Promotional Culture

The term promotional culture was coined and developed by Andrew Wernick in his groundbreaking book, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression, published in English by Sage in 1991. Anticipating the precipitous rise and subsequent dominance of branding and marketing activities in the West over the past twenty years, Wernick breaks with traditional views of advertising, production, and consumption as conceptually distinct areas of consumer culture, arguing that the commodity form cannot be separated from its promotional form and that consumption activity is bound to the production of promotional meanings and brands. Promotionalism names the extension of market values and commodity relations in all areas of life.

Promotionalism has been on the rise in the West since the beginning of the mass production of goods, addressing the need to advertise and market those goods to consumers. Locating the first successful branding exercises in the development of the distinct style of Wedgwood pottery in the mid-1700s, Wernick notes how the style and look of Wedgewood [Page 1158]products became central to their brand identity and to how they were promoted. In this early moment of industrial capitalism, then, we see the rise of “market-oriented design,” whereby “production and promotion (are) integrally co-joined” (1991, 15). What is promoted cannot be disentangled from what promotes it; the commodity form produces its own promotional skin, becoming a “commodity sign.”

There can be no doubt that promotionalism is now a dominant cultural condition. We see the rise of branded goods, branded corporations, branded politicians and political parties, branded nations and cultural events, even branded individuals (Oprah™, Tiger™, Michael Jordan™). Our clothes, our cars, our homes, even our own senses of self are intricately bound up with the logic and meanings of corporate brands and promotional messages. But how is a promotional message distinct from any other form of communication?

Echoing the work of other post-structuralist theorists, such as Jean Baudrillard, Wernick argues that a promotional message makes for a unique mode of communication; it is a complex group of signs, which simultaneously represent, advocate on behalf of, and eventually come to displace the commodity being promoted. Promotion entails a rearrangement of the relation between sign and referent, whereby the sign comes to dislodge the material object to which it refers and, in this way, acquires a kind of agency: “in this integrated system of production/promotion, the commodity and its double—the commodity sign and the promotional sign—are deployed together in a mutually referring and self-confirming way” (1991, 16). Goods come to be designed less for their direct usefulness and more for the meanings and myths they are able to mobilize and represent.

For Wernick, promotion is a speech act, a form of rhetoric, which must be judged not by its content but by its performativity, its ability to incite action; promotion works to perpetually persuade. A culture marked by the ubiquity of promotional discourse is a truly postmodern one, signaled by a lack of trust in language. Here, what matters most is not “meaning” per se or “truth” or “reason,” but “winning”—attention, emotional allegiance, and market share. Promotional rhetoric, as a foundational component of commodity exchange and of most contemporary social discourse, is thoroughly instrumental; its function is to bring about some form of “self-advantaging exchange” (1991, 181).

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