This special session calls for a radical overhaul of consumer research and marketing practices and pedagogy to fit a post-growth world. Open to degrowth-minded scholars and practitioners, the session will delve into critical marketing, transformative consumer research, consumer culture theory, macromarketing, and beyond. And conversely, it will examine how these disciplines can inform degrowth strategies, ensuring a mutual enrichment of knowledge and application. Therefore, if you are green-blue-inclusive-sustainable [insert your favourite growth-washing adjective] growth advocate, then this session is probably not for you. We encourage participation from those ready to explore and enact a deep, systemic shift away from traditional growth-centric approach to marketing and consumption, while eschewing cliched and simplistic characterizations of marketing and sustainable consumption for a more nuanced understanding.

This paper aims to address a crucial intellectual gap as related to advertising and the climate crisis. It specifically focuses on the role of limits to the advertising industry, following the degrowth school of thought. While degrowth has developed into an intellectual and social movement, it remains largely underexplored in humanities, particularly in communications and cultural studies which have only recently begun to focus on the climate crisis.

Thus, I will present an interdisciplinary literature review that brings together degrowth scholarship from the social sciences with emerging scholarship from cultural studies to map out the issues, explore the possibilities and account for the challenges in conceptualising a degrowth approach to advertising. I will also apply insights from the literature review to the case of the UK grassroots network AdFree Cities, and particularly policy recommendations they have been advocating.

On the one hand, the degrowth scholarship has broadly advocated for limits in the advertising industry of highly industrialised societies (d’Alisa et al, 2014; Cosme et al, 2017; Kallis, 2018; Jackson, 2021). On the other hand, cultural studies and particularly critical approaches to promotional culture have only recently started comprehensively outlining the advertising industry as an environmental hazard as well as relevant cultural resistance (Brevini and Murdoch, 2017; Lekakis, 2022; Meier, 2023).

This paper will draw from the literature review and case study to outline directions for future research and future policies that address the complicated relationship between advertising and the climate crisis. Finally, it will bring attention to critical issues that related to the conceptualisation of advertising in relation to degrowth. Countering consumerism is only one aspect of degrowth, though a meaningful one if a cultural shift can be achieved.

References

Brevini, B. and Murdock, G. (eds.) (2017) Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

d’Alisa, Giacomo, Demaria, Federico and Kallis, Giorgos (2014) Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, London: Routledge.

Jackson, Tim (2021) Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity.

Kallis, Giorgos (2018) degrowth, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lekakis, Eleftheria (2020) ‘Adversaries of advertising: anti-consumerism and subvertisers’ critique and practice,’ Social Movement Studies, 20(6): 740-757.

Lekakis, Eleftheria (2022) Consumer Activism: Promotional Culture and Resistance, London: Sage.

Meier, L.M., 2022. Consumer Society and Ecological Crisis. Routledge, London.

Existing literature on degrowth-oriented organisational value creation (Froese et al., 2023) shows that there are already countless ways in which organisations can, and do, offer a real alternative to extractive and profit-centered ways of delivering goods and services. Degrowth-oriented organisations, however, also face numerous challenges. For instance, they have to compete with large, growth-dependent enterprises but cannot do so simply by selling more or lowering their prices. They also tend to provide products and services in new ways, requiring customers and “prosumers” to adapt and often participate.

Such challenges could be addressed through strategic communications and marketing. Yet, little orientation exists so far on how to do this. Traditional marketing frameworks include countless tactics that actively encourage harmful practices like overconsumption, planned obsolescence and materialism, while technological advances like artificial intelligence are increasingly drawn upon to do this ever more efficiently. There is also currently no research on what degrowth-oriented marketing and communications could entail.

Hence, the goals of this study are to understand how marketing and communications can provide value for degrowth-oriented organisations, how technological marketing tools can be used in ways compatible with degrowth principles, and how this could contribute to a transition towards a degrowth economy. To this end I conducted primary interviews with diverse degrowth-oriented organisations, including charities, energy co-ops, and degrowth-oriented businesses, focused on the organisations’ current use of and benefits from marketing, their future plans, and the challenges they face. The analysis of the interviews is complemented by desk research on literature on degrowth organisations and marketing in order to develop a blueprint for new marketing frameworks and tactics that are inherently guided by degrowth values. This will provide invaluable guidance for practitioners in degrowth-oriented organisations, researchers in related fields, and marketing professionals seeking to realign themselves with degrowth principles.

The escalating severity of environmental challenges is prompting a growing proportion of management scholars to adopt more radical perspectives than the three-pillar approach to sustainable development - economic, environmental and social - in which the economic pillar always ends up taking precedence (Hickel, 2019; Robinson, 2004). There is a call to produce new frameworks and analyze new practices (Wright et al, 2018; Gibson, 2015). Indeed, recent research in climate and biodiversity sciences shows that the changes currently being made by economic players and the transformation of business models are not enough (IPCC, 2022; IPBES, 2019). Faced with the complexity of the challenge of crossing the "planetary boundaries" (Rockström et al. 2009), marketing researchers are calling for new discussions to transform the marketing activities of organizations according to the principles of strong sustainability (Press, 2021; Volle and Schouten, 2022) or degrowth (Lloveras and al, 2022).

While the theoretical ambition is there, empirical studies are still lacking to understand how to operationalize such a transformation on a corporate scale. As the traditional objective of marketing is to develop value through increased sales or market share, using consumerist advertising, it’s considered by many as contrary to the principles of strong sustainability (Gossen et al, 2019).

Our research question is the following: How an organization transforms its marketing practices to integrate a model that respects the planetary boundaries? Here we will focus on one objective : what are the drivers and obstacles to the adoption of such a model within an organization that intend to implement such a model ?

To study how a company concretely engages in this strategic change in its marketing activities, we use the practice theory approach (Bourdieu, 1990; Giddens, 1986). As the marketing literature has not yet produced a conceptual framework to describe the operational part of the transformation, it is necessary to produce theory through observation and analysis of what actors in the field actually do when they cope withthis transformation. In this work, we are adopting the single-case study method (Yin, 2009) to analyze the transformation in a business organization that has decided to adopt a post-growth model based on the respect of the planetary boundaries. Using a qualitative approach, our data collection is multi-method (participant observation, semi-structured interviews, study of internal documents and a notes book written by the researcher). The fieldwork took place in the marketing department of "Les Laboratoires Expanscience" between January and December 2023.

Despite the worsening of the eco-climatic crisis and the social injustices associated with the growth model, the idea of degrowth remains a niche issue, failing to position itself decisively in the public debate and translate into concrete action on the political front and in people's everyday lives. This marginality is certainly first and foremost due to the interests of power groups and the socio-economic system consolidated in recent decades, but it’s also based on people's perception of the relationship between growth and individual/ social prosperity. For this reason, in order to foster the construction of a new imaginary for a society beyond growth, it’s appropriate to gain an in-depth understanding of the components of both the current, prevailing imaginary of growth and that of degrowth, verifying how this growth-degrowth antinomy is represented in the mental processes of individuals, public opinion and shared culture. In particular, it’s necessary to investigate how the culture of growth has been shaped and supported by the culture of consumption, which in fact constitutes the way in which confidence and the positive valorisation of growth are actually realized in people's daily lives.

In order to explore this issue in the Italian context, research was launched in two distinct but integrated phases, the first results of which are presented here. A first part of the research consists of a questionnaire survey, addressed to a large and varied sample of people, allowing us to draw a wide picture of the Italian population's knowledge, opinions and attitudes regarding the opposing perspectives of growth and degrowth, as well as the relationship between this system of expectations and beliefs and the broader culture of consumption. A second part of the research is aimed at detecting extent and characteristics of the degrowth theme in the imagination and in the operating methods of movements and associations whose activities could represent a framework of concrete translation of general principles into everyday practices. In fact, it often happens that the activities of such organisations are largely congruent with the degrowth perspective, but the theme is not adequately made explicit, thus missing opportunities to create useful alliances also in terms of political proposal. To clarify these aspects, organisations potentially close to degrowth objectives were mapped, examining their communication and operational styles, with the aim of identifying and removing possible obstacles to their full involvement in the degrowth socio-political project.

The author first explains the growth mechanisms as described by André Gorz and links them with a broader analysis of the growth imperative in the degrowth critique of capitalism. The growth mechanisms can be classified into cultural (positional consumption, advertisement, cult of work etc.) and systemic (rebound effect, money multipliers and the logic of capitalist accumulation).

In the second part of the paper, the author shows the ways in which the self-perpetuating mechanisms of growth imperative can be broken through a combination of policy and cultural shifts.

Finally, he will point out the errors to be avoided in analyses of growth and the limits of mechanistic thinking about complex systems, especially capitalism.

The panel “Sleeping with the Enemy: Marketing’s Role in Shaping Post-Growth Realities” intends to explore the transformative potential of marketing in a world facing a confluence of crisis. Drawing inspiration from Milton Friedman’s historical impact on global economics, we want to underscore the power of marketing to make ideas politically inevitable. As society grapples with the urgent need for sustainable, degrowth-oriented approaches, we call for a shift in marketing’s traditional principles.

While marketing has historically thrived on promoting growth and consumerism, we believe that it can be harnessed to promote degrowth values, ecological economics and alternative business models aligned with degrowth agenda. This unique perspective challenges the notion that marketing is the adversary of degrowth and true sustainability, showcasing a growing cohort of marketing professionals willing to align their efforts with radical sustainability agendas.