Practitioners of Difference Marketing as Rhetoric Chris Miles A paper presented at the Sixth “Rhetoric in Society” Conference of the RSE, University of East Anglia, Norwich, July 3rd-5th, 2017 The starting point for my presentation today is the contention that marketing is the most powerful yet most poorly understood contemporary instantiation of the rhetorical discipline. Some of the reasons for that ‘poor understanding’ reside in the way in which rhetorical scholars understand marketing. But, equally important, is the way that marketing sees itself. As a marketing scholar, I intend today to examine some of the reasons behind marketing academia’s nervousness with persuasive communication. This will involve introducing some historical aspects of the discipline, for which I apologise in advance, but I shall then attempt to argue that despite great scholarly prejudice and intertia, marketing has recently been moving towards a self-conception which, even if just tacitly, recognises the rhetorical basis for its practice. For most publics, even a significant portion of marketing ptactitioners, marketing is about persuasion. When almost anyone other than a marketing scholar talks about McDonald’s marketing or Microsoft’s marketing what they are generally referring to is the complex of communication efforts designed to persuade consumers to think and feel in particular ways about a product or brand — the advertising, public relations, branded web sites, and social media influencer campaigns that seem to overfill our mediated worlds. Understood in this way, marketing is surely entirely rhetorical? This is not an earth-shattering claim, of course. There have been people who have noticed this before me. Yet, more often than not, when someone points it out they also have to note the same glaring inconsistency. So, Stephen McKenna writes (1999), “the largest, most pervasive, and most successful rhetorical enterprise on the planet is advertising. . . [yet]. . . it is perplexing to note that scholars of rhetoric give advertising scant attention” (p. 103). Similarly, almost a decade later, Charles Marsh (2007) states that “advertising may be the most pervasive form of modern rhetoric, yet the discipline is virtually absent in rhetorical studies” (p. 168). Both McKenna and Marsh provide a number of reasons for why scholars of rhetoric ignore the largest, most powerful, instantiation of rhetoric in modern society — it is vulgar and so unworthy of the attention of communication intellectuals, it is mostly performed in very short texts and so it’s better off left to linguists, it is predominantly visual and so is best left to semioticians and semiologists, or even that rhetorical analysis of advertising would 1