Exploring the role of discourse in marketing and consumer research

James Fitchett,Robert Caruana

doi:10.1002/cb.1497

James Fitchett, Robert Caruana

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1497

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Abstract

AbstractThis paper reviews the development of discourse‐based analysis in marketing and consumer research and outlines the application of various forms of discourse analysis (DA) as an approach. The paper locates this development alongside broader disciplinary movements and restates the potential for critical DA (CDA) in marketing and consumer behaviour research. We argue that discourse‐based approaches have considerable potential and application particularly in terms of supporting disciplinary reflexivity and research criticality. A discursive lens offers novel ways of understanding marketing as a subject/discipline as well as how marketing academics conceive and investigate objects of marketing inquiry. The objectives of this paper are fourfold: to outline the development of discourse and text‐based studies in marketing and consumer research; to reveal how this has shaped, framed and limited the application and utilisation of DA in particular ways; to synthesise the main principles of DA generally and CDA specifically; and highlight how these approaches could be applied to a range of marketing and consumer behaviour issues and contexts. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Highlights

Marketing and consumption depend largely on discourse for the creation, ordering, dissemination and reinforcement of product knowledge
Our core rationale is that discourse analytical techniques can and have been used systematically to identify the organisation of marketing knowledge, how these ‘enframe’ certain subjectivities, practices and relationships, and what the various outcomes are for those subjects of marketing discourses. In this we argue that discourse analysis calls attention to those systems, processes and practices that enable text – such as a marketing textbook or consumer guidebook- to operate in the first place, why it is possible to make certain kinds of statements and not others, why certain values and judgments are attached to specific acts of text and speech, as well as highlighting the fact that some kinds of text remain marginalised, discredited and unspoken (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2011)
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in particular, offers a valuable methodological and epistemological direction for marketers who, while willing to subject the mainstream marketing discourse to scrutiny and analysis are able to examine some of the reasons why dominant discourses about marketing remain powerful and widely accepted

Summary

Introduction

Marketing and consumption depend largely on discourse for the creation, ordering, dissemination and reinforcement of product knowledge. Analysis at this level concerns the situated nature of the text under investigation, in terms of who it is produced by and for (locally) but how it is produced (externally) by drawing upon wider social discourses The application of this kind of approach in consumer and marketing research has potential in studies of consumer identity and discourse (Roper et al, 2012; Thompson and Haytko, 1997) and is used to examine the meaning of adverts and/or the subject categories and relationships (re)constructed in consumer readings (McQuarrie and Mick, 1992; Scott, 1994a). The view of CDA is that by exploring the constraining effects of marketing discourse and revealing its’ constructed (and contestable) nature, consumer discourse may be opened up to novel definitions, interpretations, questions and practices

Conclusions

Objective reality