Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Socialization

* Master’s Thesis: Rethink ethical marketing after the critiques of Bernard Stiegler. Maxime Lathuilière. ESC Toulouse / WF Ingolstadt master in management , 2012

URL = http://maxlath.eu/master-thesis

Abstract

"Marketing, as the organization of attention capture and motivation canalization, that is to say the diverting of the social energy that is desire as analyzed by Bernard Stiegler, is at the heart of the social and economic system that is questioned by the post-2007 crises and the experience of system limits. Marketing’s shared history with the consumerist culture, the controversies on business responsibility and the downfall of counterforces that are national states and social institutions in the context of globalization, contributed to blur the limits of ethic in marketing practices. While limits thin down, marketing practices found new fields of technical improvement through the development of behavioral sciences, constitutive of a psychopower, immoderately use to tend toward ubiquity; not only aiming direct sells anymore but also working on the symbolic level for the sake of branding. Those immoderate practices lead to a form of exhaustion of marketing’s raw material: attention and desire. This systemic analysis of marketing’s impacts would lead to the sketching of an alternative system of information, valuating responsibility regarding the commons, including the psychic and collective well-being.

Plan

I. The notion of ethical marketing

II. Analyze of marketing’s impact on individual and collective psychology with Bernard Stiegler’s work

III. Difficulties and opportunities to implement a philia- and transindividuation-friendly marketing in the emerging technological and sociological context."