Big Lies, Little Lies: The Story of Propaganda

Abstract

Marketing is a technical term that must relate to modern practice and the body of theoretical knowledge it draws from. We define it as being all those behaviours by which the firm relates to its externalities, but in recent years, as we have seen, theory and practice have taken it well beyond this to embrace non-business organisations, and after initial resistance this more elastic conception has been generally accepted. Can it thus be called marketing? We could argue that this is a matter of self-definition: if people call themselves marketers, then they are. But it is also an analytic description of a set of distinct processes and technologies which in commerce are called marketing, and which in recent years has been applied to non-commercial areas where analogous conditions arise.

‘The public has therefore, among a democratic people, a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive of; for it does not persuade to certain opinions, but it enforces them and infuses them into the intellect by a sort of enormous pressure of the minds of all upon the reason of each.’

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America