Is consumerism only what Philip Kotler says it is? A decolonial analysis on failures, hierarchies, and exclusions

Abstract

ABSTRACT The mainstream area of marketing maintains that consumerism is a social movement that seeks to support consumers against corporate wrongdoings. Led by the area’s canons, particularly Philip Kotler, marketing has associated consumerist values with neoliberal-capitalist principles; however, it has failed to address the issues, realities, and contexts of consumerism and consumerists in the Global South, in their multiple and non-homogenous forms, which are onto-epistemically aligned to such realities. The present paper aims to analyse, through a decolonial perspective from Latin America, how the consumerism led in marketing by Kotler fails to promote consumer protection in multiple realities and for multiple groups, especially (if not only) in the Global South. Latin American decolonial theorisations related to hierarchies of power, locus of enunciation and universalisation of knowledge are adopted, in order to critically analyse these failures, based on a perspective that originates in a non-hegemonic context.