Is consumerism only what Philip Kotler says it is? A decolonial analysis on failures, hierarchies, and exclusions

ABSTRACT

The mainstream area of marketing maintains that consumerism is a social movement that seeks to support consumers against corporate wrongdoings. Led by the area’s canons, particularly Philip Kotler, marketing has associated consumerist values with neoliberal-capitalist principles; however, it has failed to address the issues, realities, and contexts of consumerism and consumerists in the Global South, in their multiple and non-homogenous forms, which are onto-epistemically aligned to such realities. The present paper aims to analyse, through a decolonial perspective from Latin America, how the consumerism led in marketing by Kotler fails to promote consumer protection in multiple realities and for multiple groups, especially (if not only) in the Global South. Latin American decolonial theorisations related to hierarchies of power, locus of enunciation and universalisation of knowledge are adopted, in order to critically analyse these failures, based on a perspective that originates in a non-hegemonic context.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumerism
• decolonialism
• hierarchies of power
• locus of enunciation
• universalisation of knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In this paper, we will use capitalism and neoliberalism as economic systems that, despite having some discontinuities, have also central continuities as economic systems of oppression and power on a global scale. Our focus here is particularly on neoliberal-capitalism, our current dominant economic system (particularly since the 1980s–1990s). The ‘neoliberal’ framework is marked by free market ideal for economic growth, and it articulates with Kotler’s and mainstream marketing’s concepts of consumerism. The neoliberal-capitalist framework, in this case, is distinguished by the growth in economic inequality, with the weakening of democratic paradigms, particularly for ‘ordinary’ populations, while large corporations see their interests being met by neoliberal-capitalist ideologies. Thus, in this work, we focus on neoliberalism as ‘part of the long-term development of capitalism’ (Cahill & Konings, 2017, p. 111).

2. We would like to highlight here that, despite being aware that neither the Global North nor the Global South are homogenic or static (e.g. there are many metaphorical souths within the North), our focus here is on the geopolitical Global South, particularly regarding Latin America and the colonial-modern system of oppression imposed on this region.

3. The use of this particular critical lens as our grounding epistemology is based on the understanding that it is better suited to explain the context the authors of this paper are from, produce from and live in, given how Latin America was culturally, socially, religiously, and economically forgotten through historical colonial processes imposed by Spain and Portugal and the later capitalist-neoliberalism led particularly by the US. The processes and debates concerning the construction of decolonial concepts themselves were forged from the struggles, violence, and oppressions suffered historically in Latin America. Decolonialism, therefore, aims to bring such coloniality to light, and create theoretical possibilities from this locus and its particularities (Ballestrin, 2017; Mignolo, 2011). Thus, we considered decolonialism more adequate for our analysis, considering (1) our context and locus of enunciation and (2) the dimensions we wished to explore. For instance, in the same way decolonialism has Latin American epistemological roots, postcolonial critique has geo-epistemic grounds in Southern Asia (although not only in this locus), which has its own particular outlook arising from historical colonial processes (Tlostanova, 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcus Wilcox Hemais

Marcus Hemais is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Business management, and his research interests focus on decolonialism and consumerism.

Laís Rodrigues

Laís Rodrigues is a PhD student at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Her research interests are in international regulations, decolonial perspective, subaltern feminist studies and discourse analysis.