The Body, Consumption & Marketing

The Body, Consumption & Marketing

11 Bedford Square on Thursday, May 23^rd at 2:00

Marketing and consumer behaviour models typically frame the consumer as a decision-maker who evaluates options. At its most alienated conception, marketers are accused of imagining the person to be akin to a computer; an information processing machine that arrives at both rational and irrational outcomes. In moving away from rational model-making, experiences become privileged sites of understanding consumption but, again, analysis takes place at the level of the mind with research often taking the form of interpreting oral testimony. What happens when the body is brought to bear more strongly within our analytical frames?

There are numerous ways of thinking about the consumer body; as the central site in which consumer desire becomes stimulated, as the actuality of behaviour itself, as an externalised technology that needs to be governed through fitness regimes and bodily ideals, as the object that fails governmentality injunctions because we are always too fat, too skinny, too short, too tall, etc., as the principle site through which gender norms are experienced and performed.

This seminar seeks to consider the role of the body within consumption and marketing. Norah Campbell of Trinity College, Dublin explores futuristic conceptions of the body within science fiction depictions of the post-human whilst Liz Parsons and Emma Surman of Keele University explore the embodied experiences of marketing workers.   A panel discussion will follow in which we will be joined by the philosopher, William Large of University of Gloucestershire.

The event will take place at 11 Bedford Square on Thursday, May 23^rd at 2:00.

To reserve a place, please email alan.bradshaw@rhul.ac.uk