Living in the material world: marketing and meaning

Anthropologist Grant McCracken looks at marketing as the management of meaning in culture. He argues that the meanings carried by material goods come from the culture we live in and go into the goods that we consume in pursuit of identity, to help make choices and communicate with others. Marketing facilitates the movement of meanings from cultural artefacts to consumers via branding

Materialism is becoming the villain of the piece

Increasingly it’s the explanation we resort to when things go wrong. Drugs on the rise, divorce rate up, kids dropping out of school? Must be our love of consumer goods. The case against the consumer society is the new orthodoxy, a staple of classroom, cocktail circuit, and media commentary. We have found a new flag in which to wrap ourselves. We have found a new incendiary for our ‘searing’ acts of social criticism. Most of all, we’ve got ourselves an all-purpose explanation for the ills of contemporary life.

This argument is familiar and widespread. It says modern, Western societies, driven by the engines of marketing and materialism, have developed a soul-destroying obsession with consumer goods. It says these goods have turned us away from high culture, from real spirituality, from the ideals of community, self-sacrifice and a common good. Goods are shackles for the self. We all know the argument well enough to sing it by heart.

This argument is a dangerous misrepresentation of the facts. It is, in my opinion, alarmist, accusatory, rich in assumption, poor in research, and almost entirely wrong. It creates alienation where none is necessary, self-loathing where none is warranted, and it sends our collective misgivings rabbiting off in all the wrong directions.

Consumer goods are an important medium of our culture

They are a place where we keep our private and public meanings. Cars and clothing, for instance, come loaded with meanings – meanings we use to define ourselves. We are constantly drawing meanings out of our possessions and using them to construct our domestic and public worlds. Shackles of the self? In Western societies, the reverse is true. Consumer goods are one of our most important templates for the self.

Why do goods play this role? In our society, individuals are free to construct the self. We no longer presume to tell people who they must be. Increasingly, we leave them to make this choice for themselves, to choose how they will define their gender, age, class and lifestyle.

Goods help us make this choice. They help us make our culture concrete and public (through marketing and retailing). They help us to select and assume new meanings (through purchase). They help us display new meanings (through use). And they help us change meanings (through innovation). Goods help us learn, make, display and change the choices required of us by our individualistic society. They are not shackles but instruments of the self.

This does not mean the consumer society is above criticism. Let us note, for instance, that goods do contain stereotyped meanings. They contribute to the confines we place upon the self-definition of women, immigrants, the elderly and the young. But let’s remember that this could not be otherwise. When goods reflect the meanings of our society, they must necessarily reflect the benign meanings and the imprisoning ones.

And let us remember that goods help to destroy stereotypes. Every protest group in our society creates new constellations of clothing to repudiate old meanings and establish new ones. The history of feminism in North America represents, among other things, a continual repudiation and reinvention of our material culture, as women refuse sexist clothing and create outfits that give voice to a new view of gender. Goods are both the prison and the keys to the cell.

Let us also grant our love of goods is sometimes wasteful. Certain patterns of consumption must change, and they will. But those who suppose we will become a society of plainness and simplicity are simply wrong. The abundance, the diversity and the obsolescence of consumer goods is not driven by marketing deception or our own giddy disregard for the state of the planet. It is driven by the objectives of our culture. Some of the reductions we are now contemplating are necessary and possible. Others are simple pipe dreams that misunderstand the nature of the consumer society – our society.

And let us remember that goods will propagandise for the green society. ‘Green’ meanings are even now being loaded into goods, and it is in this form that they will help to colonise consciousness and achieve a more ecological society. This is a bitter irony for some of the green enthusiasts but it is as it should be. This is what our culture does.

Let us also grant that materialism relates to selfishness. This too must change, and it will. But it cannot change until we understand why goods mean so much to us. Simply to say that we are driven by selfishness, vanity and greed is not useful or illuminating. It is time to take a more intelligent view and to see that consumer goods capture us because they capture the meanings with which we construct our lives.

We are constantly drawing meanings out of our possessions and using them to construct our domestic and public worlds. Shackles of the self? In Western societies, the reverse is true

Should good be vilified?

Hippies, intellectuals, and ecologists think so. But why is it that hippies always have to wear very particular jeans and sandals to engage in this hostility for material objects? Why is it that intellectuals must flaunt their affection for tweed coats and peculiar headgear? Why is it that the greens must wear Birkenstocks to declare their good intentions?

All of this is plain enough. These anti-materialists are using materials to define the group and the self. They are using consumer goods to fashion an identity. They depend upon on material culture to make their culture material.

Consumer society is not an artificial and catastrophic social invention. It is a culture with its own systematic properties. And we are not devouring beasts who treat with the devil. We are creatures who depend on the meanings contained in the material world.

Meaning management: an anthropological approach to the creation of value

So let us now turn to the role of marketing in the management of these kinds of meanings.

As a practical and an intellectual enterprise, marketing turns, to some extent, on the question of value. Value is the basis of price. It is the fount of profit. The firm is designed to create and capture value. This concept of marketing is widely accepted. It serves as a powerful foundation for our understanding of what marketing is, the identification of the problems marketing must solve to serve the business community, and the intellectual agenda that directs the academic’s interest.

But do we have an exhaustive definition of value? I believe not. Some value comes from cultural meaning. Marketing, I argue, generates value partly because it generates meaning.

One of the things the marketing manager is managing is meaning. Meanings are party to the marketing process at several points. This aspect of value, I believe, has no systematic part in most marketing calculations. It makes a cameo appearance when we talk about brands and advertising but it is more foundational than this.

The idea of meaning as value needs to be made a more systematic part of the marketing model (Figure 1). This model says that every product and service is made up of its physical properties, functional features and cultural meanings. These meanings come from somewhere. They come from culture – from movies, fashion, television, subcultures, fads and trends, etc.

And they are captured for the product or service through delivery vehicles, some of which fall within the marketing envelope – packaging, advertising, promotion, placement, sponsorship, etc. And meanings go somewhere. They end up in the life of the consumer. In this case, the product has delivered value because it has delivered meaning. This is what the consumer is, in part, why the consumer is buying the product or service – to obtain the meaning contained in it.

The consumer has access to many meaning sources beyond the ones provided by marketing. But the ones provided by marketing are vital to the self-invention or self-completion of the individual. This is one of the reasons why meanings add value. We do not have the full inventory of cultural meanings and delivery devices that would allow us to deal with this question in detail, but it is possible that there are some kinds or degrees of cultural meanings that are available to the individual only as a consumer. And it is, survey or no, manifestly clear that certain of the meanings that most people treat as essential to full participation in the contemporary world come from this source.

Consumers could find other sources of this meaning, and sometimes they do. But this ‘outsourcing’ comes at a cost. At the least, this is a self-imposed marginality. Without the meanings made available by the marketing system, the individual is, for some social and cultural reasons, incomplete, or at least pallid.

This article featured in Market Leader, July 2012.

Grant McCracken is an anthropologist and consultant

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