Marketing cultures

What do marketers actually do? In the final episode of Season 1 of Cultural Economy in the Kitchen, Addie McGowan and Philip Roscoe journey into the strange world of marketing, a place of persuasion, data, and corporate storytelling. Accompanied by Kevin Mellet and Robert Cluley, they explore marketing as a sprawling social practice built from signs, statistics, management tools, ethnographic hunches, PowerPoint decks, and carefully managed uncertainty. Kevin maps the sociology of marketing as a field shaped by knowledge production, moralization, and the organization of markets themselves. Robert takes listeners inside the day-to-day labour of marketing professionals, revealing how data becomes drama and numbers become narrative. Together, they unpack marketing not as a glossy surface but as one of capitalism’s great backstage operations: part science, part art, part speculative fiction. From Cultural Economy in the Kitchen, the academic journal podcast from the Journal of Cultural Economy editorial collective.