This paper takes a rhetorical approach to the study of everyday marketing work. It seeks to understand how marketers make sense of the work they do, what discourse is used, and with what rhetorical effect. The study is based on interviews, observations and daily interaction with five marketers involved in marketing and selling of consulting services. It was found that these marketers draw on relationship discourse and customer need discourse – among others – when arguing for business. These discourses could be understood as contradictory discursive forces used by marketers to talk up suitable rhetorical selves, by means of which they accomplish their work. As a whole, this paper provides an illustration of the rhetorical nature of marketing, and discuss theoretical implications, aiming to expand the intellectual agenda for future studies of marketing work that takes marketers’ use of language seriously.

Introduction

There is a growing interest in work-based studies that recognizes the constitutive role of language (Barley & Kunda, 2001; Korica, Nicolini, & Johnson, 2015; Okhuysen et al., 2015). The underlying assumption is that language is not primarily used by people to make more or less precise representations of the reality of a situation. Language does not mirror reality, it constructs it (Potter, 1996). Put differently, words create, or perform, the acts they refer to (Austin, 1975), with profound implications for how organizational life should and could be studied. By problematizing the representation of everyday work – and investigate how discourse is used on a micro-level by various organizational actors to accomplish things – we are able to learn not only about the discursive means used, but also how the social life of an organization is produced and reproduced (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000a, 2000b). This is particular important in the field of marketing where conventional marketing management discourse prescribes certain activities as “correct” and “natural”, whereas every other activity a marketing manager might be involved in does not fall in the category of marketing at all (Hackley, 2003). Thus, having marketing managers account for their accomplishments in terms of conventional marketing management discourse might not be very informative of their everyday activities, leading to one-dimensional understanding of the marketing subjects and the nature of their work (Brownlie & Saren, 1997).