![]() ![]() This allowed Plato to construct ‘the sophist as the negative alter ego of the philosopher: his bad Other’ (Cassin, Citation2000, p. Plato took the word rhetor, which narrowly referred to someone who made a speech in a law court, and then adapted it into a term to describe the whole business of being a Sophist. A central part of Plato’s attack on the Sophists was the coining of the term, rhetorike, to refer to what the Sophists do with words. In opposition to Plato, the Sophists placed oratorical skills, rather than philosophy, at the heart of their schooling. Plato’s principal intellectual rivals were the Sophists, something well documented in dialogues such as Gorgias, Protagoras, Menexenus, Phaedo, Sophist, and Phaedrus. Hence, the very existence of rhetoric as concept could be seen, from a marketing perspective, as a result of one of the earliest attempts at a ‘competitive positioning strategy’. And Plato’s description of what rhetoric is, what it tries to do, and how it relates to truth is both heavily influenced by his own particular philosophical project and his distinct unease at the comparative public success of those he labelled as teachers of rhetoric. It has been persuasively argued (Schiappa, Citation1990) that the term itself was coined by its first and still most influential enemy, Plato. The initial act of defining rhetoric involves complicated, contingent decisions that are immediately bound up with intense valorisations. A clear understanding of why this might be will enable us to appreciate not only why marketing is so closely tied to the rhetorical tradition but also why marketing itself suffers so regularly (in the press, in popular fora, but also in the boardroom) from so many of the same accusations as rhetoric. Worse still, rhetoric is not just ignored but ‘actively distrusted, and attacked’, so that anyone seeking to engage in any form of exploration of its influence upon a discipline such as marketing is immediately faced with a seemingly interminable uphill battle against a dominant view of rhetoric as a poison, something to be avoided, discouraged, shunned. ![]() vii) has noted, despite the many years that distinguished scholars and specialists have devoted to ‘telling us about the great importance of rhetoric as a key to understanding the past, its history, literature, art, architecture, music’, they have not been able to ‘overcome the prejudice, or lack of response’ from the wider scholarly world. This must inevitably involve a certain degree of engagement with the history of rhetoric but this is important precisely because most marketing scholars are generally not familiar with this history, and therefore fall prey to the pejorative usage of the term to signify ‘empty’ discourse designed to manipulate or trick.Īs Vickers ( Citation1999, p. 803) insistence, in this very journal, that rhetoric ‘as a framing device and as an instrument for managerial action is central to a full appreciation of marketing reality’ has acted as our mission statement in putting together both this special section and the First International Symposium on Marketing (as) Rhetoric that preceded it in 2017 at Bournemouth University.īefore introducing the invited contributions and the peer-reviewed articles that make up this special section, we wish to outline for the journal readership the basic arguments for treating marketing as a form, or an instantiation, of rhetoric. While there is a small but significant tradition of using rhetorical perspectives to analyse and investigate aspects of marketing theory and practice, our title suggests that rhetoric can be identified with marketing at a more fundamental level. This special section of the Journal of Marketing Management is dedicated to the exploration of the relationship between the relatively modern discipline of marketing and the ancient subject of rhetoric.
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