Marketing graffiti - Michael Saren

Rejecting the managerially-driven structures normally imposed on the subject, Saren explains marketing from the perspective of the pivotal figure in the process: the consumer. He addresses readers as active consumers and producers of marketing, and therefore already well-equipped to appreciate the rationale and practice behind the process.

Critically examining the wide range of products, businesses, technologies, information, services, ads, packaging and branding, Saren utilizes everyday images and phenomena to draw out the conceptual foundations of marketing in its social and cultural context that we all experience.

By taking this alternative approach - linking the abstract concepts to the everyday world the reader already knows -Marketing Graffiti explains marketing as consumers experience it, as active participants in it reflecting the variety in the bricollage subject that is marketing.

About marketing…

'Marketing has become the soul of the corporation.'

Gilles Deleuze, 1992


'In the surplus society the customer is more than king: the customer is the mother of all dictators.'

Jonas Ridderstrale & Kjell Nordstrom, 1999


'The majesty of the customer … hardly plays any part any longer for the individual in relation to the advertising apparatus, the standardization of commodities and other economic realities.'

Max Horkheimer, 1967


'If marketing can encourage us to buy a Ferrari, it can also persuade us to drive it safely - or resist the temptation to steal one'. Gerard Hastings, 2006

"If the metaphor of the machine inspired managers in the industrial age, the image of living systems may inspire a truly sustainable post-industrial marketing."

P Senge & G Carstedt . 2001


Marketing is everything.'

Regis McKenna 1991


"The shoppingisation of urban life …. the city is being configured according to the mall"

Rem Koolhaas, 2001


"Baudrillardians never make it past the shopping mall"

Brian Massumi 1992


About graffiti…

'A wall is the best place to publish your work'

Banksy, (Graffiti Artist), 2005


'That's enough. I can't take any more',

Duncan Lloyd & Paul Smith, ('Graffiti' Maximo Park) 2005