From the Editor: Manipulation and Marketing: The Elephant in the Room?

Abstract

Welcome the third and fourth (double) issue of the first volume of the Journal of Marketing Behavior (JMB), the European Marketing Academy’s (EMAC) new peer-reviewed behavioral journal. JMB features behavioral research related to marketing that has relevant and interesting practical implications for managers, policy makers, or consumers. The first two issues of JMB included original experimental consumer research on the perception of percentage changes and on the effectiveness of humorous persuasive appeals; they also featured articles, in which academic thought leaders in consumer research and psychology provided their perspectives on fundamental behavioral topics that are key to research and practice in marketing, on behavioral decisionmaking and on rationality as utility maximization (or not). This double issue continues the idea of offering a platform for high-level perspectives from multiple disciplines on important behavioral topics, broadening the set of contributing disciplines whose insights may be relevant to marketing. The issue is anchored on an essay by Cass Sunstein, in which he provides a definition and comprehensive account of a concept that the public often associates with the field of marketing, yet a thorough discussion of which marketing scholars themselves seem to have fastidiously circumvented over the years—manipulation—perhaps the marketing discipline’s elephant in the room. Whether and how marketers might manipulate consumers with subliminal advertising was a fashionable research question in the 1950s (Simonson et al. 2001). In more recent decades, the major academic marketing journals have not featured work on the concept of manipulation itself, even though there has been plenty of research into automatic psychological processes that may enable manipulative marketing actions and communication, for example,