ABSTRACT
This book raises these and many more questions about the use by the corporate sector of the powerful and ubiquitous behaviour change tools of modern marketing; what I have termed ‘the marketing matrix’. Given the impact that our consumption behaviour has on ourselves, our fellow human beings and our planet, it argues that there is a need for much greater vigilance. In the seventy years since Steinbeck castigated the banks for their treatment of dustbowl farmers, and the fi fty since Eisenhower warned us of the growing power of the military industrial complex, things have got steadily worse. Corporations have grown ever bigger, transcending national boundaries and dwarfi ng regulatory institutions. In one sense, this is unsurprising: as many commentators, from Joel Bakan to Naomi Klein, have noted, a ruthless regard for the shareholder, corporate wealth and the bottom line is written into corporate DNA, and this, in turn, makes continuous growth a necessity.
