Rethinking ‘marketing as applied economics’
本文提出三个相互关联的观点：市场营销并非经济学的简单分支；它早期受形而上学和心灵研究影响；营销思想中贯穿着‘实践理想主义’，与‘实践现实主义’形成对比。通过谱系学方法，追溯了普伦蒂斯·马尔福德、汤姆森·J·哈德森和A·F·谢尔顿著作中的实践理想主义脉络，并分析了‘暗示’如何取代催眠成为营销理论中的认识论政治替代品。
This paper makes three intertwined arguments. Firstly, marketing is not simply an outgrowth of economics. Secondly, it is indebted to metaphysical, psychical and psychological research which provided the conditions of possibility for theorising marketplace interaction in our early history. Thirdly, marketing thinking has been and remains inflected by a position labelled ‘practical idealism’. It is a contrast to the ‘practical realism’ which also subtends our discipline. Adopting a genealogical approach, we explicate the threads of practical idealism weaved across Prentice Mulford, Thomson J. Hudson and A.F. Sheldon’s prominent works. Mulford provides the contours of the intellectual landscape. Hudson extends Mulford’s assumption grounds. Sheldon combines the articulations of Mulford, Hudson and studies in psychical research, outlining the viability of hypnosis and telepathy in sales practice. To distance itself from hypnosis and associations of manipulation, ‘suggestion’ was the epistemological-political replacement promoted by marketing theorists. Discursive transmutation was achieved through epistemological deviation. Epistemological deviation is conceptualised as the dismissal of and disengagement from a theoretical or hypothetical account without the consideration of appropriate evidence. W.D. Scott’s treatment of telepathy is an exemplar of epistemological deviation. It is a complete departure from the tenets of intellectual inquiry. What this means is that the promotion of psychology into marketing was accomplished – in part – by the abdication of critical reflection and not by its extension.