The Marketing Era From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning [Hardcover]

Marketing has situated itself as an indispensable tool in today's business world-an unavoidable step in the process from production to consumption. This book is the first of its kind to map out the organizing principles and cultural logic of marketing, and trace the profession's ascent to global domination. Applbaum argues that marketing can be seen as a particular set of cultural practices that surfaced in reaction to the affluence of Western society, and not the answer to the call of inherent human needs and wants. In order to understand globalization, transnational corporations, and the spread of consumer culture, one must understand the logic of marketing.

In this ambitious and provocative work, Kalman Applbaum offers us an anthropological confrontation with nothing less than the animus of bourgeois society's self-conception (8): marketing. At stake, ultimately, is an opportunity for us to understand how we came to be what we are. Or more exactly: how we came, so much of the time, to understand ourselves as consumers. In the grand old tradition of Boasian or Meadian public cultural intervention, Applbaum's confrontation with the cultural logic of marketing promises to defamiliarize the categories that unobtrusivelyand therefore all the more insidiouslyhave come to structure Euro-American common sense, and are now, in the name of globalization, in the process of being exported to the four corners of the world& --William Mazzarella, University of Chicago, Anthropological Quarterly.

Kalman Applbaum can lay claim to being an insider in two academic professionsanthropology and marketing. The intellectual and practical benefits of this dualism become immediately apparent to the reader as the argument unfolds& Marketers shared vision of what constitutes consumer culture, along with the professions shared practices of manipulating consumer wants and desires, not only is globalizing and totalizing but also is self-enabling and lcï