Crisis, what crisis? Marketing, Midas, and the Croesus of representation

Abstract

A crisis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a decisive moment”, “a turning point”, “a time of great difficulty”. If this is the case, then marketing cannot possibly be in crisis. Crises are temporary states of heightened anxiety, whereas marketing is in a semi‐permanent philosophical pickle. Or so scholarly commentators would have us believe. This paper argues that there is no crisis of representation in marketing. There are more, and more varied, representations of marketing than there have ever been. Representationally speaking, marketing is living in a golden age, a time of Croesus and King Midas. The real problem is that many of these representations are not very good, albeit for understandable reasons. We need to raise the quality rather than increase the quantity of our “experimental” endeavours and this paper makes five recommendations to that end.