Marketing Discourse: Its Emergence and Contradictions

In the previous chapters we argued that financial services organizations and those who worked inside them gradually began to reconstitute themselves from the point of view of strategic discourse. As the old field of relations which had connected the state, financial institutions and consumers together began to fall apart, managers began to evolve new ways of looking at their world and intervening in it. Strategic discourse provided a framework and techniques for this at a high level of generality, but in order to be effective and powerful it needed to be translated into more specific and penetrative mechanisms. These involved ways of categorizing and measuring the world which could provide the basis for instituting specific forms of practice, control, monitoring and disciplining. We have already seen how strategy emerged alongside the development of IT and came to provide a core, but contested, framework for its management. However, one of the most important of these mechanisms was associated with the establishment of marketing within financial services. In what follows, we explore the process whereby marketing became established within financial services. This is not simply an issue to do with the functional structure of firms such as the establishment of marketing departments. As with strategy, it concerns the evolution of a particular way of looking at the world, the incorporation of a range of techniques and methods of analysing and acting upon the world. Finally, it involves the interactive production and reproduction of the social world in new ways to make sense of the power of strategic discourse. Thus marketing and strategy became increasingly strongly linked.