Marketing and the New Materialism

Abstract

Modern man’s unsustainable systems of production and consumption are symptoms of underlying problems in how we understand and relate to the material world. Socially constructed dualities between the social and natural sciences and between meaning and materiality have encouraged societies to indulge in magical thinking about the ability of material goods to deliver nonmaterial wellbeing, which in turn places marketing at the center of the destructive overconsumption of natural capital. This essay calls attention to a growing philosophical countertrend, neomaterialism, that is reshaping research in such a way as to collapse such false dualities. The new materialism, carried over to marketing practice, demands a meticulous, if not obsessive, attention to material things, their provenance, their agency and their downstream destinations, thus forming the basis of a more sustainable society.