delay, block, and undermine each new measure. When advertising was banned, displays in shops suddenly became ever more elaborate –​so they in turn had to be regulated. When the fancy shelving
units were outlawed, the pack itself became a powerful marketing tool,
from perfume packs to collectors’ tins. So another Act of Parliament was
needed to mandate plain packaging. In this way the will of Parliament to
eliminate “everything that is a tobacco advertisement or acts as a tobacco
advertisement”, first stated at the turn of the millennium, took 20 years
of battling against the tobacco industry to achieve.
One of the most powerful voices in this fight came from young people
themselves. For example, when teenagers analysed and called out the
marketing trickery of designer packs their words were irrefutable:
I think the package is a big part of the product … probably just as
important as the product (teenage girl).
It makes me feel quite cool … It makes you feel stylish and that,
kind of upper class (teenage boy).
They look too colourful to be harmful … (teenage girl).
I don’t know if they are deliberately trying to sell to fourteen year
olds, but I think it sort of appeals, because they’ll look at it … They
are sort of saying it without actually saying it, like subliminally
saying you know, fourteen year olds (teenage boy). 30
No policy maker could ignore them, and all the lobbying and influence of
the multinational tobacco industry came to nothing.
Michael and Morag’s Wisdom
Meanwhile, small is still beautiful. As far as I know neither Michael
nor Morag play the tin whistle or own a harlequin suit. Their goods
come without logos, musical accompaniment, or celebrity endorsement (King Edward is not paid for lending his name to the potatoes).
Their idea of social glue owes nothing to starlings or fancy films and
everything to remembering our names and making us feel comfortable
in their shop.
Grooming the Next Generation
55
Children are always welcome, and here they can experience commerce
as it has been practised since time immemorial: a simple, equitable
exchange between two human beings which meets the needs of both.
No in-​depth psychology, no attempt to turn shopping into a Freudian
experiment, no pseudo identity building. Just boxes of vegetables, a few
shelves of groceries and some sweeties. These last certainly appeal to the
youngsters, but there is no particular effort to push them. They are not
at child’s eye level for example, or given prominent display –​just there in
the background as part of the whole.
The main appeal for teenagers is work. Michael and Morag always
have at least one local youngster on the payroll. Not stacking shelves or
sweeping out storerooms but behind the counter, working the till and
serving customers, just like the management. Learning about work, community, and human decency. You might call it citizen socialisation.
The Child is Father of the Man
Like the people of Hamlyn, we have been found wanting. We have
allowed the corporate marketers to prey on our children. They do this
from the tenderest of ages –​even reaching into the womb. This despite
our knowing it causes our kids immense harm; despite knowing how to
protect them; despite the collapsing planet.
However, as in Browning’s poem, there is hope. In the one instance where
children have been properly protected the result has been an unqualified
success. When freed from the clutches of tobacco marketing our young
people have moved en masse away from smoking. Furthermore, they
played a key role in making us adults act; their words drove the regulatory process. Like the children of Hamlyn, they had wisdom beyond
their years. This wisdom has now moved way beyond tobacco and is
addressing the climate crisis and our utterly unsustainable way of life.
The Greta Thunberg generation has understood the need for change in
a way we adults are still struggling to grasp. It seems Browning’s fellow
poet William Wordsworth was right: the child is father of the man.
However, they have a hard fight on their hands: digital has now given
the corporate marketer nuclear capability.
Chapter 5
Surveillance Capitalism
The Perfect Consumer
Alchemists spent their lives looking for the fabled Philosopher’s Stone
which would enable them to turn base metal into gold. In digital technology corporate marketers have found their philosopher’s stone, albeit
one which works in reverse: with it they can turn the gold of the human
being into the base metal of the consumer.
The necromancy starts, once again, with information about us. Thanks
to digital technology marketers can access this in vast quantities - beyond
the dreams of the Stasi or Big Brother, let alone the old-fashioned analogue market researcher. With it they can look into us body, mind and
soul and identify not just our daily needs, but our hopes and dreams, our
deepest fears, our most secret vulnerabilities. When this is harnessed to
big data and artificial intelligence they become like gods – all seeing; all
knowing.
This has given their marketing forensic precision. Advertising has
become “programmatic”, honed and targeted in microseconds to suit our
preferences exactly. Product design, pricing and packaging can also be
customised to perfection. Meanwhile distribution is simply universal –
any time, any place, anywhere.
As with all proficient marketing, digital commerce is, at first blush,
a delight for the consumer. We get what we want, at a great price with
same day delivery to our armchairs. But as human beings we know the
hazards of such spoiling. We inevitably start to want more and better; we
get crotchety if the algorithms get it wrong; two days for delivery soon
becomes unacceptable. We know this does not make us happy. More
insidiously it turns all our interests, everything that moves and matters to
us, into an act of consumption; our lives are being traduced into a series
of shopping opportunities.
Meanwhile, the corporates are coining it. Whilst in the bad old days
before Facebook and algorithms the analogue marketer ruefully remarked
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-7
Surveillance Capitalism
57
“I know that half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half”,
the Amazons of this world have no such doubts. The guess work is being
replaced by certainty because they now understand us so well. They
started by programming their advertising; now they are programming us.
The Internet Dream
The UN Zoom conference has brought together staff in eight countries on
four continents. The subject of the meeting is Covid-19. The pandemic
is causing great additional problems on top of the usual worries of international development, but there are also reasons for hope and the meeting
is upbeat. The internet is connecting up the world, communications
through mobile telephony are now good even in the remotest corners
of the world so information about the pandemic is up to date; testing
is being organised and recorded using computer technology that would
have been little more than a dream a generation ago; vaccines are emerging and each country officer talks through her plans to roll them out and
record progress, with smartphones playing a crucial logistical role.
The hope is infectious: technology is a wonderful thing. From the wheel
to the printing press to the internet it has improved the human condition
since the origins of our species. It is the engine of progress. But it can
equally be the cause of great harm. A wheel can be fitted to an ambulance
or a tank; the printed word can deliver wisdom or hatred and the internet
can defeat Covid-19 or turn us into biddable consumers. It all depends on
our priorities and values; on what we do with our innovations.
When Tim Berners-​Lee, an Oxford academic then working at the scientific CERN collaboration in Switzerland, imagined the World Wide Web
into existence in 1989 he saw it as a public good, a means of connecting
humanity and making the world a better place. Twenty years later he
reemphasised these principles:
the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business,
your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital
to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to
free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in
the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important
documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on,
filtered, censored and disconnected.1
In the same piece however he warned of “threats to the Internet, such
as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet
traffic, compromise basic human network rights”.
58 The Corporate Marketing Machine
Clicks and Confessionals
In the intervening two decades the Web had been commercialised: Berners-​
Lee’s idea had been thrown to the wolves of Wall Street like so much red
meat. The consequences were apparent in 2010 and have worsened since.
Corporate marketers have tumbled to the fact that the mass of online
information about us is a goldmine. As we noted in Chapter 1 the great
insight marketing brought to business was that effective persuasion begins
with an understanding of your target customer. It was this that gave birth
to the market research industry and the slew of focus groups and surveys
that keeps every marketer worthy of the name up to speed on our whims
and fancies. Digital technology has turbo-​charged this flow of information.
Google was the first to appreciate the lucrative potential offered by
moving from their original principles of connecting people and enabling
effective search, to self-​interested snooping. The “user profile information”
(UPI) which they were gathering as a matter of course from our internet
searches revealed volumes about us –​not just our demographics but our
future intentions, peccadillos, and weaknesses, our hopes and dreams. It
was market research on steroids and the data was pouring in 24/​7 completely free of charge. With it they had the power to turn advertising from
informed guesswork to scientific certainty, and us from concerned citizens
into biddable consumers. Google realised that it had what amounted to
a one-​way mirror into our lives which was already generating invaluable
UPI and could be tweaked and honed to make it ever more powerful. The
company filed multiple patent applications accordingly.
Shoshana Zuboff describes one such from 2003 called “Generating
User Information for Targeted Advertising”. She goes on to explain how
this was a software device to gather data about us that would help achieve
what she calls the Holy Grail of advertising: the ability “to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might
have a high probability of actual influencing his or her behaviour”.2 Such
“programmatic advertising” has now become a commonplace but was
then a major innovation. Google was loss-​making until those at the top
realised that our data, our “behavioural surplus” (the fingerprints we
leave behind when we surf the web), is a retail goldmine; it produced a
3,590% increase in Google’s revenues in just four years.3 For Zuboff this
marks the dawn of a “new industrial revolution”4 and the emergence
of an approach to business which she calls “surveillance capitalism”5 –​
where algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligence enable infinitely
more powerful marketing which can deliver success on an unprecedented
scale. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler6 prefers the term “computational capitalism” but is equally disturbed by a system which he argues
is undermining our ability to think authentically and critically. In Tim
Berners-​Lee’s terminology we have entered the age of industrial snooping,
which is proving to be immensely lucrative.
Surveillance Capitalism
59
Where Google led, others followed and the tech giants, now known
collectively as FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google),
have come to dominate the web and the world. We now live in an attention
economy where our personal data has turned Cialdini’s martial art, the
compliance professionals efforts to use our own strengths to control us,
into a precision science. As the Centre for Human Technology –​an NGO
set up by alarmed former tech employees –​explains
Constantly forced to outperform their competitor, they [marketers]
must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued. They
point AI-​driven7 news feeds, content, and notifications at our minds,
continually learning how to hook us more deeply –​from our own
behaviour.8
Our behavioural surplus, more or less wittingly provided with every
keystroke, is combined with additional data from specialist providers such
as Equifax and Experian. The Experian website explains how businesses
can “Quickly stream and integrate our comprehensive data into your
own systems, workflows, websites and products with our Business
Information APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)”.9 This data is
remarkably personal, including such insights as our income, the number
of credit cards we own and the restaurants we prefer to visit. The sheer
scale of this is also daunting: the non-​profit newsroom ProPublica did a
study of Facebook asking volunteers “to share the categories of interest
that the site has assigned to them”. In total, they collected more than
52,000 unique attributes –​including “Pretending to Text in Awkward
Situations” and “Breastfeeding in Public” –​that the social media site has
used to classify users.10 Cambridge Analytica’s success in predicting and
moulding political allegiance, shocking though it was, was just scratching
the surface of potential influence.
Mark Zuckerberg is right when he says Facebook does not sell its users’
data; it collects it and buys it. It then uses artificial intelligence to convert
it into tools that can, at a price, enable precision targeting by anyone who
wants to influence our behaviour. As industry insider Tristram Harris
explains, in his testimony to the US Senate:
This is what has caused 70% of YouTube’s traffic to be driven by
recommendations –​not by human choice but by the machines. It’s a
race between Facebook’s voodoo doll and Google’s voodoo doll as to
who can better predict your behaviour.11
The price for accessing the voodoo dolls is high and the principal users
are those with most to gain: multinational corporations and politicians
(we will discuss the latter group in Chapter 6).
60 The Corporate Marketing Machine
“Imagine a world”, Harris continues
in which priests only make their money by selling access to the confession booth to someone else; except in this case Facebook listens to
2 billion people’s confessions, has a super-​computer next to them and
is calculating and predicting the confessions you are going to make
before you know you are going to make them.12
No wonder Zuboff argues that
We now face the moment in history when the elemental right to
the future tense is endangered by a panvasive digital architecture of
behaviour modification owned and operated by surveillance capital,
necessitated by its economic imperatives and driven by its laws of
motion, all for the sake of guaranteed outcomes.
The aim is to “modify the behaviour of individuals, groups and
populations in the service of market objectives”.13 To make us into biddable consumers.
The Tender Trap
As always with marketing the consumer experience is made as pleasant
as possible and the data capture is done with great charm. The cage is
temptingly gilded and the trap well-​baited. So it does seem like the digital
world offers a bracing new dawn of consumer empowerment. We consumers can now communicate with each other across the globe, and form
into caucuses that have real power. We can come together to help snag
badly performing products and defy poor service. The electric windows
in my friend Paddy’s Galaxy ceased to function and the Ford garage
told him it would cost hundreds to fix. In the bad old pre-​internet days
he would have been over a barrel; but a quick visit to an owners’ site
provided a work-​around from a fellow Galaxy driver, all fixed for 20
quid –​and sucks to you Mr Ford. How’s that for consumers’ lib?
Such consumer forums have even developed into a new phenomenon: the brand community. People coming together to discuss how they
can get more out of a product, keep one going when the parent company
has abandoned it or just share their love of it. For example, Apple devised
an unsuccessful palm pilot in the 1990s which they then withdrew from
the market; a group of customers kept it going for years with self-​help
and their own software fixes. Grassroots rebellion combined with a noble
fight against obsolescence. What’s not to like?
The internet also gives us muscle. We can force corporations to
bring back discontinued products. An online campaign compelled UK
Surveillance Capitalism
61
confectioner Cadbury to reintroduce the Wispa chocolate bar that it had
insensitively discontinued. Who’s in charge now, eh?
We consumers can even make our wishes known before a product has
even been conceived, and get involved in the process of satisfying our
own desires from the very start. Lego have been practising such co-​production for a number of years now. Coke did it for a new bottle, RJ
Reynolds for a new cigarette pack design. How much more responsive
can a corporation be than to work in partnership with its customers to
“co-​create value”?
It’s All About the Data
In the attention economy, however, all of this grassroots agency is just
another source of valuable data. Consumer forums are monitored to get
insights into consumer concerns. Brand communities are honouring the
brand, which is a flattering and profitable reinforcement of the brand
manager’s work. They can be and are also carefully managed. The
Harvard Business Review14 (HBR) explains that brand communities are
groups “of ardent consumers organized around the lifestyle, activities,
and ethos of the brand” and they are being deliberately encouraged by
corporate marketers: “marketers in industries from packaged goods to
industrial equipment are busy trying to build communities around their
own brands”. And we are willing collaborators because “their timing
is right. In today’s turbulent world, people are hungry for a sense of
connection”. Isn’t that nice? If life feels bleak and devoid of human contact at least you can strike up a deep and meaningful relationship with
your fridge-​freezer. The HBR piece goes on to explain how companies
can set about “researching, building, and leveraging brand communities”, “maximizing their value for a firm”, and “increasing their impact”.
The key lesson for the corporate marketer, the authors conclude, is
that: “your decision is not whether a community is right for your brand.
It’s whether you’re willing to do what’s needed to get a brand community
right”.
As with all corporate marketing the key concern is the bottom
line: “brand-​community members buy more, remain loyal, and reduce
marketing costs through grassroots evangelism”.15 That’s right, evangelism. The now famous Dove soap Campaign for Real Beauty is cited by
the HBR as a great example of a brand community in beneficent action;
in reality it just illustrates the well-​tested corporate marketers’ strategy
of simulating authenticity and so making more money. Dove’s Campaign
“brought ‘real women’ (less-​than-​pretty, older, large, skinny) together
worldwide to fight industry-​imposed beauty ideals. The women formed
in camaraderie around this mission”. A deeper analysis of the campaign
by Danish academics, however, reminds us that
62 The Corporate Marketing Machine
the corporate pay-​off is likely to emerge from the perception of the
corporation as an active socially responsible agent … whether the
problem is perceived to be actually solved or not. Again, consider
Dove; they surely have not solved the problem of distorted beauty
ideals in contemporary Western society, but they are perceived as
addressing the problem and, indeed, they have gotten their corporate
pay-​off: the campaign is reported to have led to a 700% increase in
product sales, and increased Dove’s share of firming lotions in the
UK from 1% to 6%16 (emphasis added).
Firming lotions, incidentally, are anti-​aging creams; how’s that for
Real Beauty?
Surely, I am exaggerating for effect. Some brand communities are
authentic; some of us do spontaneously come together to celebrate and
share our interest in a particular motorbike or tech device. Anyway we
can choose to join and to leave –​and those of us who join and stay presumably do so because we like it, we get some benefit from it. And my
friend Paddy did get his car fixed really cheaply. The HBR is one step
ahead, and once again, corporate marketers sprinkle the fairy-​dust of
artificial authenticity: “In truth, brand communities generate more value
when members control them –​and when companies create conditions in
which communities can thrive”. The more academic Journal of Marketing
confirms this thinking: “ceding control to customers enhances consumer
engagement and builds brand equity”. This isn’t autonomy; it’s just a
matter of the corporate marketer being “willing to do what’s needed to
get a brand community right”. A puppet is still a puppet, even though the
strings are long, and delicate to the point of transparency.
No wonder the HBR says a resounding “hooray for brand
communities”.
Widening the Net
The data provided by digital tunes the marketing machine to perfection.
Most importantly it means corporate marketers can segment and target
their customer base with immense precision, because they know them so
well. The baby milk study17 we touched on in Chapter 4 illustrates how
this works in the infant formula industry. An experienced formula marketer explains the role of digital:
I have decks and decks of the different apps and digital things that
[corporation name] created. Basically, their process was to ask in a
given country what kinds of mothers are we talking to, what are the
needs that those mothers have, and therefore what digital marketing
do we create to meet those needs.
Surveillance Capitalism
63
These apps range from “an online ovulation calculator, to help women
get pregnant in the first place” to
an app for mothers to reach other mothers who were up all night, so
mothers who have a new-​born baby and they are up at three am and
they are lonely and bored, could connect to other mothers who are
up at the same time and have a chat.
Similarly,
when you sign up to the [baby club] you tell them what your due date
is and whether you are at two months or eight months or wherever
you are, and then you step into a series of emails that are timed to
your stage of pregnancy.
In return for this targeted support, the company gets a constant stream
of personal data with which to hone its marketing. One multinational, for
instance, has segmented the global market into “three kinds of mothers”
which they call “Blue, Yellow and Red mothers”:
•
•
•
Blue Mothers: “are mothers who are all about ambition, they are
about raising a capable, healthy, happy baby, these are the mothers
who would be booking this baby into nursery school when the baby
is six months old, they are already looking for the right university,
I mean this baby has after school tutors, the mother is thinking very
hard about getting everything right so that this baby has a happy and
healthy life, hopefully a successful, middle class future, and so everything that she does it about optimizing baby’s future prospects. Those
are Blue mothers; [brand name] is aimed at these mothers”. Key
marketing slogans: “our most advanced formulation yet”; “inspired
by forty years of breast milk research”; “their future starts today”.
Yellow Mothers: “so[for] Yellow mothers it’s all about happiness, so
success to her is a giggling baby, if the baby is happy she is happy, it’s
about creating a loving, happy home for that baby to bloom and be
content. You can see that in [brand name]. I will show you a [brand
name] ad in a minute that is bang on Yellow mothers, it’s called the
‘giggling baby’s’ ad and it is literally just babies giggling, it’s adorable
and it’s what those mothers want, yeah”.
Red Mothers: “things that Reds do are aimed at enhancing the sense
of happy, cocooned childhood, so I mean Red brands would do
things like you know give you.....you sign up for our baby club and
we will send you a baby book so that you can keep your precious
memories of you and your baby and your family. It’s just anything
that enhances that sense of safe cocooning, safe environment”.
64 The Corporate Marketing Machine
This marketing effort is continually enhanced and updated to keep
the data flowing in. This drives the whole marketing effort in a profound way: the target markets don’t just get their own slogans, but their
own products and brands. All of course concocted by the same multinational corporation. And just in case we might think that there is still
some genuine choice going on here, remember that, as the study also
points out,
infant formula is in reality the definitive one-​size-​fits-​all product. By
law all products must have the same formulation, as established by
independent research. The only permitted variation from this is for
unproven additives, which if they ever prove to be beneficial, would,
again by law, have to be added to all formula products.
Remember also that formula is markedly inferior to breastmilk.
New parents are not alone –​all of us are being digitally groomed by
corporate marketers. The product is teed up to match our preferences: we
watch steam engine videos on YouTube, here’s the new book about the
Flying Scotsman; we ask Google about the Greek islands, here’s a cruise
you will love. These are crude examples, I know –​but then I am not an
algorithm; I haven’t analysed 52,000 unique attributes.
All the other marketing tools are equally well honed. Programmatic
advertising, devised and deployed in response to our key strokes, fits our
world view so precisely that we barely recognise it as advertising. It just
confirms what we knew already, more like an inner voice than anything
so shallow as a sales pitch. Pricing is equally tempting. For the most part
the corporate’s god-​like powers have been channelled into cheapness.
They can sweep away trade unions, camouflage sweatshops, browbeat
suppliers, and conjure these abuses into irresistible bargains. Finally, distribution is the trump card in the digital marketer’s hand. No more chains
of high street buildings to maintain and supply. No more remaindered
stock. No more armies of shop workers to pay. No more need to tempt
us out of our homes. Just a beautifully pitched virtual smorgasbord and
a compliant clientele available 24/​7.
Far from being a free, open space where information (however crazy
and anarchic) can be accessed and shared, a sort of people’s republic of
ideas, our digital environment, and that of our children, is becoming just
as commercialised as the real one. Indeed more so, because on a digital
platform there are few logistical barriers. The popup doesn’t need a team
of bill posters, a vacant road-​side hoarding or planning permission. It
combines the functionality of TV commercials, posters, and product
placement all in one. It can lead people to other promotional locations,
sell to them directly, and keep in perpetual touch. And, of course it keeps
pulling in the all-​revealing data.
Surveillance Capitalism
65
4/9
410
400
417
402
412
406
408
416
414
404
418
418
104
Figure 5.1 Amazon Patent Application: System and Method for Transporting Personnel
Within an Active Workspace (Patent Number Wo 2015/​034956 Al).
Amazon: Customer Heaven; Citizen Hell
So where is this digital alchemy taking us –​the perpetual snooping, the
ersatz brand communities, the fake authenticity, the commercialisation
of anti-​natal care? Jeff Bezos and Amazon, his Frankenstein brainchild,
gives a good idea of what the future holds.
As with Google, patent applications are a good place to start. The
illustration below (Figure 5.1) comes from application number Wo 2015/​
034956 Al made by Amazon in 2016 for a “System and Method for
Transporting Personnel within an Active Workspace”. As Kate Crawford
and Vladan Joler explain
66 The Corporate Marketing Machine
It depicts a metal cage intended for the worker, equipped with
different cybernetic add-​ons, that can be moved through a warehouse
by the same motorized system that shifts shelves filled with merchandise. Here, the worker becomes a part of a machinic ballet, held
upright in a cage which dictates and constrains their movement.18
The innovation met with such a public outcry that it was never enacted,
but you do get the drift.
When Jeff Bezos set out on his path to world domination he adopted
the same playbook as any other marketing driven corporation, but took it
to its logical conclusion. He is copying Philip Morris and Coca-​Cola, but
is doing it more vehemently. His company isn’t just consumer oriented,
he explains, it is the world’s most “customer-​centric company”, built not
merely on consumer insight but what he calls “customer obsession”.19 He
doesn’t talk of plain old consumer satisfaction but “customer ecstasy”.
He applies this thinking with utter determination: one of the first names
he flirted with for his planned empire was “Relentless”.
Bezos’ linguistic preferences are instructive. Obsession, the Collins
English dictionary explains, is “a persistent idea or impulse that continually
forces its way into our consciousness especially one associated with anxiety
and mental illness”. Ecstasy is an “overpowering emotion characterised
by loss of self-​control and sometimes a temporary loss of consciousness”.
Finally, relentless is used to describe “an enemy, hostile attitude etc. …
which is implacable, inflexible, inexorable”. It points to a dystopian world,
worthy of Orwell or Huxley, where corporate marketers are our enemies
and unstoppable in pursuit of their goals; where their focus on us is intensified to the point of madness; where our role is to consume so slavishly that
we lose control of our faculties –​especially our critical ones.
Thus a world by digitally armed corporate marketers is one where
we can have every material possession we desire (though not necessarily
need) at the touch of a button. All we have to do is close our minds
and hearts to the consequences. To the poor souls working in Amazon
“Fulfilment Centres” who must jump to attention each time we click the
“Buy Now” button –​and be grateful they haven’t been caged yet. To
the millions who can’t afford such plenty. To the sweatshops and brutal
supply chains that produce all the cheap stuff. To the small businesses
and bookshops driven to bankruptcy. To the planet that screams out
against such unsustainable idiocy. To the emptiness and futility of having
yet another whim gratified overnight; of receiving one more cardboard
package with its ingratiating, sinister grin.
A world where we are ecstatic customers, but have to resign as decent
human beings. And, as it has for the last 100 years, this manipulative
spoiling works spectacularly well: we are gifting Jeff Bezos unprecedented
wealth and power because the service is so good. We fall at his feet because
he can deliver our gewgaws in 24 hours at rock bottom prices. Indeed,
Surveillance Capitalism
67
such is our ecstasy, that, not content with pocketing Amazon’s disreputable packages, we also actively collaborate in making the company more
dominant and in ceding more of our self-​respect. As if controlling over a
third of internet commerce didn’t reveal enough about us, the company
has now produced its own bugging device: the Amazon Echo.
We happily buy this, put it in our children’s bedrooms, and allow our
eavesdropped conversations to make the next generation of devices even
more powerful. All so we can turn on the lights or play our favourite
music tracks without lifting a finger. As Guardian journalist Mark
O’Connell points out: “with an AI product like Amazon’s Echo, you are
not just a consumer: you are also both a resource and an unpaid worker,
providing information and training to a dynamic system based on feedback loops of data”. Thus we do our voluntary shift in the fulfilment
centre; we walk ecstatically into Bezos’ cage.
From Bad to Metaverse
And the cage is getting ever bigger and more sophisticated. Mark
Zuckerberg’s latest Five-​Year Plan lays out his company’s route-​map to the
“metaverse”, “a digitally augmented future in which we exist as avatars
in a shared virtual world”. He warns us that “this isn’t just a product we
are building. It needs to be an ecosystem”.20 Once again this is about our
data and the power this bestows on the corporate marketer. As Verity
McIntosh, a VR expert at the University of the West of England, explains:
the granularity of data available when users interact on these
platforms is an order of magnitude higher than on screen-​
based
media … Now it’s not just about where I click and what I choose to
share, it’s about where I choose to go, how I stand, what I look at for
longest, the subtle ways that I physically move my body and react to
certain stimuli. It’s a direct route to my subconscious and that is gold
to a data capitalist.21
Michael and Morag Unplugged
It need not be so. Michael and Morag never considered calling their shop
Relentless; they already had a name: Michael and Morag’s Greengrocery.
Neither of them even flirted with the idea of becoming an avatar and they
have no business dealings with FAANG, although they do sell a lot of
apples and their Fairtrade coffee comes from the Amazon. Nor do they
make much use of technology –​ok the till did go electric in 2003 and
they will take orders over the phone, but data harvesting is not a forte.
They harvest fruit and veg. Even if they did collect our data, how would
they retain it –​Michael struggles to remember where the snap peas are
without Morag’s help.
68 The Corporate Marketing Machine
I cannot recall any moments of customer ecstasy in their shop –​except
perhaps for Charlie the cocker spaniel who loves carrots and literally
jumps with joy when Morag lets her have one. The rest of us get courtesy, cheerful humour, and great fruit and veg –​but not ecstasy. We are,
after all, just restocking our larders, not seeking spiritual rapture. We do,
however, get something that the Bezos of this world, for all their wealth
and power, can never supply: real, flesh and blood authenticity.
Escaping the Cage
Thanks to digital technology, corporate marketers now have huge quantities of information about us, and their knowledge of our whims and
weaknesses is giving them unprecedented power. They have mastered
a debased form of alchemy. But, as T S Elliott22 predicted, this excess
of data has driven out any semblance of wisdom. When it is harnessed
to AI, corporate marketers can reach for godlike powers, but their
blinkered focus on materialism and money shows them to be anything
but divine.
Humanity has been here before, and thankfully moved swiftly in the
opposite direction. Midas pleaded with the gods to take away his golden
touch when he realised it turned even his food into metal and he faced
starvation; when it turned his daughter into a statue. The Gods took pity
on him. Faustus regretted his pact with the devil, and, in Goethe’s version
of the story at least, God forgave him. But with digital technology the corporate marketers are rapidly becoming our gods, and unlike their ancient
Greek and medieval forerunners, they don’t take pity, confer blessings
or forgive. They just chase profit, relentlessly. They are constructing a
world in their own obsessive image, in which our role is to be biddable,
house-​trained consumers who intersperse a lifetime of material longing
with occasional moments of mindless ecstasy.
But they haven’t caged us yet. We will rebel. But first we need to take
a look at our leaders.
Chapter 6
Marketing, Power, and the Demise
of Democracy
We could build a psychological profile of each voter. We would know
what kinds of messaging you would be susceptible to, including the
framing of it, the topic, the content, the tone, whether it’s scary or not,
that kind of thing. So what you would be susceptible to and where you
would consume that and then how many times we have to touch you
in order to change how you think about it.
(Christopher Wylie, whistle-​blower from
Cambridge Analytica)1
Julius Caesar: The First Corporate Marketer
The writings of a 16th-​century French teenager may seem like an obscure
place to start, but Etienne de la Boétie’s essay on The Politics of Obedience2
is a virtuoso account of why unjust political systems prevail and how they
can be changed. They prevail, he shows, because we let them (the losers
always vastly outnumber the winners); and they change when we retract
our permission. We will return to the subject of change in the second half
of the book; for now we will stick with defining the problem, and look
at how the corporate marketers’ influence has extended so easily into the
corridors of power.
La Boétie looked back into classical times to try and explain why we,
the masses, succumb to those in power. He identified four key control
mechanisms –​bread, circuses, symbolism, and paid collusion –​which
equate perfectly with corporate marketing. Starting with bread, he points
out that the support of the Roman mob could be bought for the price
of a meal: “a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine and a sesterce: and then
everybody would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King!’ ” In today’s terms
we have the material plenty of 40,000 supermarket lines and Amazon
Prime. Unlike ancient Rome however, where the mob got their bread
for nothing, we pay for ours and in the process increase the wealth and
reinforce the power of the elite. And we show our acquiescence, not just
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-8
70 The Corporate Marketing Machine
with shameless patriotic cries, but also with loyalty cards and air-​miles –​
and we happily pay to display the elite’s symbols on our clothes and
trappings.
Circuses also helped the Caesars buy support: “plays, farces, spectacles,
gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these
were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty”. The endless sport and screen-​based entertainment are a perfect
modern equivalent, the price of our liberty –​and again, Roman citizens got theirs free, but we willingly pay for our Netflix subscriptions.
The explosion in all forms of sports and entertainment sponsorship by
corporate marketers in recent years tells its own story of the power of
circuses, and La Boétie, like Coke, would have completely understood
the marketing value of a global spectacle like the Olympic Games.
Symbolism –​mystery, magic, and propaganda –​also play a key role in
the acquisition of power:
It is pitiful to review the list of devices that early despots used to establish their tyranny; to discover how many little tricks they employed,
always finding the populace conveniently gullible, readily caught in
the net as soon as it was spread.
La Boétie’s portrayal of classical Rome fits modern advertising and
branding perfectly. His words about his own time are equally apposite.
In 16th-​century France, he explains, those in power “never undertake
an unjust policy, even one of some importance, without prefacing it
with some pretty speech concerning public welfare and common good”;
the corporate marketer calls this “public relations” or in our more
sophisticated times “corporate social responsibility”. As we will discuss
below, no right-​minded tobacco multinational would consider addicting
another generation of children without first producing a glossy report on
its good works in sub-​Saharan Africa.
Collusion is the fourth essential tool: there are so few in the elite, and
so many of us, that without our help those at the top could never prevail.
The inequalities of consumer capitalism are breath-​taking –​think of the
wealth of the 1%; of individual corporations growing far bigger than
whole countries and Jeff Bezos earning an extra $13b in one day when
his 1.25m workers earn an average of $16.28 per hour.
How can such a tiny minority hold so much sway? As La Boétie points
out they can only do it with the collaboration of an army of functionaries who themselves gain from the accepted order. Those who benefit,
in however small a way, from the tyrant’s rule provide what he calls
“the mainspring and the secret of domination; the support and foundation of tyranny”. In our era, this would include the army of functionaries who staff the “aggregate marketing system” –​as we noted in the
Marketing, Power, and Demise of Democracy
71
Introduction, 20 years ago this comprised 30 million people in the US
alone, and oversaw the expenditure of five trillion dollars a year.3 It also
includes us: without our devoted shopping, our loyalty cards, the system
could not function. Digital is taking this collaboration to a new level. La
Boétie’s next sentence “Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon
you, if you do not provide them yourselves?” is a prescient evocation of
the social media age in which we volunteer the data Amazon and its co-​
travellers need to maintain their grip on us. And, once again, we pay for
the privilege of doing so.
Profit Over People
Two millennia before Jeff Bezos thought of caging his employees, we
can already see the similarities in the methods used to acquire political and commercial power. Amazon’s founder would have thrived in
Ancient Rome; Caesar would have made an excellent corporate CEO.
Edward Bernay’s exposition on Propaganda, which we discussed in
Chapter 1, with its talk of “secret government” seems less shocking in
this context, and more of a natural intellectual progression. As Bernays
explains: “Politics was the first big business in America”. His only regret
is that Government is now falling behind:
there is a good deal of irony in the fact that business has learned
everything that politics has had to teach, but that politics has failed
to learn very much from business methods of mass distribution of
ideas and products.
A recurrent theme of his book is that democratic governments need to
recognise the value of propaganda:
Governments, whether they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist, depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the
success of their efforts and, in fact, government is only government by
virtue of public acquiescence. Industries, public utilities, educational
movements, indeed all groups representing any concept or product,
whether they are majority or minority ideas, succeed only because
of approving public opinion. Public opinion is the unacknowledged
partner in all broad efforts.
Notice the partner is public opinion, which can be managed, not we
the public who might, heaven forfend, think for ourselves. “Ours must
be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who
know how to regiment and guide the masses”. Ours not to reason why,
ours but to browse and buy.
72 The Corporate Marketing Machine
Note also that this business thinking does not just help politicians to
acquire power, but to deploy it effectively: “The process of government
is continuous. And the expert use of propaganda is more useful and fundamental, although less striking, as an aid to democratic administration,
than as an aid to vote getting”. We can be sold ideas and policies as
well as politicians and this is “the mechanism by which democracy has
organized its group mind and simplified its mass thinking”.
Bernays need not have worried, Government was and is paying
careful attention. His contemporary, the social philosopher John
Dewey, observed that “politics in general is an echo, except when it is
an accomplice, of the interests of big business … it is the shadow cast
on society by big business”.4 Noam Chomsky brings the story into our
century: “The people who spend trillions of dollars a year in marketing
ideas, as well as goods, have long understood the lesson expressed by
Bernays” he explains. They know that marketing works in politics as
well as commerce, and is “mainly a matter of manipulation and control” and “to control the public mind, you need to know what people
are thinking, and what their attitudes are; this is the reason for the heavy
polling”. Successful political campaigns are, like commercial ones, built
on thorough market research.
Politics Is a Strategic Necessity for a Corporation
The Second World War provides a sobering example of the corporate
ambition to play politics and to do so at any cost. As we noted in
Chapter 1, New York Times journalist Charles Higham demonstrates
with unnerving clarity that major US corporations –​including the
Chase Bank, telecom giant ITT and Ford –​were doing business with
the Nazi regime and corporations like IG Farben (who built Auschwitz)
throughout the conflict. They provided the regime with oil, finance, and
state-​of-​the-​art weaponry.5
The Nazi leadership was suitably and comprehensively punished at the
end of the war, and Germany went through a thorough de-​Nazification
programme –​but the corporations just moved on. Their collaboration,
Higham explains, was kept secret at the time, and has since been carefully hidden behind “an ice cream mountain of public relations”. Their
political ambitions continued unimpeded.
ITT, for example, broke cover again in 1973 when it was implicated
in the overthrow of the democratically elected, but corporate-​unfriendly
government of Salvador Allende in Chile, and its replacement by a
military dictatorship. Then 20 years on Shell Oil got itself into serious
trouble in Nigeria. It wanted to quell discontent among the local Ogoni
people, whose land in the Niger Delta its drilling was despoiling, and
called on Nigeria’s military dictatorship for help. This resulted in savage
Marketing, Power, and Demise of Democracy
73
repression, dozens of people being shot down and the subsequent execution of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-​Wiwa. In what had become a much more
interconnected world of instantaneous communication, simply hiding
things behind a “public relations ice cream mountain” was no longer a
viable option.
Furthermore, corporate marketers do not want to hide their political
ambitions, they want to flaunt and perfect them; they want to be accepted
as respectable political partners. Corporations have outgrown countries,
and have a country’s ambition to extend their reach and influence across
the world. To do this they have to get actively involved in politics: the
Allende Government’s policy of nationalisation is, for a corporation, a
legitimate business concern; the power of the Nigerian dictatorship to
quell rebellion a genuine commercial opportunity. Far from hiding this
reality, the need is to legitimise it.
From a societal perspective, though, the problem is that, despite their
size, they remain companies narrowly focused on profit maximisation
and the financial interests of their investors. What about other priorities?
What about the rest of us? What about the planet? Now Apple is bigger
than Switzerland, where are its democratic checks and balances? When
Volkswagen has outgrown India, why isn’t there a political structure to
balance the power of the CEO?6 Corporations are not disinterested political partners but partisan vested interests; foxes who want to lend a hand
with running the henhouse.
Charm to the Rescue
In classic marketing style, the corporate response to these concerns
has not been to do anything concrete about their excess of power –​to
regulate, mitigate, or reduce it, for example. Instead, all the effort goes
into charm offensives to make it seem palatable. There is no need to
reform the sinner; you just make him look like a saint, provide him
with a synthetic halo. Stakeholder marketing, the more sophisticated
successor to the PR ice cream mountains, performs this task. The
two favoured and linked techniques are “Cause Related Marketing”,
where the corporation links up to a personable and self-​evidently
worthy issue such as child literacy or indigenous rights and makes
sure the world knows about its seeming bounty; and Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR), which wraps this specific beneficence in longer
term commitments to good practice. Corporate marketers are open
about the self-​serving nature of this activity and clearly state that this
is business not altruism.
The good cause is chosen, not on its own merits, but on the benefits
association with it will bring to the corporation. Careful analysis is done
to ensure that the values associated with the selected cause can be aligned
74 The Corporate Marketing Machine
with, and have the clear potential to strengthen, those of the brand or
corporate image. Given sufficient business acumen, a well-​chosen and
managed link-​up will bring multiple such benefits. According to business
textbooks, for instance, it is good at
enhancing reputation, building image and brands, creating
relationships and loyalty among customers and stakeholders, adding
value, generating awareness and PR, driving trial and traffic, providing product and service differentiation, developing emotional
engagement with the consumer and other stakeholders, and obviously increasing sales, income and volume.7
Obviously. The book underlines this quid pro quo agenda: “whatever
cause-​related marketing is, it certainly is not philanthropy or altruism”.8
Practitioners are equally candid. This is a spokesperson for Marks &
Spencer talking about the company’s ambitious plan to “combat climate
change, reduce waste, safeguard natural resources, trade ethically and
build a healthier nation” which she explains is a matter of “enlightened
self-​interest”. The reaction amongst customers has been to “increase
trust in the M&S brand more than any other ad campaign” and this had
been “very good for profits”.9
So, just as the Marlboro cowboy and the McDonalds clown cover up
for addiction and obesity, so providing books for British school children, supporting indigenous rights in the Americas or funding child literacy programs in Malawi (stakeholder marketing campaigns funded by
News International, ENRON, and British American Tobacco, respectively) mask systemic truths about our way of life and its impact on
society, our fellow creatures and the planet that urgently need to be
addressed. In the first instance the focus is on its brands, in the second
on its reputation, its corporate identity. Good causes are embraced and
fine words are spoken for no other reason than they will enhance the
image of the corporation.
The Parable of the Bad Samaritan
There is an immense moral hazard here. Selfish altruism is not just an
ugly oxymoron, it is socially and spiritually corrosive. Helping our
fellow beings without any expectation of gain is the defining quality of a
civilised society. It brings us and holds us together. We might express this
with complex political theories, sophisticated theological arguments, or
just see it as a matter of decency and fairness; but we all understand that
it is the selflessness of the act that makes it so powerful. When we allow
multinationals to co-​opt and corrupt this quintessentially human value in
the pursuit of enrichment we are all cheapened. It threatens not just our
Marketing, Power, and Demise of Democracy
75
material wellbeing and political system, but our very humanity. Think
for a moment how the parable of the Good Samaritan would read if a
corporate marketer had got there before the Samaritan:
The Parable of the Bad Samaritan
A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was
attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and
went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going
down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the
other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him,
passed by on the other side. But a corporate marketer, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he beheld a
good potential business opportunity. He went to him where he lay
unconscious in the ditch and checked his identity papers to make
sure he wasn’t an African migrant –​they are so unpopular with his
customerbase. Then he texted a picture of the victim to the office to
see if anyone in the marketing department could identify him. Joy of
joys: the reply pinged back that the victim was actually a promising
musician and something of a celebrity in the region, furthermore his
fan base overlapped perfectly with the 12–​16, C2DE10 demographic
the company was trying to reach in its latest Facebook campaign. No
question then, his boss added at the end of the text, it was well worth
intervening –​and if he managed to pull it off, that promotion they
had been discussing would be in the bag.
The corporate marketer sprang into action: he rang the PR department for advice. They immediately saw the potential and told him
to set his iPhone up to catch a swatch of selfies, and make sure he
recorded everything the victim said as he came round. If he had
anything with the company logo on with him, he should place it in
camera shot –​but be subtle about it, as this needed to look like a
genuine helping-​hand, not an advert.
The corporate marketer ended the call and was about to follow the
advice when he saw a Samaritan approaching. The newcomer was
offering to help and said he had bandages, oil and wine. The corporate marketer immediately recognised the threat: Samaritans were
almost as unpopular as African migrants and one of them engaging
in an act of benevolence would become the story –​overshadowing
his company’s good work. He had to think fast. He reassured the
Samaritan that all was under control, then gave him one of his
business cards and asked him if he would help by taking it to the
newspaper office in the next town with a message that the corporate
marketer would like to speak to the editor in an hour or so. The
Good Samaritan did as he was asked.
76 The Corporate Marketing Machine
The manager considered ringing back the PR department to advise
them of this development, but decided it wasn’t necessary. He was
ready to implement the CSR strategy. He put on his best Florence
Nightingale manner, checked his selfie-​stick and bent down to help
the victim.
Sadly, however, by this time he had passed away.
The implications could not be more serious. The Good Samaritan is a
global morality tale. For two millennia it, and its equivalents in other
cultures, have been used to guide and instruct each generation of children
in the benefits of human decency, in the inalienable truth that helping one
another when we are in need is not just right, but the foundation of any
civilised society. Thanks to CSR, today’s children get a toxic distortion
of this moral lesson. They learn that people help each other only when
it suits them to do so; when they can profit from it. They absorb this
the hard way, because in their innocence they will start off thinking that
tobacco companies and press barons really do care about child literacy.
Some of them, as corporate marketers plan, will buy their products as a
result. Much later, the fortunate ones will come to realise how badly they
were deceived.
Critical Deficit
This deception also harms us all because it discourages us from thinking
critically about the structural problems with our way of life. Without
such critical thought, nothing is likely to change: the powerful do not
cede their power voluntarily. This problem can be difficult to see; good
deeds –​supporting indigenous rights and child literacy programmes –​
seem inherently desirable. As Anand Giridharadas11 puts it: “how can
there be anything wrong in trying to do good?”. “The answer”, he
points out:
may be when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm. In our era that harm is the concentration of money and
power among a small few, who reap from that concentration a near
monopoly on the benefits of change.
The “greater, more invisible, harm” with CSR is that it draws a mask
of respectability over the whole marketing process. The ubiquitous and
sophisticated entrapment made even more powerful by digital technology.
The psychopathic personality: corporations are irresponsible, manipulative, superficial, asocial, and lacking in empathy and remorse; all this is
camouflaged under a carapace of charm. The materialism with its superficial attractions –​consumer orientation; excellent customer service; the
Marketing, Power, and Demise of Democracy
77
perpetual focus on our satisfaction. Given the resources at the marketer’s
disposal, which have now risen to $560b per annum globally just for
advertising,12 it is perhaps not surprising that we jump for the bate and
carry loyalty cards to prove our devotion. More insidious is the perpetual
reinforcement that stuff will make everything right; that our problems can
be solved by shopping. It promotes and perpetuates what Tolstoy13 calls
“the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realisation of desires”. In truth, he continues, it is our unsatisfied desires that
make us human; without them we have no purpose, no future –​anticipating
Shoshana Zuboff’s concerns about the future tense by a hundred years.
Finally, we come to the practicalities of corporate marketing, and the
smell worsens. Consider the conditions prevailing in extended supply
chains: the conflict minerals, the sweat shops, the gig economy; the trash
vortex of single use plastic growing each year in the world’s oceans; the
systemically widening inequalities; the collapsing climate; the spreading
virus. All in the interests of higher returns for the few and spiralling consumption for those who can afford it.
Political Deficit
The democratic implications of this are profound. It is legitimising the
role of the corporation in government, and undermining that of the
citizen. Public–​private partnerships have become the norm; management
consultants run Whitehall; one corporation supplies the armaments to
destroy Iraq, another the cement to rebuild it.
Meanwhile the insidious effects of stakeholder and consumer marketing
are turning us from active citizens into unthinking accessories. As Richard
Sennett14 points out,
user friendly makes a hash of democracy. Democracy requires that
citizens be willing to make some effort to find out how the world
around them works. Few American proponents of the war in Iraq,
wanted to learn about Iraq (most couldn’t in fact locate it on a map).
When we are used to getting just what we want –​however unreasonable this might be –​from Bezos and Zuckerberg, we expect the same
customer service from prime ministers and presidents. When brand Nike
has convinced us that a pair of trainers multiplies in value by virtue of a
swoosh, why wouldn’t we buy into brand-​Britain and the chimera of sovereignty? “Just do it” and “Get Brexit Done” come from the same slogan
factory and have the same facile appeal.
Digital technology is taking this to a new level. The Cambridge
Analytica scandal revealed that the surveillance techniques being used
in commercial marketing to keep us devoutly consuming work just as
78 The Corporate Marketing Machine
well on our voting behaviour. Christopher Wylie,15 a whistle-​blower from
the company explains, with echoes of Edward Bernays, that the company was “a full service propaganda machine” and that “if you want to
change politics you have to change culture, because politics flows from
culture. If you want to change culture you have to understand what the
units of culture are. People are the units of culture”.
As with corporate marketing it starts with gaining a detailed
understanding of the individual voter, in this case from tens of million
Facebook profiles.
We could build a psychological profile of each voter. We would know
what kinds of messaging you would be susceptible to, including the
framing of it, the topic, the content, the tone, whether it’s scary or
not, that kind of thing. So what you would be susceptible to and
where you would consume that and then how many times we have
to touch you in order to change how you think about it.
In short, standard corporate marketing. This, he points out, completely
undermines the principles of democracy:
instead of standing in the public square and saying what you think
and then letting people come and listen to you, and have that shared
experience as to what your narrative is, you are whispering into the
ear of each and every voter and maybe whispering one thing to this
voter and another to this one.
In this way “we risk fragmenting society into one where we don’t
have any more shared experiences, we don’t have any more shared
understanding”. And, as he concludes, “if we don’t have any shared
understanding how can we be a functioning society?”
It is unsurprising that Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who broke
the Cambridge Analytica story, wrote a reflective article last year called
starkly: “If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying
attention”. But actually the problem isn’t Facebook or Cambridge
Analytica; these are merely symptoms of sick system. A system that has
allowed corporations to perfect their marketing tools to the extent that
they can deliver certainty, and the less scrupulous of their political fellow
travellers to dip their hands into the toolbox.
Michael and Morag’s CSR: Community, Service, and
Really Good Fruit and Veg
Still there is hope. Neither Michael or Morag has ever assisted in regime
change or had a difficult customer executed. Nor has either of them
Marketing, Power, and Demise of Democracy
79
knowingly done business with a fascist (although Rodney from up the hill
is rather overfond of flags). Their foreign policy is focused on the vegetable wholesaler in the city 10 miles away, and comprises a three-​point
strategy: (a) arrive early to get the best quality produce, (b) remember
when the school holidays are because that is the only time when the
supermarkets don’t buy up all the Fairtrade bananas, and (c) keeping an
eye out every January for the Seville oranges, which are much loved by
their marmalade making regulars.
Their dealings with politicians are also pretty limited because they
don’t have much power to share, nor any desire to obtain it. Nor has
there been any need to employ a public relations advisor or exploit a
cynically chosen worthy cause to gain their good reputation. Michael
and Morag have got where they are simply by doing their jobs diligently
and honourably. They supply good fruit and veg at a reasonable price,
provide a courteous, efficient service –​and Michael’s jokes are sometimes
funny. As a consequence, they have a longstanding and loyal clientele
and this enables them to earn a decent living. But there are no guaranteed outcomes: theirs is a human endeavour, so things sometimes go
wrong. Far from being terrifying, this is reassuring. They will never be
anything like millionaires –​let alone billionaires –​nor will their shop ever
outgrow even the tiniest country, but they don’t mind in the least –​like
the vast majority of small businesses, they are content to remain small.
Being a successful and respected part of the local community is more than
enough reward.
It’s a lifestyle thing for them and a boon for the community.
This Is About Power
Marketing is a political as well as commercial project. The corporation needs political power to ensure that the decisions government
make favour their business interests. Nationalisation and civil unrest do
threaten profits so they need to be contained. Stakeholder marketing is
used to aid these political ambitions by sprucing up corporate identities
and making multinationals seem like responsible potential partners.
Politicians are willing accomplices in this corporate power-​grab, firstly
because they too have a vested interest in boosting consumption: it creates
jobs, protects tax revenues, and keeps the populace content. They also
covet the corporate marketers ability to control us: political campaigning
and the process of governing itself have developed in lock-​step with corporate marketing. Happy consumers make happy voters: we are lovin’ it;
are worth it and every little helps us to know our place. Digital is taking
this into sinister territory: the guaranteed outcomes delivered by big data,
artificial intelligence, and the algorithm which are enabling Jeff Bezos to
keep us shopping 24/​7 are simultaneously trashing our ability to exercise
80 The Corporate Marketing Machine
our democratic rights. It turns out that ecstatic customers make poor
citizens.
But enough of the money men and their Machiavellian ways. We can
and will resist their power; after all, as that French teenager pointed out
half a millennium ago, we gave it to them in the first place. Let us now
move from the dark side of the moon and into the sunlight of change.
Part II
We Shall Overcome
So we face great problems. Corporate marketers dominate our world
and consumption is spinning out of control, causing immense harm to
us as individuals, to our community, our polity, and the natural world –​
and digital is enhancing their power and compounding the problem with
every passing day. Under their grim tutelage we are consuming our way
to perdition. Nonetheless change is not just possible, it is inevitable. The
idea that demand will always outpace supply is a recipe for perpetual
wanting; for unhappiness. Our hell-​for-​leather consumerism, a way of
life borrowed from the drunken sailor, is reaching its natural limits.
Covid-19 is just the latest of many warnings that nature has had enough.
This means there is hope. For the first time since Henry Ford kick-​started
mass production, corporate consumer capitalism is coming in for serious scrutiny even by its most devout disciples. When no lesser champion
of the free market than the White House proposes global taxes on the
multinationals there is no doubt that change is in the air.
Furthermore, as we noted in the Introduction, despite its seeming
power, the edifice is actually extremely fragile. Corporate marketing is
an elaborate confidence trick designed to convince us, contrary to all
the evidence and every scrap of our common-​sense, that we need ever
more stuff; that happiness comes in a bottle of brown sugar water; that
contentment is delivered in a grinning brown carton –​and the faster the
delivery the happier we will be. It pretends that this exploding profligacy is worth the blatant inequities which see individuals getting richer
than populations and companies outgrowing countries; that the wanton
destruction of nature is justified; that “shop ‘til you drop” is remotely
compatible with the reality of a finite planet. It is a laughable fraud. More
Coke or the survival of the snow leopard? Another SUV or breathable
air? Customer ecstasy or human decency? Who are they trying to kid
And despite all the ingenuity of the corporate marketer, all the charm,
the tricks, the cunning we have rehearsed so far, their campaigns founder
with the simple words “I am content with what I have”. Their algorithms
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82 We Shall Overcome
and guaranteed outcomes evaporate when we see that valentine roses
are not romantic but ecologically and politically abhorrent. The tech
billionaires begin to lose their grip when we remind ourselves that, despite its synthetic cache, our smart phone comes nowhere near making our
lives worth living.
Furthermore, change is nothing new for humankind. We have undergone previous transformations: from hunter gatherer to settled agriculture to industrialisation to digital; from tribe to city state to nation state
to global community; from speaking to writing to printing to posting.
Change, then, is inevitable, it is part of the human condition; the only
question is whether it will be managed and informed by decent values or
chaotic.
It is time to get our alternative ducks in a row.
Chapter 7
Deep in My Heart
History says don’t hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-​for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
Seamus Heaney
When Hope and History Rhyme
Having spent the last 80 pages bigging up the Machiavellian power of
the corporate marketer, I’m now going to poo-poo it, to snap my fingers
at it, to call it out for the phoney pyramid selling, Ponzie scheme that it
is. When we pause to consider, even for a moment, it is obvious that we
can rise above these charlatans with their foolish materialism, their next
offer of illusory happiness. We are human beings, not mere consumers,
intrinsically capable of greatness; Mahatma Gandhis and Rosa Parks, not
Zuckerbergs and Bezos, let alone their playthings.
Even as we say these words the power of the corporate marketers
begins to diminish. Not their power over the system –​their wealth retains
its allure; their profit lines still get deference from the stock exchange –​
but their power over us. This is a vital start because it frees us from their
thrall. From the manipulation and organised lying; the conflict minerals
and sweatshops; the obscene inequalities; the devastation of nature. As
Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury puts it, it helps us
“escape the toxicity of the mindset that brought us to this pass”.1
This liberation is the launchpad of change, connecting us with history
and Seamus Heaney’s “tidal wave of justice”. Two millennia of thinking
show we are capable of being so much better. We have moral agency and
we can make the right choice even when it is the difficult one. Indeed, it is
this capacity and desire, recalling Dante’s words, “to follow after wisdom
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84 We Shall Overcome
and virtue”, to rebel against injustice and malignancy, that makes us
human and cements our collective identity. In the last century this realisation was focused by the terrible events of World War II and led to the formation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Importantly these rights do not just protect us from oppression,
but enshrine in international law our entitlement to be an active participant in the process of progressive change. We now face the existential
crisis of climate breakdown and unsustainability; there has never been a
greater need for our humanity.
Human Beings Not Consumers
The problem for the corporate marketer –​and it is an acute threat to all
their shenanigans –​is that we are human beings not mere consumers, and
are perfectly capable of escaping the “lens of self” David Foster Wallace
warned us about. Indeed, it is the ability to escape our selfishness that
makes us human. As a recent newspaper editorial argued: “We are the
only species capable of reflecting on our impact. We have moral agency.
We can foresee the likely consequences of our actions, consider them,
and then make choices”.2 The editorial pushes us to think through our
personal responsibilities; to consider the consequences, both good and
bad, of our actions; to recognise that “self-​interest will only work to
the common benefit if it is understood that we ourselves are mutually
dependent creatures who harm ourselves when we harm one another”.
We are, as the poet said, masters of our fate and the captains of our soul3;
we are capable of independent critical thought.
Sadly, the corporate marketers have done their jobs well and this moral
agency and critical analysis seems to be in short supply. Lifestyle diseases,
over consumption and our disregard for the environment betray a
disturbing lack of principled analysis, consideration for others or thought
for the future. As the editorial spells out: “In relation to the environment,
these choices have frequently been wrong and show little sign of being
right in time to save us from very large and damaging climate change”.
Interestingly, if applied to individual behaviour like smoking or drinking,
this type of language would quickly attract accusations of victim-​blaming;
but with climate breakdown the victims are the global poor and future
generations. We are also victims of course (we need a habitable planet)
but first and foremost we in the global north are perpetrators.
This suggests that progressive social change depends on reawakening
our moral agency and stimulating our critical faculties. This is not to
understate the importance of addressing social structures and systems, but
simply to recognise that this needs to be balanced by looking inward to the
human qualities that also influence how we behave. What it is about our
make-​up that enables us to feel as well as think, to consider morality in
addition to convenience and to do the right thing not because it is easy, fun,
Deep in My Heart
85
and popular but because it is right. Why are we sometimes able to buck the
unhelpful system –​to resist the marketer’s offer or forgo an appealing but
unnecessary flight –​to succeed despite a deeply flawed context?
These questions matter not least because without such analysis there
is a danger that well-​meaning interventions and systemic changes might
inadvertently result in disempowerment. The idea of “nudging”4 us into
good behaviour falls into this trap. Its advocates favour a system where
desired behaviours –​signing up to a pension scheme, giving blood, organ
donation –​are presented as the obvious, even the default option. You
have to opt out rather than opt in, so for most people there is no decision
at all. This is often very effective; the default wins. But in the process we
lose out on teachable moments and the chance to grasp our own capacity
to take charge of and responsibility for our lifestyles; to exercise our
moral agency. Instead of being the playthings of corporate marketers, we
become the playthings of well-​meaning interventionists. A kinder wizard
but the same sleight of hand.
If This Is a Man
If our behaviour is not simply a function of external stimuli, but also
a product of our internal qualities, we have to understand more about
what these are, about what it is to be human. Primo Levi, the holocaust
survivor, saw Auschwitz as an appalling but brutally effective experiment
which was, inadvertently, capable of answering this question. In his book,
If This Is a Man, he explains how the Nazis set about systematically
dehumanising their victims so as to make it easier to mistreat and murder
them. Life in the camps was deliberately designed to be as unbearable as
possible so prisoners were pushed to behave selfishly, even brutally –​to
emulate their oppressors and abandon their humanity –​in order simply
to survive. And they were utterly defenceless: “we are slaves, deprived
of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death …”
Never had external stimuli been more destructive or debilitating,
yet Levi maintains that the prisoners still possessed a vital level of
agency: “… but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all
our strength for it is the last –​the power to refuse our consent”5 (Levi P
1979). However desperate our plight, we have, as Michel de Montaigne
points out an inner room which we can and must save from violation.
This is our dignity. For Levi it is what makes us human.
Levi also looks to Dante’s Divine Comedy to support his argument.
In his poem, Dante invokes Virgil and the epic journey of Ulysses. At
one point the Greek hero seeks to embolden his men for the next stage
of their voyage by calling on them to: “Look inward, to your origins.
For brutish ignorance your mettle was not made; you were made human
to follow after wisdom and virtue”.6 The words have a profound effect
on his men who become more than willing to continue their “foolhardy
86 We Shall Overcome
journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules” (symbolising the dangerous
unknown)7 because it offered the promise of wisdom. The power of the
words was not a tribute to Ulysses’ oratory, but confirmation that he was
appealing to their irreducible humanity. Beings of their (our) mettle could
do no other.
Two crucial messages emerge. First our internal drivers need to be
focused on human betterment. In Dante’s words we humans are made
“to follow after wisdom and virtue”. Second this quest will not be easy.
It requires effort, hard work, the overcoming of adversity. It is also an
endless task: “the search for meaning is itself the meaning”.8 But, at the
same time it is essential to our humanity: “the man who lives and does
not strive is lost”.9
Despite the challenges, the effort brings immediate relief. We are facing
up to something which we know is deeply unjust and profoundly unsustainable. We know about the sweatshops and deforestation. As Rowan
Williams points out, it helps us deal with the resulting internal conflicts,
the guilt and discomfort of material gain on the back of others suffering –​
to escape the toxicity of the corporate mindset.
It also builds a launchpad for change. The idea of striving is the complete antithesis of corporate marketing. A consumer society like ours,
where every little helps and happiness is simply unbottled, is designed to
remove the need for any striving. Obstacles become new product development opportunities and shopping the means of satisfying them. There
is no need to embrace toil and adversity when the dominant narrative is
of customer service and perpetual satisfaction. When we are told all the
time that we are worth it, are lovin’ it.
When we reconnect with our humanity the marketers slick
blandishments lose their power.
Fairtrade
The Fairtrade movement is a great example of how this works in practice.
It’s simple but immensely powerful principle is that farmers in the global
south deserve a decent return for their produce. A decent return means
not just enough to keep going but enough to generate a surplus that can
be ploughed back into community development –​health care, education, infrastructure. This premium is guaranteed, as is its use for human
betterment. Fairtrade works extremely well and is making an immense
difference to the quality of life of many farmers and their families.
It is possible to see Fairtrade as a small affair, and hence something
of a sideshow. A bit of feel-​good but nothing to frighten the horses.
The UK, for example, is a world leader in this movement, but still has a
very limited number of product categories in which it is practised. And
the biggest penetration, by far, is for bananas and coffee –​both at only
20%. Pin pricks, hardly even felt by the corporate marketer, which can
Deep in My Heart
87
be turned into PR opportunities with their own not-​so-​fair trade CSR
schemes.
However, this misses a crucial point. The 20% penetration of Fairtrade
serves to underline the exploitative system underpinning the other 80%
of our bananas and coffee –​and virtually 100% of everything else. If all
this stuff is not fairly traded, it must be unfairly traded. This is an outrage which demands radical change. Given the world’s immense income
inequalities, how can the rich north ever justify short-​changing the poor
south? How can such injustice, such callousness sit alongside slick slogans
about happiness, help, and self-​worth?
We are trained from an early age to look after number one; to seek that
bargain, to check our change. Caveat emptor is the selfish foundation
stone of corporate marketing. Fairtrade inverts the formula, encouraging
us to think about the producer instead; reminding us that a bargain isn’t
a bargain if it comes at the cost of decency. This has the potential to seed
revolution.
Revolution
The revolution starts by changing us. Once we start to think beyond
ourselves this doesn’t just make us critical about the exploitation
of sub-​
Saharan farmers but the other inequities of our economic
system: the unacceptable working conditions in rich as well as poor
countries; the inherent dishonesty of advertising; the stupidity of
supermarkets stocking 40,000 product lines; the unfairness of the CEO’s
grossly inflated pay cheques; the futility of materialism … All the tricks
and flaws of corporate marketing which we rehearsed in the first part of
the book. It alerts us fish to the dirtiness of the water in which we swim.
This changes everything.
Learning from the Abolitionists
William Wilberforce is often given the credit for the abolition of slavery,
and there is no doubt that he and his colleagues do deserve a lot of credit.
However, the other heroes of the hour were people like us; ordinary citizens.
Wilberforce himself recognised that nothing would be achieved without
public support and in the dramatic speech to the House of Commons,
with which he launched the campaign, he called on the British citizenry
with the ringing phrase: “we ought all to plead guilty”,10 invoking both
the moral and practical imperative of grass roots involvement.
The challenge was truly daunting. In 1787, when the anti-​
slavery
movement began, there were actually more slaves than free people in the
world. Furthermore, slavery represented massive economic interests: in
the UK with its growing Empire, nearly 2% of Gross Domestic Product
was at stake. Wilberforce and his eight colleagues used many modern
88 We Shall Overcome
campaigning techniques. They had a clear vision, “drawing connections
between the near and the distant”, for what they wanted to achieve.
This was converted into achievable, pragmatic objectives –​the cessation
of trading rather than complete emancipation (the former would inevitably lead to the latter anyway). They recognised that success would
take time (eight of the nine originators were dead by the time their aim
was accomplished) and hence progress needed continuous monitoring to
inform adjustments to the strategy. Mass media communications were
deployed to great effect, and they weren’t afraid to use highly emotional
appeals as the text of a typical campaign leaflet shows:
A woman was one day brought to us to be sold; she came with a child
in her arms. The captain refused to purchase her on that account, not
wishing to be plagued with a child on board; in consequence of that
she was taken back to the shore. On the following morning, however, she was again brought to us, but without the child, and she was
apparently in great sorrow. The black trader who brought her on
board said that the child had been killed in the night to accommodate
us in the sale.
(Smith11)
But the most important factor in their success was the role played by
ordinary people. Abolition movements were established in towns across
the country. These encouraged critical thinking, drawing “the dramatic,
direct connection between British daily life and that of slaves”. Tea, that
quintessentially British symbol of civilised domesticity, became “the
blood stained beverage”. This critical thinking was converted into direct
action –​fundraising, letter writing to political representatives, petitions,
protests, fliers, public meetings, and boycotts of sugar and tea. Sugar
sales, for example, slumped by a third as 300,000 people stopped using
it in order to dissociate themselves from slavery.12 The result was an
unstoppable force and, despite the special pleading and massive commercial interests, the government simply had to move. A leading newspaper
of the time expressed it trenchantly: “the sense of the people has pressed
abolition on our rulers”.13
This is how social movements work. As Margaret Mead said “never
believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For indeed that’s
all who ever have”.
And so to Human Rights
Thus, focusing on the individual or the small scale is not to deny the
importance of the collective, but rather to reinforce it. Once we start
to look critically at our society, it pushes us to consider others. If I am
Deep in My Heart
89
unhappy with the effects the system is having on me, at the same instant
I come to recognise that others are also suffering. If, like Nye Bevan,
my father dies of pneumoconiosis I begin to empathise with the fate of
other coalminers and the health needs of everyone, or if a car knocks
me off my bike the benefits of cycle paths for all become more apparent.
French philosopher Albert Camus is precise about this, arguing that
whilst our suffering in the face of a world that is difficult to understand
and often unsympathetic (as he put it “absurd”) is individual, once we
begin to criticise and act on these criticisms –​that is, to rebel –​it inevitably becomes collective. The stimulus to mitigate our individual hardship
connects us with the humanity of others; the individual harm becomes
a shared harm. Much as Descartes argued that our desire and ability to
think demonstrates our individual existence, so Camus sees our desire
and ability to rebel as proof of our collective existence. “I think therefore
I am” is joined by “I rebel therefore we are”.14
Camus and Levi were writing in the immediate aftermath of the
Second World War; a time when it was recognised that there had been
a profound failure of moral agency and there was a desperate hunger to
prevent any repetition of the holocaust and its related horrors. In this
context, the idea that all human beings have the same fundamental qualities, share an “inherent dignity”, and are equal “members of the human
family”15 had powerful resonance. The view developed that the protection and nurturing of these qualities, and recognition of them as inalienable moral and legal rights was the only progressive way forward. Under
the auspices of the newly formed United Nations this resulted in The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Human rights reinforce the importance of moral agency: “the nature
that underlies natural or human rights is the moral nature of a human
being” and they emphasise the idea of human potential: “human rights
are less about the way people are than about what they might become”.16
Human rights law can provide an environment in which this potential
can be fulfilled, but in and of itself will not stimulate people to take up
the resulting opportunities for personal growth. For this to happen people
have to be recognised as active participants in the process of change.
The Right to be a Nuisance
For this reason, human rights legislation overtly enshrines it as a right
that all of us should be able to participate in the process of change, from
instigation right through to monitoring and evaluation. Here is the United
Nations explaining these principles in its Right To Food Guidelines:
The process of designing and implementing [interventions] should
also respect participatory principles and empower intended
90 We Shall Overcome
beneficiaries, who should be explicitly recognized as stakeholders
… Fundamentally, a human rights based approach to poverty is
about empowerment of the poor … This focus on the poor and the
needy for their empowerment is amply reflected in calls … for those
targeted to have a say in how services are provided, and for poor
communities to be empowered to control the way money set aside
for them is spent17 (emphasis added).
Thus, the idea of partnership working is not just encouraged, it is laid
down in international law.
The prize for doing this is indeed worth the winning: “… human
development is possible only through comprehensive human action
coordinated by human rights”. However, it carries with it risks as well
as benefits: “The ‘human nature’ that underlies human rights is quintessentially human, full of frailties but also fraught with the possibility of
the greatest glory. Human rights are a practical political institution for
widely realising these higher potentials …”.18 As the liberation theologist
argued: “it is not about giving them a fish; it is not even about teaching
them to fish –​it is about returning the river to their care”.19 We need to
remember that we all have responsibility for the river.
Popular engagement in social change is also an important safety
measure. Without it, human rights legislation risks becoming pious sentiment, or worse doing actual harm. Vanessa Pupavac,20 for example,
explains how over-​zealous application by adults of the child’s right to
safety has dangerously constrained play, reducing school playtimes and
even eliminating unsupervised play altogether: “Panics over strangers,
concerns about environmental dangers, potential litigation over accidents
(however remote) and fears over bullying are all leading to a constriction of children’s play”. The negative consequences included isolation,
obesity, and mental illness.
The way to prevent this type of unintended harm is to encourage
everyone –​including children –​to join the debate. This also means that
the ensuing change will benefit from a bigger pool of ideas; given the
complexity of the problems we now face, such creativity is vital.
Thinking like an Ecosystem
We also need to think beyond human rights, to the rights and requirements
of other creatures and nature as a whole. To recognise that we are part of
an ecosystem in a mutually sustaining relationship with our environment,
both living and non-​living. This interconnection is naturally occurring,
and depends on balance: if one species becomes too dominant or the
physical environment changes, the ecosystem automatically corrects
itself. When human beings try to interfere with these processes –​like
Deep in My Heart
91
when we introduced cane toads (for pest control) and rabbits (for food)
into Australia –​the result is usually calamitous. This is why Robert
Bringhurst argues that each of us should try to “think like an ecosystem
instead of like a disconnected visitor”21 (or a corporate marketer or a
consumer). Only when we connect with our environment can we see our
part in it.
The modern business corporation is the exact opposite of an ecosystem: it is a human construct that deliberately discounts its own
harmful effects. The extraction of natural resources is an unquestioned
right; pollution and resource depletion are categorised as externalities to
keep them off the balance sheets; lung cancer and obesity are ignored or
denied. To quote Rowan Williams again, it conceives of a world “made
up of dead stuff plus active minds and acquisitive wills”.22 The corporate
marketers’ job, as we have rehearsed, is to make all this seem perfectly
reasonable and, indeed, immensely appealing.
Calling them out and deconstructing the toxic narrative of being
worth it, of lovin it, helps us to realise that the planet is not just there
for our convenience, to supply our needs, wants, and whims. That it
is not just some oversized supermarket, but a complex, interdependent
web which enables the animate and inanimate to progress in harmony.
Paradoxically, humility about our role in this ecosystem helps us connect
with our humanity; only when we accept we are part of nature, not its
master, can we grow and fulfil our potential.
Riding Heaney’s Tidal Wave
We are so much more than consumers. We have moral agency: the ability
to judge right from wrong and the capacity to act accordingly, regardless
of adversity. This combination of morality and striving is not just a useful
coping strategy; it is what defines us as human beings. It is what we mean
when we talk of human dignity, of the human spirit or simply humanity.
In the last century we so valued these qualities that we came together as
a species to enshrine them as inalienable rights and commit their protection to international law. Sustainability demands that other species and
the natural world be treated with the same respect. Thus moral agency
underpins our humanity, our collective consciousness, and so inevitably
our place in nature.
However, our thraldom to the corporate marketer and
hyperconsumption has driven us the brink of catastrophe. The planet is
groaning under the strain of our neediness and greed. We must continue
to deconstruct, critique, and rebel. The indigenous Americans personify
nature and call her Pachamama (Mother Earth). We need to learn to
honour, not fight, her; she clearly isn’t lovin it, and may soon decide we
aren’t worth it.
92 We Shall Overcome
The going will not be easy. It means profound changes to our way of
life and therefore overcoming powerful vested interest. Starting a revolution is hard; keeping it going is harder; winning it is harder still. Then the
hard work begins. But this, thankfully, is what it means to be a human
being. Every creature has its purpose: wasps eat garden pests, maggots
breakdown carcasses, marron grass binds the sand dune. Human beings
should use their big brains not to turn another dollar, but to determine
how to make the world better for all and to ready ourselves for history’s
tidal wave of justice.
Consumers can’t ride this wave; only human beings can. And to do so
we need to join forces.
Chapter 8
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
the aim should be to produce the maximum of wellbeing for the
minimum of consumption.
(Fritz Schumacher)1
Down at the King’s Head
The first pub I ever frequented was run by Wilf and Doris Sheffield.
I can remember being in there the week before Christmas when Wilf
was explaining to a few locals why, unlike other businesses, he would be
opening on the 25th. “If someone needs somewhere to go on Christmas
Day, Doris and I will be ready to welcome them –​and we’ll be doing our
roast beef sandwiches” (Doris’s complementary sarnies were a legend
which only came out on special occasions). At the time it struck me as a
warm-​hearted gesture, but with hindsight it is clear that Wilf and Doris
really understood their customers. They knew that many of them lived
alone and that for them a family dominated festival like Christmas could
be a very lonely time. They saw their role as offering them support.
Wilf and Doris are long gone, but their spirit lives on. My current
local is run by Mary, a landlady who is just as impressive. She not only
knows our names, but our concerns and triumphs, our insecurities and
successes. And like Wilf and Doris, she doesn’t just sell us beer, she gives
us support. Mary is an experienced and very able publican, and this
inevitably means she is also a first-​rate marketer. I don’t mean that she
has been to Harvard Business School or got an MBA. I mean she is an
instinctive marketer, like Morag and Michael, who just gets it –​as so
many other small businesses have down the millennia. Her job makes her
presciently observant so she thoroughly understands the people (they are
so much more than customers) she serves. She is not running her pub just
to make money, but also because she wants to provide a caring service
and contribute to the –​to her –​community.
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94 We Shall Overcome
She is free to do this because, unlike a corporation, she doesn’t have
investors breathing down her neck or worries about her share value
dipping. Nor is she exceptional: all good publicans are like this –​and
bad ones don’t last very long. This may seem like an odd proposition,
given the public health problems associated with booze, but actually
the hazards only underline the immense benefits that come from Mary’s
breadth of values. When a product causes illness and addiction on the
scale which alcohol does, we desperately need people dispensing it who
are concerned with more than profit maximisation.
The worth of the responsible publican is well known to public health
researchers. When they are trying to devise potential interventions or guide
support services for people with alcohol difficulties they need to interview
problem drinkers, but finding them can be difficult. Alcohol problems
are often well disguised –​and even alcoholism can be kept out of sight.
Two groups can and do help here: local doctors and local publicans. Both
groups know who needs support and are motivated to help them find it.
Sadly, beyond the local pub, the alcohol business is dominated by
multinational corporations, with their unblinking focus on profit. Try
asking them about problem drinkers and all you will get is denial and
obfuscation, because their profits depend them. A recent study shows that
in England two thirds of alcohol purchases are made by heavy drinkers,
and that “the heaviest drinking 4% of the population account for 30%
of all consumption and 23% of all industry revenue”.2 The same pattern
is apparent in Australia.3 This is a global phenomenon and explains the
3 million annual deaths WHO attributes to booze.4
Marketing for the Angels
So marketing wasn’t invented by corporations or professors of business; it
has just been purloined by them. It only becomes toxic when it is warped
by their immense power and deployed with their psychopathic intent;
when marketing becomes corporate marketing. It is time we reclaimed it.
We can do this in two ways.
First, we must rid ourselves of corporate marketing and find more
useful endeavours for the hapless legions of adland. In previous chapters
we have noted marketing’s remarkable power to influence our consumption behaviour –​to keep us wanting, shopping, and buying. This is
causing such mayhem because of the pathological focus on profit; we will
explore what might happen if this fixation were changed to put people
and the planet first.
Second, we can think more broadly about the potential uses of
marketing. Time and again the most pressing human problems can be
traced back to our behaviour. Racism, pollution, crime, pandemics, war,
domestic violence are all in the final analysis a function of human conduct,
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
95
and marketing is a well-​proven means of influencing our behaviour. Why
then not apply it to other more important behaviours than shopping –​
how we drive, treat each other, become and remain good citizens? This
chapter also looks at this idea of “social marketing”, asking the question
posed by General Booth a century ago: why should the devil have all the
best tunes? His Salvation Army has thrived ever since, become an enormous force for good and bequeathed us an invaluable lesson.
Rethinking Corporate Marketing
As Climate Scientist Steve Emmett said a decade ago “we need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-​shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer”.5
The last thing we need then is the Bernays-​inspired corporate marketing
machine hectoring us to do the exact opposite. The whole edifice needs to
be decommissioned; systematically demolished and assigned to the skip
of history marked “really, really stupid things we once did”. It would not
even be a particularly radical move: as we noted in Chapter 4, with the
help of young people, we have done for cigarettes and so saved a generation from the clutches of Big Tobacco. We know it makes sense; we
know it works: it is time to get rid of corporate marketing.
However, on its own this will probably not be enough. A 100 years of
organised lying and the rest have left us parlous. Consumption has become
such a big focus of our lives it is difficult to imagine it becoming peripheral. Brands have entered our bloodstream. Influencers are our friends.
Michael Rosen explains that “fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore
your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job”;
it deliberately hides all the downsides “militias, mass imprisonments,
transportations, war and persecution”.6 So, it is with corporate marketing
and we will need help to kick our carefully seeded materialistic habits.
So maybe we shouldn’t just ditch the marketers, but retrain them to
better purpose. Instead of lauding us and our acquisitiveness, all their creativity, ingenuity, and imagination should be redeployed in the service of
the planet. To get us to consume not more and more, but less and better.
“The aim”, as Schumacher argues, “should be to produce the maximum
of wellbeing for the minimum of consumption”7 and so encourage “the
development of a lifestyle which accords material things their proper,
legitimate place, which is secondary and not primary”.8 The machinery
of marketing can and should be refitted to drive this revolution.
Fewer and Better Products
A recent study published in Nature9 notes that in 2020 the amount of
stuff we humans produce exceeded the natural biomass for the first time.
96 We Shall Overcome
In other words, all the cars, plastic containers, asphalt, tech devices,
shopping trollies, and other props we need to live as hyperconsumers –​
along with the associated waste –​now weighs more than all the life, plant
and animal, on earth. Plastic alone outweighs animals two to one. The
proportion was only 3% in 1900, and, if we continue as we are, there
will be three times as much stuff as life by 2040. We have to start asking
questions about how much of this stuff we really need, and whether it
should be produced in the first place. The current system of “if I can
produce it and you will buy it, off we go” is clearly untenable.
In a consumer society like ours limiting choice seems like heresy, but
actually there is a long tradition of controlling what products can be
developed and launched onto the market. In different parts of the world,
for instance, guns are tightly controlled, drugs and alcohol are completely
prohibited, and pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated. These constraints
exist because the products in question are deemed to have high collateral
costs. They cause disease, offend religious sensitivities or threaten real
harm if not used with great care. Given the problems of climate breakdown and planetary destruction we have to start defining these so-​called
externalities much more broadly. We need, for example, to accept that
any consumption decision uses up carbon, and therefore has implications
for our planetary health. Consequently, any new product should be justified: is it worth the carbon it will cost?
There are two ways of proceeding from here. One is simply to calculate
the full externalities of any product and make sure these are fully paid
for by the producer. The tobacco pandemic again provides a precedent.
In 2010, the European Commission ordered a review of the ways it could
reduce the harm being caused by smoking. One very straightforward
option which the consulting group suggested was to invoke “the polluter
pays principle” and “internalise the external health costs of smoking by
requiring full liability and payment of the health costs of smoking by
the tobacco industry to national health systems”.10 The report estimated
these costs to be approximately one billion euros a year and that requiring
tobacco multinationals to honour this debt would reduce smoking by a
quarter. As for the smoker’s lungs, so for the planet.
The other option is to calculate the externalities and decide which are
worth paying and which not. The oil industry is a good example. We have
reached a point where many are now calling for an end to the trade in oil,
and its replacement by sustainable sources of energy. This can’t be done
overnight –​some process of transition is needed. But the closing down
of the oil corporations could happen much more quickly if we began
by putting an end to all the consumer and stakeholder marketing that
continues to make SUVs the most popular car, long haul holidays aspirational and politicians amenable to such madness. This persuasive effort
could then be put behind sustainable alternatives such as public transport
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
97
and cycling. We can expect a fight though; when the citizens jury on
the climate crisis, set up by President Macron in France, recommended
just such controls, the corporate lobbyists went into overdrive and the
Elysée back tracked on its promise to take action.11 The promised law
was replaced with a toothless voluntary agreement.
Aynuk’s ‘Ammer
Products that make it through this selection process should come with
a lifetime guarantee. In the old Black Country joke, Aynuk says to his
friend Ayli “this is the best ‘ammer I’ve ever ‘ad –​three new ‘eads and four
new ‘andles”. All products should be like Aynuk’s hammer. The horrors
of single-​use and built-​in obsolescence should be replaced by designed
reparability, reusability, and recyclability. Manufacturers and consumers
should be required to take responsibility for products throughout their
life course. Both they and we should stop thinking in terms of ownership,
and remember that everything we have is borrowed from Pachamama.
When all we ever give her in return is pollution and waste, it is unsurprising that she is getting grumpy.
The service economy has to become equally respectful of nature. This
will force some hard decisions: long haul holidays and cruises on diesel
belching floating cities are no longer tenable. On the other hand, ecological alternatives will become more attractive and aspirational as our
sensitivity to and appreciation of the environment increases. Again the
admen have a potentially valuable role to play here, helping us to reconnect with Pachamama.
People and Planet-​c entred Advertising
More broadly, advertising and all the other forms of marketing communication should be designed to help us make responsible and better-​
informed decisions about our purchases: what, and crucially whether,
we buy. To do this we need factual and verifiable information about the
tangible characteristics of a given product or service. Forget the celebrity endorsements or manicured brand images; stop attaching enticing
symbolic meanings to consumption. Just provide the facts needed to
help people to decide whether or not to buy. In France, the Loi Evin12
has required alcohol advertisers to follow just such a regimen and it
has worked well for the last 30 years. If you want to promote booze
you have to restrict yourself to making verifiable statements about the
characteristics of your wine, beer, or spirit –​such as its alcoholic strength,
grape variety, ingredients, flavour, and place of origin. And you also need
to explain the downsides of consumption –​the damage to health that
alcohol can cause. In other words, the advertiser must provide all the
98 We Shall Overcome
information needed to make a rational decision for or against consumption. The virulent resistance of the alcohol multinationals13 to this perfectly reasonable measure shows how warped things have become; in a
crazy system common sense becomes a revolutionary force.
The Loi Evin is limited to alcohol and focusses specifically on public
health. It does not address broader issues like sustainability or fairness.
But it does demonstrate that advertising can be detoxified; it just needs
the political will (the law is named for the farsighted and determined
health minister who introduced it). We need, then, a Loi Evin not just
for alcohol but for all products and services –​as the French NGO SPIM
has cogently argued.14 All marketing communications should stick to
provable facts. Furthermore advertisers should not just be required
to tell the truth, but the whole truth. When they are devising a campaign, advertising agencies will typically make a note of what they call
“mandatories” –​items such as the client’s logo or mission statement
that have to be included in the proposed ad. These mandatories should
henceforth be required to focus on the needs, not of the advertiser, but
we people and our obligation to shop responsibly. For every potential
purchase decision, we have to be given full information on such things
as whether the producers have been properly treated, animal welfare
provisions, pollution hazards and, above all, the product’s carbon footprint. This last needs to cover the entire product life cycle, from raw
material, through manufacture, distribution, sale, use, and ultimate
recycling. Only when we are armed with this information can we make
responsible consumption decisions.
Price and Place
We need to approach price and place with exactly the same clarity and
determination. Both these marketing tools should also be devoted to
helping us become more responsible: to consume less and do so more
ethically. The practice of pricing products on the basis of perceived value
rather than actual costs of production has to end. We need to start putting
values ahead of value. When we buy something, we have to know that all
those in the supply chain are being well treated and paid. For example,
a simple graphic will quickly show us that the farmer gets less than 7%
of the profit from a chocolate bar, and less than 3% of the price of a cup
of coffee,15 and such unfairness causes real hardship. We also need to
remember that there is, as with advertising and the Loi Evin, a well-​tested
alternative –​this time in the Fairtrade movement (see Chapter 7). The
aim should be to make all trade fair; the fact that as things stand, most
trade is unfair is a shocking reality we all need to face because only then
will it change. Common decency, along with common sense, is a revolutionary force.
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
99
We are not good at judging prices, and are readily fooled by price
promotions; as we have seen corporate marketers can manipulate our
shopping baskets with relative ease. All this influence, which is currently
being used to get us to behave badly in the interest of short-​term profits,
should be used to encourage us to behave well in the interests of long-​
term human and planetary wellbeing. We should be rewarded for consuming less not more; healthy options should be cheaper than unhealthy
ones; BOGOFs should incentivise carbon saving.
Exactly the same arguments apply to point-​of-​sale activity and store
design. Shops should be designed with people and the planet in mind,
not the shareholder’s returns or the CEO’s bonus. The prime spots in
the shop should go to Fairtrade items, low impact products and locally
grown produce. And the onus should be firmly on the marketer to prove
that his or her efforts will have beneficial outcomes physically, socially,
and ecologically. Marketing that does not have such provenance is both
manipulative and dangerous; it should be outlawed.
Coming Back Brockens 16
These suggestions may seem dramatic and far-​reaching, but again they
are nothing new. The idea of controlling our economic system and
ensuring that it is really working for the common good is as old as industrialisation. The risks taken in the early foundries, mines, and factories
would make our hair stand on end today. Highly dangerous practices
that were barely even recognised as such, let alone guarded against, were
common.
“Coming back brockens” is a case in point. In the early days of the
Durham coalfields in the Northeast of England, the pits comprised a
central vertical shaft which, as it was sunk, passed through horizontal
seams of coal. The miners worked out along these seams leaving in place
columns of coal to hold up the roof. Once they reached the limits of
the seam they returned to the central shaft, removing the columns as
they came, because the mine owners wanted every scrap of coal they
could get. This was called “coming back brockens”. The miners’ great
skill was to judge just how much pillar they could remove without the
roof collapsing. The dangers involved are demonstrated by the fact that
“coming back brockens” was only practised in coalfields with no habitation up above.
This hazardous method of working has, along with child chimney
sweeps, been completely outlawed by modern health and safety regimes.
Now, in the early years of the 21st century, we are just becoming aware
of the full hazards of marketing. The promotional equivalents of child
chimney sweeps and coming back brockens are becoming more apparent,
and we need to take action swiftly and resolutely to control them.
100 We Shall Overcome
Currently, with a few exceptions like tobacco and pharmaceuticals,
what little marketing regulation there is comprises voluntary measures
and self-​managed codes. If someone were to propose that the UK should
repeal the Factory Acts and replace them with a voluntary code on child
labour, he or she would be a laughing stock.
Michael, Morag, and Mary Are Beautiful
It is then perfectly possible to turn corporate marketing into a benign
force. It is just a matter of changing the driver from the proliferation of
profit to the wellbeing of people and the planet. However, in and of itself
this will not do enough to tackle the problem of corporate power. Even if
they are of benign intent, there will always be problems when companies
outgrow countries. The tech giants and supermarkets lack democratic
accountability, give disproportionate rewards to those at the top and
have far too much influence.
Once again, Fritz Schumacher is right: small is beautiful. Small
businesses are no more perfect than any other human construct, but
their smallness saves them from ever doing much harm. They lack the
power to hurt and have a strong incentive to behave well –​they won’t
survive otherwise. Street markets, small shops, an independently run
hospitality sector are the lifeblood of any community. They are not
just businesses, but friends and neighbours with a vested interest in the
welfare of the locality because they live there. They also pay their taxes
and spend their profits locally, rather than syphoning them off to distant corporate HQs.
We should then be supporting these enterprises as much as possible.
By we, I mean us citizens, who should always prefer the small local shops
and providers over the supermarkets and multinationals. We should give
a big thank you to Michael, Morag, and Mary and back them with our
custom. I also mean policymakers who should devise systems of regulation and taxation that favour the small and make sure that the big
players pay their way. The current tax evasion by the multinationals
is completely unacceptable, and recent moves to tackle it a very welcome start.
There are also real signs of hope online. Tim Berners-​Lee dream of the
internet as a public resource that can support communities and small
business is still alive, as the examples in “The Box of Hope” show. As a
comment on the Ethical Consumer site puts it:
I think we’re realising how seriously our system has failed us and
that’s really, really scary, but I think the other side of that is that it’s
pushing people to make positive steps, and they want to feel back in
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
101
Box of Hope: Small really is beautiful1
Know the Origini
Ethical Consumerii
Know the Origin began in response to Ethical Consumer began as a magazine in
the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory
1989 and is an independent, not-​for-​
in Bangladesh in which over 1,100
profit, multi-​stakeholder co-​operative
workers were killed, including children. with open membership. Its main
The online shop opened in 2016 and sells goal is to make global businesses
190+​sustainable brands. Products are
more sustainable through consumer
ethically sourced with a transparent
pressure.
supply chain.
The magazine includes detailed
Products include: men’s and women’s
information on products and
clothing, bathroom, homeware, beauty, companies, using a points and traffic
cleaning products, craft kits, chocolate, lights system to rate their ethical
tea and coffee, stationery, tech
practices. Each issue highlights different
accessories, plastic free items.
business sectors, such as financial
services, tech or white goods.
iii
Real Seeds
Fairphoneiv
Real Seeds is an organic farm in Wales Fairphone began in 2013; its values
powered by 100% renewable energy.
are: responsible sourcing (it
All their plants are open-​pollinated,
uses Fairtrade gold and recycled
so are not hybrid or GM. This
materials); workers’ welfare (factory
means that seeds can be collected
workers get a living wage bonus);
for subsequent planting. Real Seeds
sustainability; product longevity;
explain how to do this, as well as
moving towards a circular economy
offering advice for beginners and
by encouraging recycling, reusing, and
experienced gardeners on organics
reparability (the latest phone comes
and self-​sufficiency.
with a screwdriver) and a transparent
There are no shareholders and all
supply chain.
directors and staff are paid the same Fairphone has a forum in which people
hourly wage. The company mission is
can help one another to resolve
not to maximise profits, but to supply
issues, buy or sell second-​hand
quality seeds to home gardeners and
Fairphones and/​or parts and discuss
to educate people about home seed-​
the industry. A network of volunteer
saving. There are reduced postage
super-​helpers –​Fairphone Angels and
costs for the low and unwaged, and
Community Forum Leaders –​give
plastic packaging is minimised.
assistance to Fairphoners in their
area, online, or face-​to-​face.
1
i
ii
iii
iv
With thanks to Sarah Aldred
https://​knowtheorigin.com
www.ethicalconsumer.org/​
www.realseeds.co.uk
fairphone.com/​en/​
control of the choices they’re making and I think that’s kind of where
Ethical Consumer comes in; people want to be able to make positive
lifestyle choices and move forwards, and they want the information
to be able to do that reliably.17
102 We Shall Overcome
Reclaiming the Devil’s Tunes
Having reformed and contained the corporate marketers to make them a
force for good, we can now turn to General Booth’s idea of stealing their
clothes –​or, more accurately, reclaiming them. Of using marketing ideas
and tools to influence far more important behaviours than shopping.
At base any society comprises a group of individuals attempting to
rub along together, to work out how they can maximise mutual benefits
without undermining the individual; how they can exchange and do
deals in a way that suits both –​indeed multiple –​parties. I respect my
neighbour’s privacy and property in part because I want her to respect
mine; she will moderate her love for heavy metal because she wants me
to resist using my lawn mower at dawn. All but the most antisocial of us
understand this quid pro quo.
In particular, the smooth running of any democratic system depends
on people willingly living their lives in a way that serves both personal
and collective needs; on compromise and mutually beneficial exchange.
Criminal justice, international diplomacy, the democratic process itself
all depend on voluntary, cooperative behaviour; on give and take. If
mutual interests aren’t properly served, any group enterprise ultimately
fractures and fails. Dialogue falters, culture wars break out and real ones
become that bit more likely.
Nowhere are the dangers of such failure more apparent than with
climate breakdown. Pachamama, the natural world and our fellow
creatures, are part of our collective human project and their needs and
interests also have to be given due consideration. They have a right to
our empathy and respect. They have had neither; they have been cheated
and short-​changed and as a direct result, catastrophe is staring us in
the face.
So, we badly need the grist and lubricant to human interaction which
marketing can provide. Not commercial marketing, with its focus on
our consumption behaviour, but “social marketing” which uses similar
principles to influence our social and health behaviours for the benefit
of all –​the individual, the community, and the planet. Thus, whilst a
tobacco marketer uses marketing to pull a teen into smoking regardless of the health harms because she then becomes a long-​term source of
profit, a social marketer will use marketing tools to discourage tobacco
use: to inform her of the risks, to debunk the industry’s lies, to empower
her to say no. In the first case, the shareholder is the only certain winner,
in the second the teenager, society, and the environment all stand to gain.
I used the word similar, rather than identical, because the intent behind
the campaign creates an all-​
important distinction between the two
branches of marketing. As we noted in Chapter 1, the fiduciary imperative –​the obligation on the corporation to put their shareholders’ interests
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
103
ahead of all others –​means that corporate marketers all too easily slip
into manipulation. When problems with their products emerge, be it the
health-​harms of alcohol or the ecological harms of oil, the instinctive
response, as we have noted, is to protect profits with denial and dissembling. When new regulation threatens sales, the immediate reaction
is resistance however socially beneficial the proposed rules may be. To
return to Joel Bakan’s metaphor, the psychopath will out.
Social marketing, by contrast, sets out, not to boost profits, but to
improve the lot of a particular individual or group. To help the smoker
to quit, or the gambler to control their betting. This purer motive doesn’t
stop them from making mistakes; from being patronising, for example,
or devising interventions that don’t work. Nor does it stop them from
producing wrong-​headed or unnecessary campaigns. To err is human,
and there will be ethical dilemmas with any attempt to alter or influence
human behaviour. But it does ensure that social marketers are systematically focused on human betterment; they are at least trying to do good
and not just make money.
How to Sell Brotherhood like Soap
There is ample evidence to show that social marketing works on lots of
different behaviours –​our inclination and capacity to take exercise, eat
healthily, behave ecologically, respect others.18 It is perfectly possible, as
one early proponent put it, to sell brotherhood like soap.19 The fact that
commercial marketing has done such harm, as we rehearsed in first part
of the book, turning us into thoughtless hyperconsumers, only serves to
underline its power to bring about change. It is a tool like any other, and
can be used for good or ill. An axe can clear a path or kill a man; the
same engine powers a tank and an ambulance. It is up to us to choose
our tools and use them wisely. General Booth touched on a profound
truth: the commercial marketers’ capacity to bring about voluntary
behaviour change is far too valuable to be limited to the market place.
Social marketing begins in exactly the same place as its commercial cousin: with an understanding of “the customer”; the people with
whom you want to do business. If you want to get someone to change
their behaviour, you need to start by seeing the world as they see it and
so get to know their reasons for behaving as they currently do. Their
motivations and intentions, their hopes and dreams. Just as the tobacco
industry has always invested heavily in research to understand young
people so they can make their products more appealing to them, so
social marketers need to do the same if they are going to devise and offer
appealing alternatives.
The Truth campaign is an excellent case in point. It began in Florida,
where, 20 years ago, funds for fighting youth smoking released by litigation
104 We Shall Overcome
against the tobacco industry were used to do some in-​depth research with
teenagers. The researchers talked to smokers and non-​smokers to gauge
knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour regarding tobacco. This revealed
that they knew full-​well about the health consequences of smoking, but
didn’t give them much moment. At their age they had little grasp of their
own mortality and even less inclination to think about an elevated risk
of heart disease and cancer that might strike decades hence. It was soon
clear to the research team that traditional public health messages about
the dangers of smoking –​blackened lungs and coffins –​would have little
traction.
By contrast the deceit and duplicity of the tobacco industry did strike a
chord. W B Yeats pointed out that education is not about filling buckets
but lighting fires, and teaching the young Floridians about Big Tobacco’s
systematic malfeasance started a conflagration. They were already critical of the adult world, and when they had the long list of industry sins
explained to them –​the lies, the denial, the manipulation of nicotine, the
deliberate targeting of kids like them –​this added incendiary fuel to their
inclination to rebel. The Truth campaign was born.
The research also showed that, as with the Greta Thunberg generation,
this was far from being a passive target group who needed adults –​however well meaning –​telling them what to do. Little would be achieved
by a public health equivalent of the Marlboro cowboy ads. What was
needed was something more active: not just a communications campaign
but, as with fighting slavery, a social movement. At the same time however, it needed to attract attention if it were to make a difference –​so
mass media could play an important role.
The result was a series of youth driven events to point up the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of Big Tobacco, which were filmed and turned
into television commercials. “For example, one well-​
known ‘truth’
commercial, known as ‘Body Bags,’ features youths piling body bags
outside of a tobacco company’s headquarters and broadcasting loudly
via megaphones that these represent the 1200 people killed daily by
tobacco”.20 The campaign organisers explain that
The “truth” brand builds a positive, tobacco-​free identity through
hard-​
hitting advertisements that feature youths confronting the
tobacco industry. This rebellious rejection of tobacco and tobacco
advertising channels youths’ need to assert their independence and
individuality, while countering tobacco marketing efforts.
In one sense this mimics tobacco marketing perfectly, right down to
the ads and the brand. In another it is its complete opposite; one seeks
to ensnare and addict with lies, the other to liberate and empower
with truth.
We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
105
The campaign was immensely successful. It reached three quarters of
American teenagers and succeeded in alerting them to the unscrupulous
practices and deceptive marketing of the tobacco industry. It also hit
the gold standard for such efforts: it successfully reduced youth smoking
prevalence.21 The truth campaign is still running today.
What happened in Florida has been replicated many times for other
populations and behaviours. Covid-19 has underlined the needs society
has to inform and guide our behaviour. Social distancing and mask
wearing need careful promotion and explication. Vaccination and the
complexity of concepts like herd immunity need nuanced and sensitive
treatment, and trust needs to be maintained between experts and the
rest of us. Social marketing can help with all these things. It can also
move upstream, just like commercial marketing, and address health
professionals, politicians, and other stakeholders. Doctors have been
successfully targeted to improve prescribing practices, for example, and
policy makers to regulate commercial marketing.
Indeed with complex, multifactorial problems like climate, multiple
levels of intervention are essential. Individual citizens, stakeholders,
governments, and international agencies all need to change, because the
challenges are both profound and systemic. But systems are made up of
people, and where there are people social marketing ideas can be used
to influence behaviour and encourage beneficial change. The problem is
that the playing field is extremely uneven and whilst social marketing is
doing some good, it is currently being massively out spent and its benefits
overwhelmed by corporate marketing. Just to take one example, in 2021
the World Health Organisation had a budget of $2.4 billion22 to fund
all its social marketing work, including “nutrition, violence and injuries,
road safety, gender, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), air pollution,
climate, tobacco use, trans-​fatty acids, harmful use of alcohol, obesity,
and physical activity”.23 In 2019 Coca-​Cola alone spent nearly twice as
much ($4.2bn) on its marketing.24
When these figures are transposed much will be achieved.
Changing for the Better
I started this chapter by suggesting that turning marketing into a benign
force required a flight of fancy. In reality, as we have seen, there are
plenty of precedents and much common sense to support the idea. It is
not far-​fetched, just hidden in plain sight.
Of course, human beings cooperate by trying to understand each
other’s point of view. Of course, life is better when we succeed in doing
this and act accordingly. Of course, we flag up our own potential contribution to the collective project, what we have to offer, and will give this
its best face. Of course, there will be a measure of selfishness in all this,
106 We Shall Overcome
but this will be kept in train as we long as we don’t become too powerful;
our sense of dependency reinforces an instinctive respect for the quid
pro quo. These essential human traits are also basic marketing functions.
They have informed human cooperation since time immemorial.
It is equally obvious that these levers could be much better used. In
particular the capacity to influence behaviour, and do so in a way that
achieves voluntary and indeed willing change, is invaluable as we face the
growing catastrophe of climate breakdown. Given the unsustainability
of our current way of life, the only certainty is that change is inevitable;
social marketing can help us to manage the transition rather than simply
fall victim to it.
So, we have the tools to rebuild. But before we set to work, we need
to consult an architect. Someone who can see the bigger picture, see
things differently and help us devise a new, sustainable human story. In
Chapter 9, we will turn to indigenous wisdom.
Chapter 9
The Whole Wide World Around
We Need to Talk About Capitalism 1
An old Sufi story tells of how well Mullah Nasruddin was doing in the
donkey business. Each week he brought a very well-​bred, well-​fed donkey
to the market and sold it for a price no other donkey seller could match.
Soon the other merchants began to grumble, and finally one took him
aside and said:
Mullah I appreciate good business as much as anyone but you are
destroying me. I am a rich man. I own much land which I rent to
peasant farmers who pay me in grain, so I get my donkeys’ food free.
I have many servants who groom and care for my animals. They do
all the work and I pay them virtually nothing. But I still can’t sell my
donkeys as cheaply as you do.
My friend I see your problem immediately said the Mullah, you are
stealing the land, the grain and the labour. I am stealing the donkeys.2
If the only way we can beat the corporations is by stealing the donkeys, it is
time for a rethink. When Tech giants can sell things for less than the Morags
and Michaels can buy them, and pubcos buy out the Marys, there is little
we individual citizens can do to help, however energetically we follow after
wisdom and virtue. When mega-​supermarkets can bully their suppliers
and snuff out competition, the focus of change has to move upstream.
When the agrochemical industry is driving Indian farmers to suicide with
seed patents and terminator genes, international action is needed. When
the planet is crumbling under the onslaught of the behemoths fighting for
global market share, we have to start talking about the system.
This conversation needs to start by counting our blessings; corporate
consumer capitalism has brought enormous benefits to humankind. A lot
of money had been made, and the glaring inequalities notwithstanding,
this has been shared enough to improve the material well-​being of many
DOI: 10.4324/9781003268567-12
108 We Shall Overcome
people on the planet. In China alone it has lifted 700 million people
out of poverty over the last 30 years.3,4 Cultural achievements, from
Michelangelo to Banksy, have been immense. Technological progress
has also been vertiginous: from quill-​penned letters to video calls; from
sailing ships to space rockets. We have eliminated smallpox, developed
anaesthetic dentistry, travelled to the moon, and invented a communication system capable of connecting all seven billion of us.
At the most fundamental level, the last 400 years has also seen a
remarkable increase in life expectancy. When Columbus set off on his
first transatlantic voyage, people across the world could, on average,
expect to live no more than three decades. As economic development
and industrialisation gathered pace, life expectancy in wealthier countries increased steadily and by 1950 had more than doubled (Norway
topped the league at 72). Poorer countries have made up ground since
and, although unacceptable inequalities persist both between and within
countries, UN data show that across the world most people can now
expect to live for six decades or more5
These are impressive achievements. However, they are side effects of
consumer capitalism, not direct outcomes. The improvements in life
expectancy, for instance, have come from public health initiatives –​
improved sanitation, access to clean water, vaccination against communicable diseases –​not directly from the market, let alone the corporations.
It is true that wealth generation funded the education, science, and
interventions underpinning public health. But, as we have seen, this
route to prosperity, the scramble for profits-​
at-​
any-​
cost, led by the
multinationals has also brought much direct harm to public health. The
need for improved sanitation and clean water was driven by the appallingly unhealthy living and working conditions of the new urban poor as
industrialisation took hold. Similarly, the progress in combatting infectious diseases has to be balanced against the fact that such diseases are
now much more likely because of our helter-​skelter towards mammon.
Covid-19 is just the latest in a long list of epidemics triggered by our
greed.6
The debits also include, of course, an explosion in non-​communicable
diseases –​cancer, diabetes, cirrhosis –​which our marketing-​driven consumption causes. As we noted in Chapter 1, in Europe, the continent
which, following in Columbus’ wake, led the capitalist charge, they now
kill more than 90% of us. This hyperconsumption is also front and centre
of our assault on the planet which is now presenting an unprecedented
threat to public health, life expectancy,7 and all the cultural and material
progress we have made.
Despite the blessings then, there is clearly something profoundly wrong
with our way of life. We need to change the narrative. But it is difficult
to write a new story when, as we discussed in Chapter 8, the current
The Whole Wide World Around
109
materialistic one is being so insistently trumpeted. When the corporate
marketers have done such an effective job of turning us into consumers.
David Foster Wallace is right, it can indeed be difficult for the fish to
understand the nature of the water in which they swim. So, we need
to look elsewhere for alternative perspectives. This inevitably leads us
towards the indigenous peoples who have and are continuing to resist
the corporate marketers. As Arundhati Roy argues “we must pay close
attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of
capitalism, as well as communism”, the indigenous peoples “who still
know the secrets of sustainable living” and “are not relics of the past, but
the guides to our future”.8 She is right, and history shows this will require
a fundamental shift in our perspective.
Wise Victims
Columbus did not discover America; it was already well-​
known to
those who lived there. These indigenous peoples were systematically
annihilated by the new arrivals through a combination of war, enslavement, and disease. Their cultures, mores, and ways of living were
dismissed and smothered: the imperial narrative was of improvement
and civilisation. It was a case of natural progression, social Darwinism,
albeit one helped on its way, in Jarrad Diamond’s famous phrase, by
our “guns, germs and steel”.9 Our arms and our tools were more deadly
and powerful; and our willingness to use them unstinting. Our germs,
from smallpox to influenza, whether spread deliberately or by accident,
completed the takeover.
As we teeter on the brink of climate breakdown and realise the need
for a complete rethink of our way of life, the imperial mindset looks
as foolish as it was brutal. Fortunately, the European invaders didn’t
manage to obliterate all records of Amerindian culture –​nor indeed all
the people –​and recent histories have begun to reassess and recognise
its profound strengths. In particular, it holds powerful lessons for our
current perilous predicament. There is a historic irony in the fact that
another germ –​Covid-19 –​is propelling this reassessment.
When Columbus arrived in America, there wasn’t just one indigenous
culture but many. Doing justice to all of these is the work of lifetimes.
Furthermore, to suggest these cultures were all good would be gross
over-​simplification. They were human, and therefore inevitably flawed
in many ways. There was war, human sacrifice, and cruelty. However, as
historian Fabrice Delsahut10 explains, there are certain positive themes
that recurred across the continent. He speaks evocatively of how welcoming the locals were of the first European arrivals –​in shameful contrast to our present-​day treatment of refugees. This generosity of spirit
cost them dear: there were approximately 4 million Arawak Indians on
110 We Shall Overcome
the island of Hispaniola when Columbus first made landfall; within two
centuries none were left.
Two further traits highlighted by Delsahut are particularly relevant to
our current predicament: the indigenous peoples’ relationship to private
property on the one hand, and the natural world on the other. Their views
on property were entirely at odds with those espoused by the Europeans
and being baked in to the empires they were constructing. Common
goods like land and hunting or fishing grounds were held in joint trust for
the benefit of all, with only personal things –​clothing, tools, decorative
items –​being owned by the individual. Furthermore, the accumulation of
these personal goods was discouraged because it contradicted their ideas
of happiness, which depended on goods and possessions being circulated
not accrued. Banks and monetary wealth make no sense with this world
view, as Chief Maquinn of the Nootka nation explains:
We are Indians and we have no such bank; but when we have plenty
of money or blankets, we give them away to other chiefs and people,
and by and by they return them with interest, and our hearts feel
good. Our way of giving is our bank.11
Delsahut points out that children were taught from an early age that
greed and accumulation are weaknesses to be surmounted. Charles
Eastman, a doctor and ethnologist from the Sioux people, expresses
this in a positive way: “Children must early learn the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste
the happiness of giving”. “Happiness” he continues “emerges from a
circular economy which, through barter and potlatches, ensures good
things are passed around”.12 The discordance between this and the deliberate targeting of children by advertisers which we discussed in Chapter 4
is stark.
This sharing and the idea of interconnectedness also inform indigenous
attitudes to nature, and lies at the core of their spiritual lives. For them
human beings are part of the natural world, mutually dependent on and
respectful of it. Their ecological theology has become familiar in recent
years, and sounds more compelling as the climate statistics worsen. When
we hear Luther Standing Bear say “The old Lakota was wise. He knew
that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of
respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans,
too”,13 inner city ghettoes seem more obviously desolate and the Alberta
tar sand extraction disrespectful to the point of sacrilege. When we are
reminded of Chief Seattle’s evocative words –​
this we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to
the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one
The Whole Wide World Around
111
family. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.14
we can only admire his prescience.
Amerindian culture succeeded in bringing its people contentment.
Three centuries after Columbus’s arrival US president Thomas Jefferson
was moved to remark: “I am convinced that those [Indian] societies which
live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater
degree of happiness than those who live under European governments”.15
There is no better test for a civilisation, not even life expectancy, than the
contentment of its people. Jefferson knew this full well –​he also coined the
phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” which was enshrined
in the American Declaration of Independence, and subsequently the new
country’s Constitution.
Determined Culprits
As with any journey, even a small difference in compass bearing at the
outset leads to a very different point of arrival. The gulf between the
indigenous and European perspectives was already vast when Columbus
arrived in 1492; it was grown ever wider since: from ecological harmony
on the one hand, to ecological catastrophe on the other.
Far from decrying the acquisition of personal property and wealth,
the colonists were completely driven by it. The natural world was not a
wonder to be respected, but a resource to be exploited. European imperial
ventures were not motivated by ideas or intellectual endeavour,
still less … some nebulous spirit of discovery. They took place over a
long period of time, step by step, as immediate, easy profits could be
seen. Financial considerations were always dominant and only once
the potential for profit had been demonstrated did the monarch come
in with support.16
Before Columbus arrived in North America, the business model had
been tested in the Canaries, which the Europeans happened across in
the early 14th century. Initial raids to capture slaves from the native
Guanche population were followed by invasion, subjugation, and
exploitation. “The Guanches”, historian Clive Ponting tells us, “hold
the dubious distinction of being the first people to be driven to extinction by the Europeans”.17 The same happened with the other Atlantic
islands of Madeira, the Azores and Cape Verde. The principal business
was sugar which was immensely profitable, provided there was fuel and
forced labour for processing (the work was so exacting no one would do
it except under compulsion). Both were finite resources and soon became
112 We Shall Overcome
depleted. Madeira means “Wooded Isle”, so named because, as an early
slaver remarked: “there was not a foot of ground that was not entirely
covered with great trees”.18 These were killed off even faster than the
Guanches.
So, Columbus wasn’t on a voyage of exploration but a business
trip. His ships had been built and equipped by investment bankers, his
investors and royal patrons sought financial returns. One of the first
things Columbus noted on arrival in Hispaniola was that the locals wore
gold jewellery, and so he imposed a system of tributes to impound it.
This marked the first wave of exploitation: the looting of existing items
of value. There were many of these to be had, especially in Central and
South America –​the Inca and Aztec cultures being particularly rich
sources. Plentiful though they were, however, they were finite, and conquest is expensive. Investors demand their repayments with interest and
profits.
The second wave of profiteering came from a mix of plantations and
the extraction of natural resources. Both were labour intensive, so profit
margins were again enhanced by using slave labour. The most notorious
(and lucrative) example emerged from the discovery in 1545 of silver
deposits at Potosi, 12,000 feet up in the Andes.
At their height in the 1580s the mines were producing 300 tons of
silver a year. To achieve this output the local population was subject
to forced labour –​the workers had to stay underground for a week
at a time and process the ore using highly toxic mercury; not surprisingly the death rate was high … the local population was nearly
wiped out in a few decades … by the end of the sixteenth century the
Spanish were forcing huge caravans of slaves to walk from Buenos
Aires over the Andes to Potosi.19
The ecological impacts of mining the Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain)
have also been devastating. As the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia
explains: “The demand for fuel and construction materials both above
and underground led to deforestation even at great distances from the
Cerro Rico. Colonial observers commented on this from the earliest
days of bonanza. The nearer hinterland was immediately stripped of
brush, ichu grass, and the soil-​stabilizing yareta moss. Overgrazing likely
resulted as well, despite the fact that llamas are well adapted to highland
environments. In short, the environmental costs of Potosí’s enormous
productivity remain nearly impossible to calculate.”20
This was the pattern for Europe’s imperial project over the next few
centuries. The human and ecological costs were appalling but excused
by the profits. Estimates are difficult to make, but it is likely that around
90% of the indigenous population –​some 100 million people –​were
The Whole Wide World Around
113
killed. This a uniquely appalling statistic; the world has never seen the
like, before or since:
death on this scale was the greatest any society had to bear in human
history –​and the few who survived faced an immense cultural shock
as their whole way of life disappeared as their communities died
around them and what was left was destroyed by the European
invaders.21
Our consumer capitalist economic system is the direct descendent of
this imperialism and corporate marketing pulls us all into this unsustainable and ill-​fated project. It encourages us to ride roughshod over the
two primary indigenous insights which Delsahut identified: the need to
treat the human inclination for acquisition with great caution and the
importance of nurturing a deep respect for the natural world. Corporate
marketing was in its infancy when Chief Seattle and Standing Bear spoke,
but they knew even then that a system which actively seeks out and
encourages greed and treats nature as “a portfolio of resources for us or
our species to buy and sell or manage or squander as we please”22 would
end in tears.
Indigenous Partners
Our search for a new narrative, then needs to start with humility; a recognition that we have gone wrong, that our current story is untenable.
Our difficulty in doing this, in grasping the enormity of climate breakdown, and develop alternative stories is what Amitav Ghosh calls our
“Great Derangement”.23 He lambasts the tepid language of the 2015
Paris Agreement on Climate “the word catastrophe is never used and
even disaster occurs only once and that too because it figures in the title
of a previous conference”.24 He puts this down to the involvement of
“various billionaires, corporations and climate entrepreneurs” in the
negotiations; exactly the sort of stakeholder marketing we discussed in
Chapter 6.
He shows how the document betrays this bias:
as is often the case with texts, the Agreement’s rhetoric serves to
clarify much that it leaves unsaid: namely that its intention, and the
essence of what it has achieved, is to create yet another neo-​liberal
frontier where corporations, entrepreneurs and public officials will
be able to join forces in enriching each other.25
Meanwhile the marketing to us keeps the show on the road, convincing us to continue buying the stuff and the myth, piquing our greed
114 We Shall Overcome
and obscuring the costs to nature. A new story is needed which instead
of encouraging acquisition can “warn, as so many of the old stories do,
against taking too much, against reaching too far, against leaving too
little for others”.26 More positively, as for the Amerindian children, it can
extoll the beauty of generosity and the happiness of sharing.
We need the help of indigenous peoples. Interestingly, moves towards
such a partnership have been made, but not by the economic establishment or multinational corporations, despite their state-​
of-​
the-​
art
communications. Rather they have come from the opposite direction,
from indigenous peoples, and they bring the same lessons about respecting
nature and containing greed.
The Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada, for example, whose way of life
dates back to pre-​Colombian times, have used their connections with a
BBC journalist to make two films, one in 1990 called From the Heart of
The World, and a sequel, Aluna in 2012.27 In them they explain that their
duty to the planet compels them to warn us, their “younger brothers”,
of the harms our economic system is causing. They express deep unease
about the devastation that mining, power generation, and modern living
in general is reeking on the world; they call on us to change course.
Despite a lack of modern scientific method, they explain sophisticated
ecological principles, the connectedness of nature and the harms being
done to the climate. Things the International Panel on Climate Change
was only just beginning to grapple with at the time of the first film.
So, our new story might develop with us following the advice from
Robert Bringhurst28 we noted in Chapter 7 and try to think like an
ecosystem. By recognising, as Chief Seattle told us, that we are part of
nature not the masters of it; that the world is a living, breathing network
of mutually dependant lifeforms. Once we embrace this “Pachamama
Principle” of mutual dependence, then extraction becomes much more
difficult and brute exploitation impossible. When we accept that rivers
connect mountain and sea and benefit both, hydroelectric schemes need
much more careful thought. If we see trees as sentient creatures that can
comprise ecosystems in their own right, logging becomes a much more
questionable activity. The Kogis see nature herself as a living, sentient
being; Aluna is the mother of everything, and they say in their film “if
you knew she could feel you would stop”. The reverse is also true: as long
as we do not know that nature can feel, we will never stop; we urgently
need a story of the world that will bring this lesson home to us.
A similar plea came recently from the Amazon’s Kayapó people: “We
call on you to stop what you are doing, to stop the destruction … If the
land dies –​if our Earth dies –​then none of us will be able to live. We will
all die”.29 Their chief, Raoni Metuktire, explains that we share the same
fears about the future, we are in the same perilous predicament. That
is why group of the Amazonian peoples are currently suing Brazilian
The Whole Wide World Around
115
President Jair Bolsonaro in the Hague to challenge his exploitation and
destruction of the rainforest.30
Raoni Metuktire also nails the futility of materialism. He explains that
they refer to money as piu caprim, which means sad leaves, because it
causes so much division:
When your money comes into our communities it often drives our
people apart. And we can see that it does the same thing in your
cities, where what you call rich people live isolated from everyone
else, afraid that others will come to take their piu caprim away from
them. Meanwhile other people live in misery because they don’t have
enough money for food.
Sad leaves are the driving force of corporate marketing.
Partnering with the Kogis and the Kayapós can open our minds to
new ways of thinking, new ways of being that have stood the test of
time. Note it is not a matter of accepting wholesale everything they say,
adopting all their customs and every aspect of their culture; in a partnership of equals there is room for compromise and negotiation –​both partners are free to learn. By contrast, the corporate marketing machine, as
Ghosh demonstrated, does require us to accept their view of the world –​
from a foundation myth extoling growth and hyperconsumption to shamanistic branding practices.
Nor does this mean we can never harvest anything from nature; humankind, as do other animals, need to do this to survive, let alone flourish. It
is a question of how we do it; a question of restraint; a question of respect.
The native American Indians were horrified by the logging operations of
the European settlers, and their unsustainable hunting practices. It wasn’t
that they never cut down trees or hunted wildlife, but that they did so
with respect. They would apologise to the trees and animals, thanking
them for the life they gave up and the life they sustained. To quote Raoni
Metuktire again: “to live you must respect the world, the trees, the
plants, the animals, the rivers and even the very earth itself”. Instead, we
are encouraged to think of only ourselves: to consume because we love it;
to rest assured we are worth it and find happiness, not in giving, but in a
bottle of brown sugar water.
A New Planting
It is 600 years since Portuguese sailors first sighted the Wooded Isle a
few hundred kilometres off the west coast of Africa and lit “one of the
earliest flares of the modern world”.31 Since then, we have used a mix of
colonialism and capitalism to find out what happens when we build a
society around perpetual and untrammelled acquisition. When, instead
116 We Shall Overcome
of containing our materialist tendencies, we devise a powerful machine
to encourage them, not just in a wealthy elite, but in everyone. A story in
which individuals find fulfilment in striving for more, the whole always
expands and everything that stands in the way –​the natural world, alternative cultures –​is expendable.
The indigenous peoples we overwhelmed in our acquisitive fury tried
to tell us in words and deeds what happens when greed is allowed free
reign and the natural world is treated as an exploitable possession.
They are still trying to do so. But we can’t hear because the messages
of acquisition and materialism –​the corporate marketing at every level
of society –​is drowning them out. When we are continually told that
happiness comes from having more, it is extremely difficult to convince
us that less is desirable.
Now Covid-19 has said enough. You must stop. You must rethink.
You must consider the repercussions of your actions. And we have had to
listen. For the first time since we Europeans began pillaging the Wooded
Isle our acquisitive and extractive economic system was put on hold. In
1780s Bolivia indigenous leader Túpaj Katari led an unsuccessful rebellion against the Spanish; on the scaffold before his inevitably brutal execution he swore: “I will return, and I will be millions”. It seems he has
fulfilled his curse. But maybe it wasn’t a curse, just another much-​needed
and more insistent call to rethink our story. And maybe this time we will
listen.
To do so, though, we have to rethink the destructive role of acquisition
in our polity. We have to decommission the technology of avarice: the
advertising and marketing; the surveillance, algorithms, and guaranteed
outcomes. Ralph Waldo Emmerson warned us: “sow a thought and you
reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you
reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny”. We have sown
the character of greed and are reaping the destiny of climate breakdown.
It is time to plant a new crop, one of generosity, sharing and respect for
nature, and when the harvest comes in we can stop stealing donkeys.
Notes
Introduction
1 Dante A The Devine Comedy, Canto 26, line 118.
2 Baran PA and Sweezy PM (1966) Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly
Review Press, p.121 quoted in Foster JB, Hannah H and McChesney R (2009)
The sales effort and monopoly capitalism, Monthly Review, vol 6, no 11,
New York, April, p.21.
3 https://​ass​ets-​eu-​01.kc-​user​cont​ent.com/​7bf8e​f96-​9447-​0161-​1923-​3ac69​
29eb​20f/​e81fb​a48-​540d-​48b8-​b793-​d9785​2125​25e/​Adspe​nd_​R​epor​t_​20​21_​
2​001_​int.pdf.
4 Oxfam (2017) www.oxfam.org/​sites/​www.oxfam.org/​files/​file_​attachments/​
bp-​economy-​for-​99-​percent-​160117-​en.pdf, p.16.
5 Elhacham E, Ben-​Uri L, Grozovski J, Bar-​On Y and Milo R (2020) Global
human-​made mass exceeds all living biomass, Nature, vol 588, 17 https://​doi.
org/​10.1038/​s41​586-​020-​3010-​5.
6 Roy A (2011) www.guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 November.
1 Original Sin
1 Harari YN (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Harper.
2 https://​fcpab​log.com/​2016/​01/​18/​dr-​king-​bef​ore-​you-​fin​ish-​breakf​ast-​youve-​
depen​ded-​on-​half-​t/​.
3 www.theguardian.com/​environment/​climate-​consensus-​97-​per-​cent/​2018/​
jan/​01/​on-​its-​hundredth-​birthday-​in-​1959-​edward-​teller-​warned-​the-​oil-​
industry-​about-​global-​warming.
4 https:// ​influ​ence​map.org/ ​rep​ort/​How-​Big-​Oil-​Contin​ues-​to-​Opp​ose-​the-​
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6 Oxfam (2017) www.oxfam.org/​sites/​www.oxfam.org/​files/​file_​attachments/​
bp-​economy-​for-​99-​percent-​160117-​en.pdf.
7 www.investopedia.com/​articles/​personal-​finance/​091615/​how-​much-​money-​
do-​you-​need-​live-​san-​francisco.asp.
8 www.jetinsiders.com/​aircraft/​learjet-​35-​cost.html.
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9 https://​cms.howto​spen​dit.ft.com/​vehic​les/​208​764-​is-​this-​an-​aston-​mar​tin-​
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10 Foster JB, Hannah H and McChesney R (2009) The sales effort and monopoly capitalism, Monthly Review, vol 6, no 11, New York, April.
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12 Higham C (2007) Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-​American Money Plot
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13 Baran PA and Sweezy PM (1966) Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly
Review Press, p.121, quoted in Foster et al (2009).
14 Ponting C (2000) World History –​A New Perspective. London: Chatto and
Windus, p.790.
15 Shah R (2018) Rising obesity in Africa reflects a broken global food system,
Financial Times, September 17, p.31.
16 See, for example, Levitt T (1960) Marketing myopia, Harvard Business
Review, July–​August, pp.45–​60.
17 WHO (2016) http://​apps.who.int/​gho/​data/​view.main.CODR​EG6E​URV?
lang=​en.
18 Foster et al. (op. cit.).
19 Hastings G and MacFadyen L (2000) Keep smiling: No one’s going to die. An
analysis of internal documents from the tobacco industry’s main UK advertising agencies. The Centre for Tobacco Control Research and the Tobacco
Control Resource Centre. London: British Medical Association. ISBN
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2 Advertising and the Art of Organised Lying
1 www.tobacco.org/​News/​9910tobaccowars.html (accessed 18 October 2011).
2 Foster JB, Hannah H, McChesney R (2009) The sales effort and monopoly
capitalism, Monthly Review, vol 6, no 11, New York, April, p.10.
3 Sennett R (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale
University, p.161.
4 Baker MJ (2003) “One More Time –​What is Marketing?” in Baker MJ (Ed.)
The Marketing Book. (Fifth Edition.) Oxford: Butterworth-​Heinemann, p.5.
5 Hastings G and MacFadyen L (2000) Keep smiling: No one’s going to die. An
analysis of internal documents from the tobacco industry’s main UK advertising agencies. The Centre for Tobacco Control Research and the Tobacco
Control Resource Centre. London: British Medical Association. ISBN
0-​7279-​1600-​9.
6 Jobber D (2001) Principles and Practice of Marketing. (Third Edition)
Maidenhead: McGraw-​Hill Publishing Company, p.506.
7 Hastings G, Brooks O, Stead M, Angus K, Anker T and Farrell T (2010)
Alcohol advertising: the last chance saloon, British Medical Journal, vol 340,
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8 Quoted in: Herrick S (2020) London Review of Books, vol 42, no 7, April
2, p.4.
Notes
119
9 www.olympic.org/​sponsors/​coca-​cola (Accessed November 2020).
10 Ibid.
11 http://​adage.com/​arti​cle/​media/​york-​times-​runs-​nat​ive-​ad-​ora​nge-​black/​293​
713/​(accessed 26 July 2021).
12 http://​market​ing.about.com/​cs/​brandm​ktg/​a/​wha​tisb​rand​ing.htm (accessed
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13 Lane Keller K (2006) “Branding and Brand Equity” in Weitz B and Wensley
R (Eds.) Handbook of Marketing. London: Sage, p.169.
14 Ibid., p.170.
15 www.forbes.com/​the-​worlds-​most-​valuable-​brands/​#7fee89ba119c.
16 www.worldometers.info/​gdp/​gdp-​by-​country/​.
17 Stewart DW and Kamins MA (2006) “Marketing Communications” in Weitz
B and Wensley R (Eds.) Handbook of Marketing. London: Sage, p.287.
18 Fischer PM, Schwartz MP, Richards JW, Goldstein AO and Rojas TH (1991)
Brand logo recognition by children aged 3 to 6 years: Mickey Mouse and Old
Joe the Camel, Jama, vol 266, no 22, pp.3145–3148.
19 Seabrook J (2015) Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in Britain. London: Hurst
and Company.
3 The Machinery of Marketing
1 Whitman W (1881–​1882) “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass. Boston:
James R. Osgood and Company, p.54.
2 www.pep-​web.org/​document.php?id=​psar.081.0077a&type=​hitlist&num=​
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5 Doyle P (2003) “Managing the Marketing Mix” in Baker MJ (Ed.) The
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6 www.tesco.ie/​groceries/​product/​browse/​default.aspx?N=​4294953296&Ne=​
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7 Doyle, op. cit., p.300.
8 Brassington F and Pettitt S (2003) Principles of Marketing. (Third Edition).
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9 www.lorealprofessionnel.com/​int/​hair-​care# (accessed 2 August 2021).
10 Cialdini RB (2001) Influence: Science and Practice. (Fourth Edition).
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11 Peattie S and Peattie K (2003) “Sales Promotion” in Baker MJ (Ed.) The
Marketing Book. (Fifth Edition.) Oxford: Butterworth-​Heinemann.
12 Shu-​Ling L, Yung-​Cheng S and Chia-​Hsien C (2009) The effects of sales promotion strategy, product appeal and consumer traits on reminder impulse
buying behaviour, International Journal of Consumer Studies, vol 33, no
3, p.274.
13 Holmes C (2011) “Is that an Elephant in the room?” presentation at
Marketing to Children: Implications for Obesity, UK Association for the
Study of Obesity (ASO) Conference, University College London, 7 June 2011.
120
Notes
14 Chandon P, Hutchinson WJ, Bradlow ET and Young SH (2009) Does in-​store
marketing work? Effects of the number and position of shelf facings on brand
attention and evaluation at the point of purchase, Journal of Marketing, vol
73, p.15.
15 McGoldrick PJ (2003) “Retailing” in Baker MJ (Ed.) The Marketing Book.
(Fifth Edition) Oxford: Butterworth-​Heinemann, p.796.
16 Doyle, op. cit., p.298.
4 Grooming the Next Generation
1 www.globalbankingandfinance.com/​ t he-​ 2 -​ 6 8-​ b illion-​ p ocket-​ m oney-​
economy/​.
2 Foxall GR and Goldsmith RE (1994) Consumer Psychology for Marketers.
London: Routledge, p.203.
3 Huxley A (1994) Brave New World. New York: Flamingo Modern
Classics, p.25.
4 Hastings G, Angus K, Eadie D and Hunt K (2020) Selling second best: how
infant formula marketing works, Globalization and Health, vol 16, no 1,
p.77. https://​doi.org/​10.1186/​s12​992-​020-​00597-​w.
5 Ibid.
6 Bob Boyle (2019) Personal communication.
7 Rollins NC, Bhandari N, Hajeebhoy N, et al. (2016) Why invest, and what it
will take to improve breastfeeding practices? The Lancet, vol 387, no 10017,
pp.491–​504.
8 DiFranza, JR, Richards JW, Paulman PM, Wolf-Gillespie N, Fletcher C,
Jaffe RD, Murray D. (1991) RJR Nabisco’s Cartoon Camel Promotes Camel
Cigarettes to Children, JAMA, vol 266, no 22, pp.3149–​3153.
9 Robinson TN, Borzekowski DL, Matheson DM and Kraemer HC (2007)
Effects of fast food branding on young children’s taste preferences, Archives
of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, vol 161, no 8, pp.792–​797.
10 www.healthexpress.co.uk/​obesity/​uk-​statistics.
11 www.thefreedictionary.com/​tween.
12 www.givenchybeauty.com/​en/​fragrances/​live-​irresistible/​range_​1 (accessed 5
April 2017).
13 www.fashionmention.com/​ w p-​ c ontent/​ u ploads/ ​ 2 013/ ​ 0 5/ ​ 0 6/ ​ C andice_​
Swanepoel_​MAX_​FACTOR.jpg (accessed 5 April 2017).
14 www.olay.com/​ s kin-​ c are-​ p roducts/​ t otal-​ e ffects/ ​ f ragrance- ​ f ree- ​ d aily-​
moisturizer?pid=​075609001772 (accessed 5 April 2017).
15 www.bestproducts.com/​ p arenting/​ t een/​ g 18726781/​ b eauty-​ p roducts-​
makeup-​ideas-​for-​teens/​.
16 www.almosttherealthing.com/​best-​starter-​makeup-​for-​tweens/​.
17 https://​graz​iada​ily.co.uk/​bea​uty-​hair/​mak​eup/​much-​woman-​spend-​mak​eup-​
lifet​ime/​.
18 Hastings G, Brooks O, Stead M, Angus K, Anker T and Farrell T (2010)
“They’ll Drink Bucketloads of the Stuff”: An Analysis of Internal Alcohol
Industry Documents. House of Commons Health Select Committee Report,
January. www.publications.parliament.uk/​pa/​cm/​cmhealth.htm.
19 www.who.int/​news-​room/​fact-​sheets/​detail/​alcohol.
Notes
121
20 National Cancer Institute (2008) “The role of the media in promoting and
reducing tobacco use” in Tobacco Control Monograph No. 19. Bethesda,
MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of
Health, National Cancer Institute; Jernigan D, Noel J, Landon J, Thornton N
and Lobstein T (2017) Alcohol marketing and youth alcohol consumption: a
systematic review of longitudinal studies published since 2008, Addiction, vol
112, no 1, pp.7–​20; Smith R, Kelly B, Yeatman H and Boyland E (2019) Food
marketing influences children’s attitudes, preferences and consumption: A
systematic critical review. Nutrients, vol 11, no 4, p.E875.
21 Wallace DF (2008) Plain old untrendy troubles and emotions, The Guardian,
20 September 2008. www.guardian.co.uk/​books/​2008/​sep/​20/​fiction.
22 Ibid.
23 The Dalai Lama (and many other Buddhists).
24 Wallace (op. cit.).
25 Roedder John D (1999) Consumer socialisation of children: A retrospective
look at twenty-​five years of research, Journal of Consumer Research, vol 26,
no 3, p.183–​213.
26 www.sapphyr.net/​smallgems/​index.htm (accessed 5 April 2017).
27 www.theguardian.com/​ w orld/​ 2 019/​ m ar/​ 1 1/​ g reta-​ t hunberg-​ s choolgirl-​
climate-​change-​warrior-​some-​people-​can-​let-​things-​go-​i-​cant.
28 www.theguardian.com/​ e nvironment/​ 2 020/​ o ct/​ 1 1/​ g reta-​ t hunberg-​
people-​like-​me-​ask-​difficult-​climate-​questions.
29 www.news.ncsu.edu/​2019/​05/​climate-​education-​for-​kids-​increases-​climate-​
concerns-​for-​parents/​.
30 www.cancerresearchuk.org/​sites/​default/​files/​execsumcancer_​research_​uk-​
funded_​report_​on_​tobacco_​packaging_​written_​by_​the_​centre_​for_​tobacco_​
control_​research.pdf.
5 Surveillance Capitalism
1 www.scientificamerican.com/​article/​long-​live-​the-​web/​.
2 Zuboff S (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Profile ISBN 13:
9781781256848, p.77.
3 Ibid., p.87.
4 Lanchester J (2019) Document Number Nine, London Review of Books,
10 October.
5 Zuboff (op. cit.).
6 Stiegler Bernard (2019) The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in
Computational Capitalism, Cambridge, UK: Polity.
7 AI: Artificial intelligence or machine learning –​the ability of computers to
mimic the way we think.
8 https://​hum​anet​ech.com.
9 www.uk.experian.com/​business/​api/​ (accessed 21 January 2019).
10 www.propublica.org/​article/​facebook-​doesnt-​tell-​users-​everything-​it-​really-​
knows-​about-​them.
11 Harris T (2019) Testimony to the US Senate https://​youtu.be/​WQMu​
xNiY​oz4.
12 Ibid.
122
Notes
13 Zuboff op. cit.
14 Fournier S and Lee L (2009) “Getting Brand Communities Right” in The
Harvard Review, April 2009. www1.hbr.org/​products/​R0904K/​R0904Kp4.
pdf (accessed 4 November 2011).
15 Ibid.
16 Anker TB and Cappel K (2011) “Ethical Challenges in Commercial Social
Marketing” in Hastings G, Angus K and Bryant C (Eds.) The Sage Handbook
of Social Marketing. London: Sage Publications, p.294.
17 Hastings G, Angus K, Eadie D and Hunt K (2020) Selling second best: how
infant formula marketing works, Globalization and Health, vol 16, no 1,
p.77. https://​doi.org/​10.1186/​s12​992-​020-​00597-​w.
18 Crawford K and Joler V Anatomy of an AI System (2018) The Amazon Echo
as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources https://​
anatom​yof.ai.
19 www.sec.gov/​ A rchives/​ e dgar/​ d ata/​ 1 018724/ ​ 0 00119312517120198/​
d373368dex991.htm.
20 Private Eye (2021) 1555, 3–​16 September, p.17.
21 www.bbc.com/​news/​technology-​57942909.
22 Elliott TS (1934) The Rock: “Where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge,
Where is the knowledge we lost in information”.
6 Marketing, Power, and the Demise of Democracy
1 www.theguardian.com/​news/​2018/​mar/​17/​cambridge-​analytica-​facebook-​
influence-​us-​election.
2 La Boétie Etienne (1548) The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of
Voluntary Servitude. The. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1975.
3 Wilkie WL and Moore ES (2002) “Marketing’s Relationship to Society” in
Weitz BA and Wensley R (Eds.), Handbook of Marketing. London: Sage.
4 Dewey J (1931–​1932) The Breakdown of the Old Order the Later Works,
Volume 6, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press (2008), pp.161–​164.
5 Higham C (2007) Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-​American Money Plot
1933–​1949. Lincoln: iUniverse, Inc., p.xv.
6 Oxfam (2017) www.oxfam.org/​sites/​www.oxfam.org/​files/​file_​attachments/​
bp-​economy-​for-​99-​percent-​160117-​en.pdf.
7 Adkins S (2003) “Cause-​Related Marketing: Who Cares Wins” in Baker
MJ (Ed.) The Marketing Book. (Fifth Edition) Oxford: Butterworth-​
Heinemann, p.674.
8 Ibid., p.670.
9 Worth J (2007) “Corporate Responsibility: Companies who Care?” in New
Internationalist, vol 407, no 4, pp.5–​6.
10 A standard market research category often simplified to “working class”.
11 Giridharadas A (2020) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the
World. Great Britain: Penguin Books. ISBN: 9780141990910.
12 Statista
(2020)
www.statista.com/​statistics/​236943/​global-​advertising-​
spending/​.
13 Tolstoy L (2006) Anna Karenina, London: Penguin Classics, p.465.
Notes
123
14 Sennett, R (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism, New Haven: Yale
University, p.171.
15 www.theguardian.com/​news/​2018/​mar/​17/​cambridge-​analytica-​facebook​influence-​us-​election.
7 Deep in My Heart
1 Williams R (2019) “Afterword” in This Is Not a Drill. UK: Penguin Books,
p.182.
2 www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2016/​sep/​01/​the-​guardian-​view-​on-​
pope-​francis-​an-​unlikely-​voice-​for-​the-​environment (accessed 5 April 2017).
3 Henley WE (1849–​1903) Invictus.
4 Thaler R and Sunstein C (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health,
Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
5 Levi P (1979) If This Is a Man. London: Penguin Books, p.47.
6 Dante A The Devine Comedy, Canto 26, line 118.
7 Levi (op. cit.), p.119.
8 Foley M (2008) The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be
Happy. London: Simon & Schuster, p.74.
9 Ibid., p.73.
10 Smith R (2012) Learning from the abolitionists, the first social movement,
BMJ, 345, e830.
11 Ibid., p.3.
12 www.monbiot.com/​2016/​10/​19/​the-​flight-​of-​reason/​ (accessed 5 April 2017).
13 Smith R (op. cit.), p.4.
14 Camus A (2005) L’Homme Révolté, folio essais ISBN 978-​2-​07-​032302-​9
Espagne p.8.
15 United Nations (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child (preamble).
16 Donnelly J (1985) The Concept of Human Rights. London: Croom Helm, p.3
and p.33.
17 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2006), The
Right To Food Guidelines Information Papers and Case Studies, Rome p.43
and p.47.
18 Donnelly (op. cit.).
19 Codina V (1985) Teología de la liberación y teología oriental: una aproximación.
Revista latinoamericana de teología (1985), vol 2, no 5, pp.147–​170.
20 Pupavac V (2002) “The International Children’s Rights Regime”, in Chandler
D (Ed.), Rethinking Human Rights. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.72.
https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​9781​4039​1426​2_​4.
21 Bringhurst R (2018) The Mind of the Wild in Learning to Die.
Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, p.22, p.8.
22 Williams (op. cit.).
8 We’ll Walk Hand in Hand
1 Schumacher EF (1993) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People
Mattered. London: Vintage, p.42.
124
Notes
2 Bhattacharya A, Angus C, Pryce R, Holmes J, Brennan A and Meier PS
(2018) How dependent is the alcohol industry on heavy drinking in England?
Addiction, vol 113, pp.2225–​
2232. 10.1111/​
add.14386.https://​doi.org/​
10.1111/​add.14386.
3 Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (2016). Risky
Business: The Alcohol Industry’s Dependence on Australia’s Heaviest Drinkers.
FARE: Canberra. https://​fare.org.au/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​Risky-​busin​ess-​The-​
alco​hol-​indust​rys-​dep​ende​nce-​on-​Aus​tral​ias-​heavi​est-​drink​ers.pdf.
4 www.who.int/​news-​room/​fact-​sheets/​detail/​alcohol.
5 Emmett S (2013) 10 Billion. London: Penguin Books, pp.168–​169.
6 Rosen M (2014) I Sometimes Fear. https://​micha​elro​senb​log.blogs​pot.com/​
2014/​05/​fasc​ism-​i-​someti​mes-​fear.html.
7 Schumacher, (op. cit.), p.42.
8 Ibid., p.249.
9 Elhacham E, Ben-​Uri L, Grozovski J, Bar-​On Y and Milo R (2020) Global
human-​made mass exceeds all living biomass, Nature, vol 588, p.17. https://​
doi.org/​10.1038/​s41​586-​020-​3010-​5.
10 Tiessen J et al. (2010) Assessing the Impacts of Revising the Tobacco Products
Directive Study to Support a DG SANCO Impact Assessment Final report
for the European Commission, September.
11 Bénilde M (2021) Lobbys Publicitaires Contre la Loi Climat, Le Monde
Diplomatique, Aout, p.28.
12 European Public Health Alliance (2004). French Evin law is declared compatible with EU law. www.epha.org/​a/​1360?var_​recherche=​loi±evin.
13 Hastings G and Sheron N (2011) Editorial: Alcohol marketing to children,
British Medical Journal, vol 342, no 7800, d1767, p.720. https://​doi.org/​
10.1136/​bmj.d1767.
14 https://​sp-​im.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2020/​06/​Rapp​ort-​Spim-​comple​t_​22​
0pg_​mai2​020.pdf.
15 www.visualcapitalist.com/​the-​economics-​of-​coffee-​in-​one-​chart/​.
16 Holden M (1994) Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village.
London: Jonathan Cape.
17 Clare C (2012) www.ethicalconsumer.org/​(accessed 19 August 2021).
18 Hastings G and Domegan C (2018) Social Marketing: Rebels with a Cause,
3rd Edition, Abingdon: Routledge UK. ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​12383-​0 –​please
see Box 5.5.
19 Wiebe GD (1951) ‘Merchandising commodities and citizenship in television’,
Public Opinion Quarterly, vol 15, no 4, pp.679–​691.
20 Farrelly MC, Healton CG, Davis KC, Messeri P, Hersey JC and Haviland ML
(2002) Getting to the truth: evaluating national tobacco countermarketing
campaigns. American Journal of Public Health, vol 92, no 6, p.901.
21 Farrelly MC (2005) Evidence of a dose–​
response relationship between
“truth” antismoking ads and youth smoking prevalence. American Journal
of Public Health, vol 95, no 3, p.425–​431.
22 The U.S. Government and the World Health Organization | KFF.
23 www.who.int/​publications/​i/​item/​programme-​budget-​2020-​2021.
24 www.businessleader.co.uk/​ h ow-​ m uch-​ m oney- ​ d oes- ​ c oca- ​ c ola- ​ s pend- ​ o n-​
advertising/​80315/​.
Notes
125
9 The Whole Wide World Around
1 Roy A (2011) www.guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 November.
2 Based on a story in Douglas-​
Klotz N (2005) The Sufi Book of Life.
London: Penguin Compass.
3 www.chinadaily.com.cn/​business/​2016-​12/​24/​content_​27763449.htm.
4 www.bbc.com/news/56213271.
5 https://​our​worl​dind​ata.org/​life-​exp​ecta​ncy.
6 Hastings G (2020) COVID-​19: Our last teachable moment, Emerald Open
Research, 2, Art. No.: 20. https://​doi.org/​10.35241/​eme​rald​open​res.13603.2.
7 www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2021/​sep/​06/​more-​than-​200-​health-​
journals-​call-​for-​urgent-​action-​on-​climate-​crisis?fbclid=​IwAR1CH_​4E_​4L_​
4SzIVxFwVamQK1q1IQTnjplPxZPzzXchydZJy6qX55Q-​XmA.
8 Roy (op. cit.).
9 Diamond J (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
New York: W. W. Norton.
10 Delsahut F (2020) Indiens Amerique du Nord: La Sagesse de la Gaieté in
Histoire Mondiale du Bonheur, François Durpaire, Le Cherche Midi.
11 Ibid., p.285.
12 Ibid., p.286.
13 Ibid., p.292.
14 The sources for this quote vary because the speech was only reported, not
recorded –​hence the comment about provenance –​but the basic thrust is
undisputed.
15 https://​press-​pubs.uchic​ago.edu/​found​ers/​docume​nts/​amen​dI_​s​peec​hs8.html.
16 Ponting C (2000) World History –​A New Perspective. London: Chatto and
Windus, p.479.
17 Ibid., p.480.
18 Patel R and Moore J (2017) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.
London: Verso, p.14.
19 Ponting (op. cit.), p.502.
20 https://​oxfor​dre.com/​latin​amer​ican​hist​ory/​view/​10.1093/​acref​ore/​978019​
9366​439.001.0001/​acref​ore-​978019​9366​439-​e-​2.
21 Ponting (op. cit.), p.492.
22 Bringhurst R (2018) The Mind of the Wild in Learning to Die. Saskatchewan
University of Regina Press, p.22.
23 Ghosh A (2017) The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. ISBN: 9780226526812.
24 Ibid., p.154.
25 Ibid., p.156.
26 Bringhurst (op. cit.), p.12.
27 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=​ftFbCwJfs1I&t=​4117s.
28 Bringhurst (op. cit.), p.8.
29 Metuktire R (2019) In the Amazon we are full of fear; soon you will be too.
Guardian Journal, 3 September.
30 Metuktire A (2021) Le président brésilien « a toujours incité a la violence
contre nous » Le Monde January 2021, p.2.
31 Patel and Moore (op. cit.), p.15.
Index
4 Ps see marketing mix
advertising: advertising research,
ubiquity of 22–​23; effectiveness of
29–​31, 33; exponential growth of
18; pervasiveness of 18, 21, 25;
pre-​corporate 14–​15; programmatic
58, 62–​64; see also branding; lying
Advertising Standards Authority (UK)
18
alcohol 49–​50
Allende, Salvador 72, 73
Amazon (company) 11, 12, 29, 56,
65–​67, 69, 71
American Declaration of
Independence 111
Apple 4, 11, 12, 29, 30, 59, 60, 73,
82
Arendt, Hannah 32
B&H 25
Bailey Review (UK) 51
Bakan, Joel 12, 29, 103
beauty industry 47–​48, 51
Behavioural Perspectives Model 34
Bernays, Edward: as founding
father of corporate marketing 1,
19, 24, 95; manipulation of the
masses 9, 14, 21; new customers,
continual need to find 18; political
applications of propaganda 71–​72,
78; successful establishment figure
1, 15; war against savings and for
consumption 1, 16
Berners-​Lee, Tim 57, 58, 100
Bevan, Nye 89
Bezos, Jeff 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 77, 79
de la Boétie, Etienne 69–​71
BOGOF sales promotions 38–​39, 99
Bolsonaro, Jair 115
Booth, William 95, 102, 103
Booz Allen Hamilton Model of New
Product Development 34
branding: brand communities
60–​62; dubious benefits of brand
satisfaction 41; as lying 28–​29;
overconsumption driven by 41, 42;
product differentiation 36; teens,
appeal to 48–​50
Bringhurst, Robert 91, 114
British American Tobacco 74
Browning, Robert 44, 55
Buddhism 51
built-​in obsolescence of products 41
Cadwalladr, Carole 78
Cambridge Analytica 3, 59, 69, 77–​78
Camus, Albert 5, 89
capital, concentration of 1
Carling 26, 49–​50, 52
Carruth, Hayden 33, 43
Carson, Rachel 16
Centre for Human Technology 59
Chase Bank 15, 72
children: ability to mobilise parents
against climate change 53–​54;
beauty industry 47–​48; consumer
socialisation argument 51–​52;
corporate profits, importance to 44;
egocentrism, corporate cultivation
of 50–​51, 52; habituation to
pervasive marketing 50–​51; infant
formula 30, 45–​46, 62–​64; legal
protection from marketing, lack
Index
of 2, 3; as particular focus of
marketers 2, 45, 110; teens as
targets 48–​50; toddlers as targets
46–​47; tweens as targets 47–​48;
see also tobacco industry
Chile, coup and military dictatorship
72, 73
China, poverty reduced in 108
Chomsky, Noam 72
Cialdini, Robert 38, 39, 59
climate breakdown: carbon costing
96; children’s ability to mobilise
parents against 53–​54; global poor
and future generations as victims of
84; hyperconsumption as cause 52,
84, 116; inability to grasp enormity
of 113; Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change 19, 114; measures
to reduce oil demand 96–​97; oil
industry denial and obfuscation
10–​11; Paris Agreement on Climate
113; social marketing as weapon
against 106
Coca-​Cola 13, 19, 27–​28, 29, 40, 61,
66, 70, 81, 105
Columbus 109–​110, 111–​112
“coming back brockens” 99
compulsive consumption 3, 31
consumer sovereignty 17–​18, 34, 42
corporate capitalism: bread-​and-​
circuses effect 69–​70; emergence of
1, 3, 13–​14; exponential growth of
4, 9, 12; as fragile confidence trick
81; marketing staff as functionaries
of 70–​71; mass collusion with 71;
overremunerated executives 12, 13,
87; political power, exertion of
72–​73; profits, psychopathic
focus on 9, 11–​12, 73, 94, 103;
regulation, difficulty of 13; tax
evasion 13, 100; see also public
relations progaganda
Covid-​19 4, 34, 57, 81, 105, 108,
109, 116
Crawford, Kate 65–​66
customer orientation 2, 17, 34
Danone 23
Dante Alighieri 1, 5, 6, 83–​84, 85–​86
Delsahut, Fabrice 109–​110, 113
Dewey, John 72
Diamond, Jared 109
127
digital technology: Big Tech monopoly
practices 11, 67; brand communities
60–​62; internet, commercialisation
of 58, 64; internet as public
good 57, 100; “metaverse” 67;
programmatic advertising 58,
62–​64; segmenting and targeting
customer base 62–​64; sinister
political applications 3; surveillance
capitalism 58–​59; turbo-​charging of
market research 2, 58, 67, 81; user
profile information 58
distribution, exclusive or widespread
40
Dove Campaign for Real Beauty
61–​62
Eastman, Charles 110
Eliot, T. S. 68
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 116
Emmett, Steve 95
ENRON 74
epi-​genetic triggers of junk food
addiction 46
Equifax 59
Ethical Consumer 101
European colonisation and
imperialism: Atlantic islands
111–​112, 115, 116; Central and
South America 112; ecological
impact of 111–​112; genocidal
impact of 109–​110, 111,
112–​113; Hispaniola 109–​110,
112; profit motive 111–​113;
see also indigenous cultures
Experian 59
Facebook 11, 29, 45, 56, 59, 60, 75,
78
Fairtrade 86–​87, 98, 99
Fairphone 101
Ford, Henry 14, 81
Ford Corporation 15, 23–​24, 72
Friedman, Milton 12
General Electric 29
Ghosh, Amitav 113, 115
Giridharadas, Anand 76
Givenchy 47
global financial crisis (2008) 9, 10
global south, poverty in 16
Goebbels, Joseph 21
128
Index
Google 11, 12, 29, 58, 59, 64
Great Depression 15, 22
Harari, Yuval 19
Harris, Tristram 59–​60
health: alcohol 50, 94, 97–​98;
damaged by consumer goods
17–​18, 27–​28, 30, 50, 108; infant
formula 45–​46, 62–​64; junk food
46–​47; see also tobacco
Heaney, Seamus 83, 91
Heinz 41
Higham, Charles 15, 72
human rights 89–​90; see also
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights
Huxley, Aldous 45, 66
hyperconsumption, reduction of:
binding legislation, need for
99–​100; compelling need for
95–​96, 116; oil demand, reduction
of 96–​97; people-​and planet-​
centred advertising 97–​98; polluter
pays principle 96; pricing practices
98–​99; repairability, reusability,
and recyclability 97; store design
99; see also indigenous cultures;
social marketing
Levi, Primo 85, 89
life expectancy, increase in 108
Loi Evin 97–​98
L’Oréal 29, 37
loyalty schemes 9, 13, 70, 71, 77
lying: branding as 29; “creating
subjective benefits” as 24, 25;
effects of advertising denied
by practitioners 29–​31; fake
authenticity 31, 48, 61–​62;
indirectness of 26; as moral
offence 20; pervasive lying, critical
judgement undermined by 32;
sponsorship as 26–​28
Lynx 48
Katari, Túpaj 116
King, Martin Luther 10, 14
Know the Origin 101
Macron, Emmanuel 97
Maquinn, Chief 110
market research: consumer behavior
field 23; emergence of 2, 17;
psychological drivers, investigation
of 35, 38; segmentation and target
groups 34–​35; situational factors
39–​40; see also digital technology
marketing: corporate emergence of
1–​2, 14, 17; exponential growth of
3–​4, 70; pre-​corporate 5
marketing mix 35, 41
Marks & Spencer 74
Marlboro 25, 29, 30, 41, 48, 74, 104
mass production 1, 2, 14
Max Factor 47
McDonald’s 30, 47, 74
McIntosh, Verity 67
Mead, Margaret 88
Metuktire, Raoni 114–​115
Microsoft 29
Montaigne, Michel de 85
moral agency: as basis of human
rights 89; capacity to rebel
against injustice 83; collective
solidarity, rebellion as 88–​89;
ecosystemic thinking crucial to
exercise of 91; incompatibility with
consumerism 84, 86, 92; irreducible
humanity 85–​86, 89, 91; “nudge”
psychology, moral inadequacy of
84–​85; revolutionary implications
of 87
Lawson, Danielle 53–​54
Lego 61
natural world: biomatter outweighed
by manufactures 4, 95–​96; colonial
indigenous cultures 5–​6, 109–​116;
Arawak Indians 109–​110; Bolivia
116; Guanche people 111–​112;
holistic attitudes to nature 110–​
111, 114, 115; Kayapó people 114,
115; Kogi people 114, 115; Nootka
nation 110; Ogoni people 72–​73;
property, conceptions of 110, 115;
see also European colonisation and
imperialism
influencers 28, 95
in-​store placement and display 39–​40
ITT 15, 72
Jefferson, Thomas 111
Joler, Vladan 65–​66
Index
plundering of 111–​112; ecological
devastation of hyperconsumption
16, 18, 19, 32, 43, 81, 108, 113;
finite resources of 4, 35, 81, 111;
humility towards 91; individual
obliviousness to impacts of
consumption 37, 108; plastic
pollution 77, 96; truth vested in
20, 32; see also climate breakdown;
indigenous cultures
Nazi party 15, 21, 72, 85
neoliberalism 12, 113
Netflix 21, 28, 59, 70
News International 74
Nike 41, 77
O’Connell, Mark 67
Ogoni protests against Shell 72–​73
Okri, Ben 20–​21, 32
Olay 47
Olympics 19, 26–​28
Orwell, George 66
packaging 36
Packard, Vance 16
perpetual growth, myth of 5, 16, 32,
42, 53, 115
Philip Morris 23, 66
politicians: adoption of business
propaganda techniques 71–​72,
77–​78, 79; lobbied by corporate
marketers 19; shared agenda with
corporate marketers 3, 15–​16,
19, 79
Ponting, Clive 16, 111
Porsche 41
pregnant women, targeted by
marketers 45
pricing: carbon costing 96;
“consumer-​oriented” 37;
disguising of real costs 37;
perceived value 37, 38
public–​private partnerships 77
public relations progaganda: cause-​
related marketing 73–​74; corporate
social responsibility (CSR) 70, 73,
76, 87; engineering consent 15;
naked and corrosive self-​interest
of corporate good works 73–​76;
stakeholder marketing 73, 74, 79,
113; structural global problems
obfuscated by 76–​77; and US
129
corporate dealings with Nazi
Germany 72
Pupavac, Vanessa 90
Quincey, James 13
radio as marketing medium 22
Real Seeds 101
Reeves, Rosser 24, 38
RJ Reynolds 23, 30, 46, 61
robber barons 14, 15, 18, 24
Rosen, Michael 95
Roy, Arundhati 5, 109
Ruskin, John 26
sales promotions 38–​39, 99
Salvation Army 95; see also Booth,
William
Saro-​Wiwa, Ken 73
Schumacher, Fritz 16, 93, 95,
100
Seabrook, Jeremy 31
Seattle, Chief 110–​111, 113, 114
Sennett, Richard 24, 77
Shell 4, 12, 72–​73
slavery, abolition of 87–​88
small business: as morally superior
alternative to corporate capitalism
4–​5, 9, 10, 14, 31, 41–​42, 54–​55,
67–​68, 78–​79, 93–​94, 100;
overtaken by corporate capitalism
13–​14, 107
social fragmentation, consumerisation
of people as cause of 32, 42
social marketing 95, 96–​97, 99,
102–​106
social media 3, 59, 71
SPIM 98
sponsorship 25–​26, 49, 70
Standing Bear 110, 113
Stella Artois 38
Stiegler, Bernard 58
supermarkets: accountability, lack of
100; advertising 18; domination
of supply chain 9, 12, 79, 107;
plethora of stock lines 3, 35, 39–​40,
69, 87; store layout 2, 40
Teller, Edward 11
Tesco 12, 35
Thatcher, Margaret 12
Thunberg, Greta 53
130
Index
tobacco industry: addiction as
business model 11, 17, 19, 40, 70;
brand development 19, 25; children
as anti-​tobacco campaigners 53,
55, 95, 104; children targeted by
17, 23, 30, 48–​49, 70, 102, 103;
dangers of smoking denied by 11,
103; marketing banned 30, 48–​49,
53, 54, 55, 95; marketing research
23; packaging regulations 36;
polluter pays principle 96; Truth
campaign 103–​105
Tolstoy, Leo 77
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights 5, 84, 89; see also human
rights
Volkswagen 12, 19, 73
Wallace, David Foster 50–​51, 84, 109
Walmart 4, 12
Welles, Orson 21, 22
Whitman, Walt 33
Wilberforce, William 87–​88
Williams, Rowan 83, 86, 91
Wordsworth, William 55
World Health Organisation (WHO)
11, 18, 46, 50, 94, 105
Wylie, Christopher 69, 78
Yeats, W. B. 104
Zuboff, Shoshana 58, 60, 77
Zuckerberg, Mark 59, 67