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Marketing, Rhetoric and Control investigates the tensions that surround the place of persuasion (and, more broadly, control) in marketing. Persuasion has variously been seen as an embarrassment to the discipline, a target for anti-marketing sentiment, the source of marketing's value in the modern organisation, a mysterious black box inside the otherwise rational and logical endeavour of enterprise, and a rather insignificant part of the marketing programme. This book argues that this multifarious reputation for persuasion within marketing stems from the influence of two quite oppositional paradigms - the scientific and the magico-rhetorical - that ebb and flow across the discourses of its discipline and practice. Constructing an interface between original, challenging close readings of texts from the beginnings of the Western rhetorical tradition and an examination of the ways in which marketing has set about describing itself, this text argues for a Sophistic interpretation of marketing. From this perspective, marketing is understood as providing intermediary services to facilitate the continuing exchange of attention and regard between firm/client and stakeholders. It seeks to manage and direct this exchange through an appreciation of the changing rational and irrational motivations of the firm and stakeholders, using these as resources for the construction of both planned and improvised persuasive interactions in agonistic (or competitive) environments. This book is aimed primarily at researchers and academics working in the fields of marketing, marketing communications, and the related disciplines of marketing theory, critical marketing, and digital marketing. It will also be of value to marketing academics in business schools, including those working in the areas of media and communication studies who have an interest in commercial and corporate communication, brand use of interactive media, and communication theory.

This article examines the various ways in which marketing work (in both 'practice' and scholarship) engages with the construction of personas. It positions marketing as a rhetorical enterprise concerned with the establishment of intermediary and liminal positions within society; positions which are designed, as in Jung's description of the persona, to "make a definite impression upon others [.and.] to conceal the true nature of the individual" (Jung 1972, p. 192) in order to facilitate social integration. An initial close reading of Jung's work on the persona provides the context for a portrayal of the extreme tensions between organisational/disciplinary/professional identity and persona in modern marketing work. The article examines the long history of anxiety that marketers have manifested regarding the reputation of their practice, the 'morality' and 'scientific' ethos of their unavoidably relativistic approach to truth and identity, and their focus on the construction of appearance/persona for commercial or political advantage. Finally, if the urge to create personas comes from needing to consistently portray the roles that society expects us to adopt (whether that be parson, cobbler or poet, to use Jung's examples), what happens to a discipline and profession which is so focused on the dynamic re-creation, re-assignment and re-invention of personas? The work argues that the distrust that marketing experiences at the hands of mainstream society illustrates the way in which the maintenance of a consistent persona, 'standing at one's post' (to use Jung's terminology), remains one of the most uncomfortable and contested aspects of modern life.

Calls for the abandonment of manipulative and controlling marketing communication practices have become increasingly common in relationship- and service-orientated marketing theories. Scholars supporting such calls agree that the pursuit of communicative control should be replaced by a dialogical, negotiative orientation. However, there has been little thought given to how exactly dialogical marketing communication can practically reconcile itself with the issue of persuasion. In this article, I argue that a critical appraisal of the techniques of the clinical hypnotist and therapist Milton Erickson can provide marketers with a constructive framework with which to refashion their communicative roles and practices around the notion of a therapeutic, rhetorically grounded, marketing dialogue in which marketing stakeholders interweave dynamic narratives of value, which have the power to change other stakeholders and themselves. I also use the comparison with service-orientated marketing literature to point out certain weaknesses in the Ericksonian conception of the therapist/client dyad.

Purpose– This paper aims to investigate the significance of academic accusations of magical practice towards marketing communication, asking what might motivate such accusations and what meaning they have for marketing's relationship with persuasion.Design/methodology/approach– The paper examines the ways in which four distinguished scholars (Raymond Williams, Judith Williamson, Sut Jhally, and Stephen Brown) have accused marketing of either sharing its transformative power with the social effect of magic or in some way offering a metaphorical parallel with the manner in which magic works to cast a glamour over the "reality" of the world. The paper outlines a rhetorical understanding of magic and uses it to construct a reading of these accusations which focuses around a discomfort with the pursuit of persuasion. The analysis is then extended to contemporary marketing theory, particularly the communicative aspects of service-dominant logic and the broader service perspective.Findings– The argument is advanced that understandings of marketing as "magical" are largely dependent upon a prejudicial view of the role of persuasion and rhetorical technique in mass media marketing communication. The paper demonstrates that this view of persuasion has also become manifest in the contemporary service perspective and limits the "dialogue" approach to marketing communication.Originality/value– The paper warns against the counter-productive demonisation of persuasion in contemporary marketing theory and seeks to highlight the manner in which accusations of magic have been used to deflect clear debate around the place of persuasion in marketing communication.

This article investigates the ramifications of the epidemiological metaphor at the centre of viral marketing. In particular, it explores the tension that exists between the presentation of the viral marketing message as an independent, quasi-organic entity with a threatening, wild potential and the apparently contradictory assertion that it can also be 'domesticated' through careful management of its design parameters and infection vectors. The influence of both memetics and the tipping point motif on this depiction is discussed, and the article considers the persuasive advantages of implications of message agency in the marketing of viral marketing itself. This article is the first study of the root metaphors underlying the discourse of viral marketing and serves to contextualise that discourse within the historical influence of memetic theory and the early literature on word-of-mouth marketing, and the more general relationship that marketing continues to have with issues of control.

Taking as its starting point Barbara B. Stern's (1994) `A Revised Communication Model for Advertising', the article argues for the application of first-order and second-order cybernetic principles to the construction of a more multidimensional and realistic model that is able to address well-documented tensions and problems in the advertising system and provide a fresh perspective on issues connected with interactive advertising and the creative component in advertising communication. The article culminates in a radical second-order cybernetic model of advertising communication that is founded upon the relationship between various observing frames and the stabilized eigenforms (constructions of the self and others produced by an observer) that are generated in the communication process.

The author argues that current trends in advertising, particularly an increased reliance on complex destabilizing metaphors, have produced a double-bind situation within target audiences that has resulted, as per Gregory Bateson's description of the schizogenic process, in schizophrenic communication patterns being fed back to advertisers. Links are made to the roots of ironic consumption and other paradoxical tensions in consumer behavior.

Introduction -- A history of rhetoric for marketers -- Marketing scholarship and rhetoric -- Control and the discourse of marketing science -- A rhetorical approach to marketing as exchange -- Marketing and sophism : a comparison -- Magic, sympathy, and language -- The magical roots of rhetoric -- Magical persuasion and marketing -- A sophistic marketing

The organizational benefits of digital technologies are increasingly contrasted with negative societal consequences. Such tensions are contradictory, persistent and interrelated, suggesting paradoxes. Yet, we lack insight into how such apparent paradoxes are constructed and to what effect. This empirical paper draws upon interviews with thirty-nine responsibility managers to unpack how paradoxes are discursively (re)constructed and resolved as a rhetoric of 'balance' that ensures identification with organizational, familial and societal interests. We also reveal how such 'false balance' sustains and legitimizes organizational activity by displacing responsibilities onto distant 'others' through temporal (futurizing), spatial (externalizing) and level (magnifying / individualizing) rhetorical devices. In revealing the process of paradox construction and resolution as 'balance' in the context of digitalization and its unanticipated outcomes, we join conversations into new organizational responsibilities in the digital economy, with implications for theory and practice.

An independent study undertaken by the Child's Curriculum Group and funded by the Educational Institute of Scotland. This report is about young children and the hopes and ambitions Scotland has for them. Scottish Government policy aspires to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up. Part of this ambition is to tackle child poverty in Scotland and narrow the gap that disadvantage brings to educational outcomes. At the same time as increasing the free entitlement to early learning and childcare (ELC) with the aim of this rising to 1,140 hours per year by 2020, there has been, over the last 10 years in Scotland, a 29% reduction in the numbers of GTCS-registered teachers employed in such services, but only a 4% drop in child numbers, which gives a ratio of 1 teacher to 84 children at this important stage. The numbers of GTCS-registered teachers in pre-school services face further reductions: if Scotland is to achieve its aspiration of changing child outcomes, no further attrition in teacher employment can be tolerated and serious consideration needs to be given to the future composition of the ELC workforce: a task that is underway following the Scottish Government's Response to the Independent Review of the Workforce (Siraj & Kingston, 2015). The study and this report seek to provide an evidence base on the role of GTCS-registered teachers as part of the Early Learning and Childcare Workforce in Scotland. While the evidence places a premium upon maintaining a GTCS-registered teaching workforce and the part they will play in sustaining policy ambitions for early childhood, the Child's Curriculum Group respects and values the essential contributions of all practitioners in the ELC workforce.

An independent study undertaken by the Child's Curriculum Group and funded by the Educational Institute of Scotland. This report is about young children and the hopes and ambitions Scotland has for them. Scottish Government policy aspires to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up. Part of this ambition is to tackle child poverty in Scotland and narrow the gap that disadvantage brings to educational outcomes. At the same time as increasing the free entitlement to early learning and childcare (ELC) with the aim of this rising to 1,140 hours per year by 2020, there has been, over the last 10 years in Scotland, a 29% reduction in the numbers of GTCS-registered teachers employed in such services, but only a 4% drop in child numbers, which gives a ratio of 1 teacher to 84 children at this important stage. The numbers of GTCS-registered teachers in pre-school services face further reductions: if Scotland is to achieve its aspiration of changing child outcomes, no further attrition in teacher employment can be tolerated and serious consideration needs to be given to the future composition of the ELC workforce: a task that is underway following the Scottish Government's Response to the Independent Review of the Workforce (Siraj & Kingston, 2015). The study and this report seek to provide an evidence base on the role of GTCS-registered teachers as part of the Early Learning and Childcare workforce in Scotland. While the evidence places a premium upon maintaining a GTCS-registered teaching workforce and the part they will play in sustaining policy ambitions for early childhood, the Child's Curriculum Group respects and values the essential contributions of all practitioners in the ELC workforce.