Marketing Ideology and Social Policy

Before leaving the topic of ideology in marketing, I want to mention one other source, in addition to ideologies of media communication, and ideologies of space. Marketing is itself a source of ideology, through its conventional axioms, concepts, and values, conveyed via mainstream text books and courses. The reason this is relevant here is that, before trying to engage with strategies for putting contextual marketing into practice, some myths about marketing need to be exposed. Many of the problems with marketing implementation arise because of misconceptions about what it is and what it can accomplish, and the major source of these misconceptions is marketing itself. Business schools are especially culpable in cleaving to a formulaic notion of marketing that suits the commodification of higher education and seems to fit with a wider neo-liberal agenda, but fails to articulate the particularities of practice. The educational route to a marketing career entails a good deal of learning that has to be unlearned once practice is encountered.