The following is taken from a lecture I wrote and presented to my class of first year marketing students at James Cook University about 8 years ago.


If you will recall, during this past semester, I have endeavored to sprinkle my lectures with the spice of irreverance, from time to time,towards some of those marketing concepts and theories from 'on-high'. Indeed, I have used such inspired academic terms such as 'a load of crap' and 'bull-shit'.


These touches of postmodern enlightenment, would no doubt be scorned by most any other academic, and probably would be seen to be blasphemous to such 'gods'
of modern Marketing such as Kotler and McArthur. However, these guys, and some others I can think of, have been pretty good at working a crowd and therefore mildly entertaining at least.

From a postmodern marketing perspective, I have given you some of the cynical seeds needed for success ; namely 'walk-the-walk' and 'talk-the-talk'.


Many postmodernists are either leftist, leftist has-beens, leftist wanna be's or closet leftists. These people, in the deepest recesses of their mind think that Marx was really on track, just too far ahead of his time. His contemporary adherants just really didn't understand this and jumped the gun.

There is one particular quotation in our textbook that struck my fancy, and therefore, there must be truth in it.
Fittingly, in a postmodern way, it is a quote from another book. The author is Nietzche and the quote is: "Profound problems are best treated like cold baths - quick in, quick out" If Nietzche was instead referring to overweight maketing lecturers he would undoubtable change it to read; profound frustrations are best treated like
cold showers - quick in, stay in.

This sobering and rather unpleasant thought can be extended into some of the deepest caverns of marketing theory; namely The Four P's. These started out in life as the 12 P's and then became 6 P's.
The amount of Pee changes over time and author. However not to be out done, Postmodern Marketing adds another 4 P's to the soup. If you are feeling up to your eyeballs in Pee, I beg you to wait for just a little longer.

These new 4 P's are; Practice, Principals, Philosophy and Prescriptions. Isn't the current Practice of marketing disintegrating? Isn't there a fragmentation of markets into smaller and smaller segments? What about the rise of a new individualism and the unpredictability in selling to Generation Y ?
There are increasing declarations of discontent with long established marketing Principals.This sence of crisis is exacerbated by the plethora of marketing Prescriptions. In addition, the Philosophies of ethics as taught in most all Business Schools these days is commonly seen as an oxymoron.

As Marshall Berman so eloquently put it, to be modern "is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we are... modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintigration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which Karl Marx said ' all that is solid melts into the air."

According to Baudrillard, the so called high priest of postmodernism, it is characterised by a culture of exhaustion, where every possibility in art, politics and society
has already been tried and the only option is to recycle the forms that already exist. History has ended, the future has already happened.

However, in the postmodern world, even this rich chocolate - cake pessimism is paradoxical. Meaning is difficult to tie down. It's contingent, unstable, temporary, postponed and dependent on the context.

The postmodern condition, therefore, is one of incredulity towards metanarratives, a refusal to accept that there is one particular way of doing things. No form of knowledge is priviliged.


Rather than search for non-existant truths, we shouold be sensitive to differences and the perspectives of marginalised groups, excercise the art of judgement in the absence of rules.

Do you buy it? Make no mistake, buying into postmodernism does not come cheap.