ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the extant marketing scholarship which has sought to engage with the rhetorical tradition. It divides this literature up into three strands. The first of these covers research that has looked at marketing communication practices in order to identify the use of traditional rhetorical tools and techniques (such as the ‘figures of speech’). The second concerns literature that has looked at marketing scholarship itself for evidence of rhetorical strategies—treating the academic marketing word as persuasive communication. Finally, there is a small amount of research that has sought (like the current work) to argue that marketing, as a whole, is entirely a rhetorical enterprise. The chapter ends with a discussion of the way in which the academic discipline of marketing exhibits a discomfort with the concept of persuasion.
