Marketing Inventing a Different Marketing Language

Fictitious campaigns for existing brands, created by top-flight young photographers and artists, show what tomorrow's marketing will look like.

Margeting is the name of a brand-new international publication by Dutch cultural analyst André Platteel. In his latest book he calls for a new form of marketing that will give consumers an opportunity to shape their own desires. Margeting offers escape routes from the dictates of present-day marketing.

An IKEA lamp in a landscape of traffic signs, old class photographs with the Adidas brand as a self-evident feature, robust formal portraits of KLM pilots and figurative texts that challenge Nike's "just do it" slogan are just some examples of the visual material in the book.

Platteel, who worked on the project for three years, says that marketing is the language of present-day culture. Marketing has permeated the culture - culture has been "marketized". Everything has become a product. Platteel says that "thinking in terms of 'marketing concepts' has penetrated almost every sector of society - not only the economy, but also politics, the media and the arts. Producers of culture no longer think in terms of desires, but of concepts aimed at target groups, based on market research, with the sole purpose of bringing about an immediate transaction."

Yet the success marketing has enjoyed in recent decades has caused it to lose touch with consumers' desires. Says Platteel: "Research results - supposedly a reflection of the vox populi - translate desires and opinions into common denominators that no longer reflect any real feeling. Marketing is generating a culture dominated by radical mediocrity."

In Margeting, Platteel deconstructs today's culture and suggests new avenues that create space for consumers' desires once more. Using examples from cinema, the visual arts, philosophy and literature, Margeting shows us numerous ways in which consumers can be invited to generate their own narratives. Much of the theory in the book is based on the thinking of contemporary "philosophers of difference".

Says Platteel: "Perceptions and descriptions of reality have changed. Reality has become too complex and has come so close to us that it can no longer be dictated as a single 'picture'. Rather than dictate a reality or impose one on consumers, Margeting invites them to keep on introducing new realities of their own into brands."