Journal of Marketing Management

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Student-centred theory building: pedagogical

collaboration after Mark Fisher

Paul Haynes

To cite this article: Paul Haynes (2022): Student-centred theory building:

pedagogical collaboration after Mark Fisher, Journal of Marketing Management, DOI:
10.1080/0267257X.2022.2105935

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2105935

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Published online: 05 Aug 2022.

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JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT
https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2105935

Student-centred theory building: pedagogical collaboration

after Mark Fisher
Paul Haynes
School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway University of London, Royal Holloway, Egham Hill,
Egham, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This study presents the findings of a pedagogical case study exam­ Received 2 August 2021
ining a framework for developing innovative theory in postgradu­ Accepted 8 June 2022
ate marketing education. The article describes a theory-building KEYWORDS
framework introduced to a postgraduate marketing course in Marketing pedagogy;
order to enable students to examine, collaboratively and critically, student-led theory;
a number of apparent paradoxes within contemporary commercial collaborative partnership;
promotion and consumer behaviour. The article examines the ped­ Mark Fisher
agogical context for the framework, invoking the recently pub­
lished account of Mark Fisher’s ‘exit’ pedagogy. The article focuses
on the example of a case study of student-led theory development,
tracing a series of stages to examine and explain promotional
practices. Features such as critical reasoning, deliberation, synthesis
and consensus building are exhibited through the stages of theory
building. The approach ultimately contributes to developing an
innovative approach to teaching theory through a framework that
empowers theory development.

Introduction
In his 2016 lecture course, published in 2021 as Postcapitalist Desire, Mark Fisher
presented a number of challenges to students concerning the possibility and character
of post-capitalism. The questions encompassed by these challenges were in many ways
more important than the answers given by either the course materials or Fisher’s own
tentative responses. The course embodied Fisher’s approach to pedagogy and his
pedagogical discourse: ‘Fisher’s pedagogy seeks to exit a state of capitalist realism
and cultural inertia, something that can be achieved by a range of strategies’ (Stock,
2021, p. 1). Central to these strategies is a committed engagement with students as co-
creators of theories, concepts and the structure of learning, as affirmed in the introduc­
tion to the lecture course: ‘you can contribute to it, you can shape it – it’s an open
experiment, this course, starting now, really . . . ’ (Fisher, 2021, p. 35). This article
describes an attempt to build on Fisher’s pedagogical approach in order to enable
students – collectively – to address emerging challenges for marketers and marketing,
by co-creating new theory. The findings from this case study contribute to marketing

CONTACT Paul Haynes Paul.haynes@rhul.ac.uk School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway University
of London, Royal Holloway, Egham Hill, Egham TW20 0EX, UK
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
2 P. HAYNES

pedagogy by illustrating that by taking ownership of theory development, rather than

merely applying existing concepts, elicits a critical evaluation of established perspec­
tives used in marketing. In this way it provides a catalyst to address ideologically
embedded assumptions in marketing education. Such a catalyst operates through an
explicit problem-based reflection on evidence-shaping and innovation in peer learning;
and, ultimately, a negotiated ‘exiting’ of dominant marketing paradigms (see Fisher,
2021, pp. 69–73).

Literature review

The collective character of marketing and consumer research is a demonstrable fact

(Bradshaw & Brown, 2008, p. 1397)

There is an extensive literature on co-productive learning and staff/student partnerships

in pedagogy in higher education (see Healey et al., 2014; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017).
These partnerships represent several types of contributions by students, i.e. as research­
ers, producers, advisers, consultants and change agents (Flint, 2015), they represent
a variety of pedagogical approaches (Cook-Sather, 2014; Little, 2011) and they encom­
pass a range of scholarly-informed values (HE Academy, 2015). The lesson from this
diversity of relationships, approaches and values is to challenge many of the core
assumptions concerning the interdependencies of staff and students, while recognising
that a productive disruption of traditional roles afforded by such a partnership is helpful
in examining and developing teaching and learning frameworks (Cook-Sather, 2014;
Neary & Winn, 2009). Partnerships are thus conceptualised in terms of the different
options for collaboration, which, in particular, present opportunities in which all stake­
holders ‘stand to gain from the process of learning and working together . . . a process
of engagement, not a product. It is a way of doing things, rather than an outcome in
itself’ (Healey et al., 2014: 12). Notwithstanding the diversity of practice encompassed by
these examples and the importance of opportunities for innovation in collaborative
practices (see Bradshaw & Brown, 2008), Fisher’s work exemplifies an egalitarian shaping
of the teaching process through such partnerships that is unusual even among critical
thinkers.

Fisher’s style of lecturing his students, as transcribed in the book, reveals subtleties to Fisher’s
teaching that were indeed ‘radical’, and in parallel, the strategies and praxis of his wider
project often go beyond critical or radical pedagogy.
(Stock, 2021, p. 2)

In particular, it approaches concepts and materials as means to affect or provoke the

entire classroom into rethinking and re-theorising the way that they perceive events
around them, a rethinking that ‘challenges the necessity for a certain style, structure and
form to be utilised for theory’ (Stock, 2021, p. 2). Indeed, it is no coincidence that it is left to
one of Fisher’s students, Matt Colquhoun, to provide the introduction to Fisher’s peda­
gogical work (Fisher, 2021, pp. 1–32) and to develop its core conceptual and theoretical
themes, embodied by the collaborative partnership expressed as the ‘Fisher-Function’
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 3

(Colquhoun, 2020, pp. 3–4). Fisher’s pedagogy is characterised as a new praxis for
salvaging and repurposing concepts, part sounding board, part dialogue and part
incitement:

I’d like every week for someone to introduce the texts – not me. You can introduce it however
you like – it doesn’t have to be a formal presentation, but just starting off talking about them,
so it’s not me starting off”
(Fisher, 2021, p. 77)

In practice, students were required to redevelop the ideas, synthesising them in pre­
paration for the class and redefining them through collective discussion in class (Fisher,
2021, pp. 179–180). This approach can be contrasted with critical pedagogy, as exem­
plified by Paulo Freire (1970) and Henry Giroux (1997), which seeks to develop educa­
tional approaches to raise awareness of oppression, using teaching to develop political
perspectives, promote activism and advocate other, related, strategies to address
inequality, injustice and discrimination. Fisher offers instead an alternative approach,
one based on assembling and curating conceptual weapons/tools and politically
charged cases or illustrations, and refusing the authority to determine, impose and
prioritise their usage in terms of developing conclusive responses or solutions: ‘it is the
rethinking of (un)thought about capital itself that lingers throughout his teaching, or
rather shapes his pedagogy’ (Stock, 2021, p. 3). In this way, Fisher removes from the
classroom the option of an ‘interpassive’ delegation of responsibility for theory (under­
written by the authority of the educator) and instead, as the examples of theory
development described in Fisher (2021) illustrate, requires an ethics of responsibility,
within an intense, insightful and political ethos informed by Deleuze & Guattari’s
emphasis on the creation of concepts as a means to transform experience and reorient
thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). This is not a one size fits all theory-generating
machine, nor equally does it imply a one size fits all theory-relevant pedagogy. Instead, it
is an experiment as much with engagement as it is with exiting preconceived structures,
creating, in Deleuze & Guattari’s language, a line of flight (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1988,
p. 216):

through engaging with the way that Fisher taught his students about the likes of capital, we
can seek to both excavate radical forms of pedagogy and critique the concept of pedagogy
itself as another entity that may need to be escaped
(Stock, 2021, p. 3)

The article will present a case study of student-led theory development, which parallels
many of the themes, influences and assumptions in Fisher’s approach, but does not
imitate it nor use Fisher’s philosophy to govern the outcome of the process. Before the
case study is presented, it will be helpful to provide a short overview of the methodolo­
gical approach that shaped it.

Method
The research comprises an exploratory research design, which is developed through
a case study. The objective of this approach is to explore the processes that shape theory
building for students and to present pedagogical insights into the support and guidance
4 P. HAYNES

of these processes. The case study is the culmination of many years of (re)designing
assignments with sufficient scope for independent theory building, using similar techni­
ques to those described in Fisher’s approach. These techniques were not copied from
Fisher’s pedagogy, but perhaps share a common ancestry through shared undergraduate
and postgraduate experience in the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of the pedagogical
research presented in this article, it represents an abductive action research approach
to method, framed as a method through which: ‘practitioners themselves investigate their
practices as they find ways to live more fully in the direction of their educational values’
(McNiff & Whitehead, 2011, p. 8).
The research examines the (axiological) learning journey that students undertake in
response to a framework, introduced early in the course, with a focus on developing,
improving or surpassing the framework’s assumptions and evaluating opportunities for
consensus building with respect to the Over Promotion Principle (OPP) of Marketing, an
abductive framework (i.e. a framework enabling the drawing of probable inferences from
what is already known by the researcher), designed to be shaped, through student colla­
boration, into a theory or principle. In most circumstances, collaborative ‘design by com­
mittee’ is equated with a compromised approach to a problem, in which any vision or
creativity has been eliminated to meet the minimum requirements of each member of the
committee. In this case, however, it was the driving force of the pedagogical value of the
OPP. The collaborators in this project were 20 postgraduate students studying a module
focused on the complex interdependencies of consumption, markets and culture. The
different iterations of the OPP emerged through a series of stages, located within the
nexus of consumption culture and the marketing basis for the promotion of the goods
and brands that drive these consumption practices. These stages were envisioned to
address the different ‘territories’ of firstly an imposed framework, through a space of
deterritorialisation, to stimulate resistance and contestation to the established teaching
inequality, and re-emerge through a reterritorialization process, to articulate individual and
group standpoints on consumption and promotion (see Bustillos-Morales, 2021) and,
ultimately, to provide collective feedback, evidence, theory evaluation, dialogue and peer-
learning for an abductive approach to these perspectives (see Åsvoll, 2014, pp. 297–299).
The initial formulation and its pedagogical justification were presented to students at
the beginning of the course as a starting point by the author, and linked to the course
readings, which included theories of relevance to critically examining promotion and
overpromotion, from Adorno to Žižek, and on collaborative theory building in marketing
(see, for example, Bradshaw & Brown, 2008). In juxtaposition with the courses’ readings,
the OPP suggested a relationship between promotion and disappointment, proposing
that for the various markets of consumer resources, in a world where everything is heavily
marketed (i.e. overpromoted), any good or service you experience for the first time as
a consumer must disappoint if it has been promoted to its maximum. This initial, non-
evidenced ‘middle range theory-focussed’ articulation is designated the initial framework
of the OPP.
The case study is an experiment in pedagogy, theory development and assessment
feedback. The pedagogical scope of the experiment in theory building was to use the
initial framework as an object on which to focus communication and with which to
provoke a collaborative approach to ‘problem identification’ across a range of marketing
and consumption paradigms, and elicit an abductive approach to address the evidence
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 5

‘all around us’ on which these paradigms are based. As with Fisher’s relinquishment of the
role of the professorial authority figure, the author established with the class the role of an
‘anthropological’ presence, exploring the consumption theory building process itself. This
is important regarding the earlier claim to approach pedagogy in terms of deterritorialisa­
tion (see also Mazzei & Smithers, 100–101). The relationship between teacher and stu­
dents is typically conceived to be a ‘territory’ that establishes classroom interactions of
authority and compliance. Breaking these classroom practices to establish that expertise
resides with students, not the teacher (whose prime purpose is modified to serve as
a witness and reflect on this expertise) is to deterritorialise traditional classroom practices.
Such a deterritorialisation is entirely intuitive when considering innovative themes in
consumer research, i.e. new consumption practices are rapidly emerging and transform­
ing, which reflect behaviour patterns more associated with the profile of students than
their lecturers. In such cases, much of the expertise on emerging consumption practices
resides with the students, for example, as a result of being born in a digital age of
consumption and acquiring the expectations and corresponding skill in decoding promo­
tional communication meant for the ‘digital native’ generation, but also as reflective,
reflexive and critically aware customers. The lecturer, perhaps reliant on textbooks that
need to be updated to synthesis academic research on these specific practices, learns
from the discourse of reflective consumers. Such learning, however, is not derived from an
encounter with passive research subjects, but through engagement with the ‘consumer
culture(s)’ discovered within the classroom but removed from the lecturer’s (potentially
narrow) awareness of emerging and under-researched consumption practices. In such
cases, Jessie Bustillos-Morales’ observations on the challenges and barriers to effective
pedagogical co-creation becomes particularly relevant: ‘presiding power imbalances
within the territory of the classroom . . . [include] the nature of knowledge as given by
the lecturer, and authority as only belonging to the lecturer’ (Bustillos-Morales, 2021,
p. 223). Deterritorialisation is thus important as it operates in ways that address these
imbalances derived from the classroom’s ‘territorial’ shaping, including relatively simple
strategies to develop a more ‘distributed sense of ownership over teaching and learning
where the voices of students ushered in significant learning that went beyond the set
module syllabus’ (Bustillos-Morales, 2021, p. 223). To be specific to the case study
presented here, the author used the OPP to elicit reflection on consumption practices
recognised within the group but not explained well within the relevant peer-reviewed
literature or by the author. The author’s lack of experience and expertise, concerning key
emerging consumption practices identified within the group, was also made explicit, in
particular through ethnographic-type questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions
regarding these practices, values and cultural meanings. This classroom interaction
afforded an appreciation of the distributed character of knowledge on this topic. How
the resulting distributed sense of ownership of knowledge also provides opportunities for
theorising will be articulated in the following sections. Before addressing this challenge,
the article will examine some of the debates implied by an attempt to reformulate the
initial OPP framework into an evidenced, if somewhat tentative, theory, concluding with
an evaluation concerning research reflexivity, pedagogical lessons and consensus in the
reformulation of the OPP. It is through this evaluation that a number of pedagogical
observations will be made.
6 P. HAYNES

Case study: the reformulation of the over promotion principle

The learning context of the reformulation of the OPP is the Royal Holloway University of
London’s MA Marketing and MA Consumption, Culture & Marketing joint elective module
called Consumption, Markets and Culture. The course objective is to critically examine
marketing text book assumptions with the aim of reconfiguring alternative formulations
to explain contemporary marketing and consumption patterns. It is within this ethos that
the initial framework of the OPP first appears: components and themes such as branding,
seduction, identity mythology and information technology are shown to combine in ways
that could be said to intensify consumer desire and frame the object of desire as just
a little beyond deliverable expectations, leading to slight disappointment and mild
remorse before the consumer once more resumes their place as a buyer to be seduced
(see Arnould & Thompson, 2005). The module teaching, in parallel with Fisher’s insistence
that the weirdness of jarring observations can be productive because they ‘cannot be
made to add up’ (Fisher, 2016, p. 56), suggests that by questioning marketing textbooks as
a summary of academic authority, by extension academic authority itself is trumped by
the comical, incongruous but commonplace observations of consumer performance that
resist conventional marketing logic (see also Beier, 2019, pp. 152–153).
Although both the problem formulation and the pedagogical context outlined are
aligned with critical approaches to marketing and consumption, they are not based on
a particular ideological perspective. As with many such principles there is room for
different perspectives to explain the mechanisms from which the OPP emerges; indeed,
identifying students’ different ideological perspectives, making them more explicit and
using them as the basis of theory generation are among the objectives of reformulating
the OPP. The reformulation process is also explicitly stated in the course as ‘an exercise in
democratising knowledge production’ through the process of critical analysis. In practical
terms this meant that examining the limitations of the OPP and any underlying assump­
tions might equally imply a critique of mainstream marketing perspectives or a critique of
the critical marketing perspectives that challenge such mainstream marketing ideas or,
indeed, a reflection on the ‘staging’ of the OPP as a discursive device. As students
choosing the elective are almost equally divided amongst those wishing to pursue
a career in management and/or marketing and those expressing alternative ambitions,
the object (or subject) of critique, the type of evidence or use of scholarship and
argumentation could not be predetermined but would be apparent only through the
discussion and reformulation based on the priorities, experiences and values on which
class members choose to focus.
The initial framework of the OPP was presented within a thirty minute lecture slot
set aside for an initial response and group discussion. At this stage a number of
examples of marketing practices likely to result in disappointment, such as in the
cosmetics and beauty industry and a specific example of fashion clothing were each
identified as potential evidence in confirmation of the OPP; equally, cases of ‘loyalty-
based’ services such as restaurants, bars and florists were offered as counterexamples,
as disappointing customers (and thus overpromoting their services) was considered
a risky strategy, particularly in a market with many near substitutes. At this stage the
debate reflected a split between a conventional rationalisation of marketing strategy
perspective, countering a conventional critique of misleading marketing practices
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 7

approach. The next pedagogical stages were designed to get beyond this dichotomy
through an evaluation of data, evidence experience and existing theory (see, for
example, Darke et al., 2010) through which new concepts would need to engage and
emerge.
In order to emphasise the importance of examining the assumptions implied by the
OPP and the evaluation of evidence to assess the credibility of different features and
interpretations of the OPP, one of the course assignments was used as the focus of this
process. The group presentation assignment was chosen so that students would need to
build some consensus regarding their evaluation of the evidence and address differences
in perspective to produce a reformulation, initially in small, self-managed, groups. This
reformulation could then be explained to, and challenged by, other members of the class
working on the same issue. Students were asked to self-manage their groups, with each
group asked to produce a group report (of unspecified length) that would not be assessed
but would be helpful in explaining the themes, perspectives and ideas that emerged in
their group discussions, and would be useful background information in clarifying, con­
textualising and interpreting themes discussed in their group presentations. Each group
was given fifteen minutes for their presentation – ten minutes to present and up to five
minutes to address questions. The presentations were formally assessed and the marks
awarded contributed towards their final module score (10%), in addition to an individual
case study (30%) and an individual essay-based assignment (60%) both of which were
unrelated to the exercise discussed in this article. The group presentations and the reports
on which they are based are discussed together to avoid repetition.
Six groups were formed ranging from 2–5 members, each producing a report over
a four-week period, which although non-assessed, was submitted through the university’s
anti-plagiarism submission process to ensure the integrity of the exercise and identify
sources not fully cited in the main text. These reports provided considerable detail about
the transition of the OPP amongst the different groups and indicate a variety of perspec­
tives used to evaluate, assess and reformulate the OPP. More importantly, the reports
indicated group consensus in developing a strategy and reading list to address the
assignment but a lack of consensus between the different groups regarding the strengths
and weaknesses of the initial framework, and regarding the most appropriate sources of
evidence and scholarship on which such analysis and claims could be made. The groups
were asked at this stage to identify their key arguments and, in particular, to emphasise
their conceptual, theoretical and explanatory innovations, in order to prepare a case for
these arguments in a formal presentation and to stimulate discussion with other groups in
the final session.
Reflecting on their conceptual and theoretical contribution and relating them to other
ideas discussed in the presentation was the final task at this stage. In the final session
a full hour was set aside for a debate concerning the final considerations and responses to
the various reformulations and objections proposed in the presentations and group
reports. A small number of clarifications were made by group members to ensure that
the full variety of opinions were open to discussion. These clarifications included treating
opinions at the level of the individual not as representatives of their group; that course
content and opinions expressed by academics should have no specific authority on the
topic; the option to retract or disagree with their previously expressed opinions; and to
emphasise that the purpose of the discussion was to collectively contribute to an
8 P. HAYNES

evidenced evaluation of the OPP concept and not merely to focus on consensus concern­
ing the reformulation of the OPP. In this regard the format of the session resembled
a focus group as much as a committee but the process of evaluation was named
a committee in order to provide a sense of purpose, in particular in ‘reterritorialising’
the analysis from critique to conceptual tool (see Haynes, 2021, pp. 1177–1179). The
discussion, chaired by a student volunteer, was focussed around four broad interdepen­
dent themes related to the findings presented in the presentations, each lasting around
15 minutes. These were as follows: 1) post-presentation opinion on the OPP as an
intellectual concept; 2) evaluation of examples and counter examples discussed in the
presentations in relation to concepts/theories; 3) assessment of the themes and assump­
tions covered by the conceptualisation of the OPP; and 4) the possibility of building
consensus in reformulating the OPP.
The discussion suggested some support for using the OPP as a heuristic device, or a way
of introducing critical themes synthesised from the totality of readings, with consensus
between the groups that the initial framework failed to offer an insightful principle or theory
for conceptualising consumer behaviour. There was considerable sympathy for the identi­
fication and evaluation of deceptive practices and misleading promotional activity perpe­
trated by marketing managers; however, this was considered to be the exception rather
than the rule, in contrast to the assumption at the centre of the initial OPP framework that
manipulative promotional practice was a common marketing practice.
There were a number of examples used by different groups, but several industries were
mentioned by more than one group. The cosmetics industry was used as an example of
misleading advertising, and indeed the (women’s) fashion in general was highlighted as
an example of a sector inclined towards overpromotion. Photo-shopped images of
models, unrealistic performance claims, and low quality ‘disposable’ fashion items were
all identified with this sector, as was the manipulative use of product placement, paid
endorsers/influencers masquerading as ‘amateur’ lifestyle vloggers or advertising dis­
guised as user-generated content. The fast food sector was also used as an example by
multiple groups, picking up on examples mentioned in lectures, such as misleading
photos of food and misleading messages concerning the quality of its ingredients. The
food industry more generally was criticised for a lack of transparency over the ethical and
nutritional content of its produce, with the example of the beverage Sunny Delight™, also
mentioned in a previous lecture, identified as misleading in its promotional activity for its
‘subliminal’ promotion as a healthy fruit juice, for example by being unnecessarily placed
in the refrigerated section of supermarkets. The food sector was also used multiple times
as an example of the limitations of overpromotion, with restaurant reviews cited as
a powerful disincentive to the practice of overpromotion. The argument suggested that
the power of online reviews means that customers who were disappointed with their
meal would act immediately to share their disappointment, which collectively would ruin
the reputation of any restaurant misleading customers about the quality or value of its
food. Online reviews for a variety of sectors and the availability/accessibility of informa­
tion through internet sources and the sharing of sources through social media, were
deemed by many of the committee to be a decisive restraint on overpromotion.
There was a general consensus concerning the view that marketing is implicated in
overpromotion, consumerism and an oscillation between high expectations and the
experience of customer dissatisfaction. The interdependence of the growth of marketing
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 9

and the expansion of the range of consumption options, such as the intensification and
proliferation of branding, were seen as linked to these trends, but there was little appetite
to blame marketing for the ill effects of consumerism due to the complexity of consump­
tion and the varied reception consumers derive from advertising, promotion and brand
management. A more nuanced approach was presented, with promotion weakly asso­
ciated with negative features of contemporary society, but a more ‘even-handed’
approach was considered to be one in which these negatives are balanced against the
positive aspects of marketing and promotion, and weighed against the other factors that
drive and motivate the consumption patterns that can be observed for good and bad.
There was much less consensus on the view characterising marketing as a discipline
contributing to negative social and cultural trends or that the conventional approach
presented in marketing courses, such as the ‘marketing concept’ or related customer-
oriented or relationship marketing assumptions play a role in shaping an ideology
normalising consumerism and unsustainable consumption patterns. While the module
had emphasised the need to identify negative aspects of marketing as a counterpoint to
the unacknowledged ideological basis for conventional marketing ideas, including
a prevailing ‘business ontology’ in Fisher’s language (Fisher, 2009), there was a rejection
of this critique as itself ideologically motivated. The initial framework was critiqued by
around a quarter of those present for assumptions that were too closely aligned with
popular anti-marketing discourse, such as the creating of false needs premised on the
passive reception of advertising, or the simplistic relationship equating the quantity of
promotion with the quantity of consumption. It was also critiqued by a similar size of
opinion for providing insufficient evidence for its specific critique.
While in the reports and the presentations there had been attempts to reformulate the
OPP and suggestions for how this could be achieved, there was a reluctance to take this
effort entirely at face value. Indeed, several attempts to develop a reformulation offered,
instead, normative suggestions to marketing managers to address the problem of being
seen to overpromote goods, rather than to critically examine or address the practices of
marketing managers. Others suggested that there was the basis of an interesting concept
to be found with a reformulation, while others agreed that capturing the ironic sense of
consumer reaction to overpromotion could be the basis of a reformulation and would
solve the issue that assumptions underpinning the OPP are far from universally observed.
Of those less inclined to agree with the reformulation, there was some attempt to add
a specific caveat or consider the special circumstances in which it might hold, but there
was no agreement on either of these conditions. Although there was no formal process
(and no pedagogical justification expressed) with which to produce no, one or multiple
finalised theories or principles, there was a degree of consensus to finalise one specific
reformulation in order to provide closure and/or the satisfaction of having a tangible
innovation as a course outcome. This will be discussed in the conclusion.

Implications for marketing education

Although there are different types of lessons to be learnt from the process set out in this
research, two pedagogical lessons will be the focus of this analysis: 1) the relevance of this
framework/principle for theory creation as a group-based collaborative pedagogical
method, as implemented in this research; and 2) the relevance of the process of student-
10 P. HAYNES

led theory creation as a pedagogical approach to critically engaging with consumer

research problems outside of this experiment as an addition to the teacher’s pedagogical
toolbox.
Turning firstly to the educational context of the process, there is, of course, a sizeable
literature on student/staff partnerships in learning (see Healey et al., 2014; Keenan, 2014;
Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). Within this literature most of the examples illustrate that
students are encouraged to take ownership of their learning agenda, take responsibility for
their research or peer learning or be engaged with the ‘blending’ and control of the
learning platform specified by the curriculum. Focussing on the production of innovative
ideas, concepts or theory is largely ignored in the literature, possibly because it is largely
ignored in practice, with Fisher (2021), Beier (2019), Bustillos Morales (2021) and Mazzei and
Smithers (2020) as notable exceptions. While student-led learning has emerged as a source
of student empowerment, the frameworks, theories and perspectives that students learn
remain the preserve of the academics designing and/or coordinating the learning experi­
ence, notwithstanding the debates concerning the opportunities for critical pedagogy to
contest authority in the classroom as much as outside of it (see Stock, 2021, pp. 12–13).
Examining the context of the specific framework used and the problems it was
designed to address implies a rather broad range of competing issues and objectives
with which to engage simultaneously. There are consequences and challenges for con­
sumers, marketers, business and society from trends concerning the intensification of
promotional activity, and increased opportunities/platforms for extending a promotional
presence coupled with innovation in promotional strategies. Focussing on potential
consumer disappointment, the emergence of more sophisticated marketing misdirection
or, on the contrary, desensitisation, awareness of promotional techniques, and a rise of
cynicism/scepticism coupled with the decline of (and influence of emerging sources of)
mass media, enables these challenges and consequences to be critically evaluated.
Collaboratively synthesising concepts from different perspectives is an inherently creative
process, in contrast to the narrow expectations of ‘correctly applying’ established aca­
demic frameworks, in particular when limited to providing a reductionist explanation
designed to limit the difficulty of its explanation, in order to avoid, rather than engage
with, complexity and uncertainty.
There is already a range of critical frameworks, perspectives and theories available that
are able to expose the way that conventional marketing assumptions (and much of the
content of marketing textbooks) are ideologically tied to explanations deemed complicit
with ‘powerful interests’ as a jump-off point for a critically inflected pedagogy. Merely
applying an off-the-shelf critique of marketing would, though, not address the needs of
the students in exploring these interdependencies, with consciousness raising only one
facet of critically engaging with the complex diversity of marketing and consumption
practices. Student-led collaboration, as represented in the case study and in examples
from Fisher’s teaching, defies thinking in such binary terms, or deferring to established
paradigms, but instead ‘synthesising a range of strategies whilst problematising the very
nature of liberatory pedagogy itself . . . that seek exit and egress from dominant para­
digms, something achieved through an attunement to weirdness, eeriness, consciousness
and the way in which the subject is enframed by capital’ (Stock, 2021, p. 2). Student-led
experiments in collaboration require, then, the type of curiosity and exploration that pre-
existing perspectives serve to relegate to secondary issues of lesser importance. This
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 11

experimental ethos fits well with the approach Fisher used in his blogging, which, though
experimental in synthesising innovative theory, is no less sophisticated than much of the
academically focused publishing in the field of marketing and consumption.
Understanding the main objective of this pedagogical approach is important in asses­
sing the need to move beyond the mere application of theories and perspectives. This
core objective is to teach a range of students from different disciplinary backgrounds
about the variety of theories and concepts applicable to contemporary consumption and
marketing phenomena and examine the limitations of these different approaches. In the
case study example, a key challenge for Masters’ courses in marketing in contemporary
higher education, is that the students taking the course arrive having studied very
different academic disciplines from each other and are not always aware of concepts
that for other students are core (and familiar) ideas. Students undertaking such courses
are therefore aware of perspectives and theories that apply to one aspect of consumption
or marketing but not to others, so that collectively the students have an understanding of
a variety of ways to conceptualise the material, but individually their knowledge is limited
to a small number of topics, which are different for each student based on their dis­
ciplinary knowledge and learning experience. The freedom to collectively explore a wide
range of such ideas as part of the group’s ‘personal agenda’ is itself a significant part of the
student’s learning journey, as exemplified by the sophistication of the reports and pre­
sentations generated within the case study. As Stock observes, with Fisher’s teaching: ‘the
range [of Fisher’s theories] itself is essential to understanding Fisher’s pedagogical stra­
tegies’ (Stock, 2021, p. 2).
The innovation developed to address the diversity of intellectual resources, i.e. experi­
ence and perspectives, assembled within each classroom setting, and the reason for
setting the challenge of developing a coherent OPP, go beyond collectively building
and operationalising a new marketing and consumption theory. It is, instead, under­
standing the process of engaging with evidence and developing concepts to understand
why it is evidence and how it provides insights into our consumption experience that is of
most value in this process. The framework of the new theory/principle was therefore
designed to be very flexible, with sufficient scope to be applied to different aspects of
consumer behaviour and marketing theory, enabling students to contribute to the shape
of the emerging theory as well as contribute to debates examining the plausibility of its
application to marketing and consumption, irrespective of their disciplinary or cultural
background. Alternatively, this contribution might instead be largely shaped by their
disciplinary or cultural background, which again highlights the tension between the role
of education in both challenging ideologies and reproducing or communicating them:

Education today represents the triumph of an utterly invasive and intractable biopower. And
yet education, within education studies particularly but by no means exclusively, has come to
be represented as the grounds for reform, renewal and redemption
(Peim & Stock, 2022, p. 258).

To address this tension, the focus of the evaluation and reformulation of the OPP was not
framed as a tool to challenge ‘false consciousness’ or to serve emancipatory discourse.
The specificity and universality of the OPP and its political implications were collectively
decided by students, meaning that different social and cultural perspectives were seen as
contributing to the debate as confirming or falsifying a variety of claims made about the
12 P. HAYNES

generality or ideological implications of the OPP (and theory in general). Key to assessing
its success as a pedagogical approach will be if concepts are generated systematically in
the evaluation and reformulation of the OPP, rather than by the wording of the text of the
reformulation or in finding uses for critiquing marketing practice. That the framework
elicits conceptual linkages in order to provide rich descriptions of the process of (over)
promotion, as outlined in the previous section, would suggest a degree of success. The
conditions under which variation can be identified and examined is built into the OPP,
enabling consumption and marketing processes to be considered in some detail in each
of the reformulation stages. These stages act as territories able to create, in Bustillos-
Morales’ words: ‘a more distributed sense of ownership over teaching and learning where
the voices of students ushered in significant learning that went beyond the set module
syllabus’ (Bustillos-Morales, 2021, p. 223). This builds knowledge and authority by bring­
ing relevant themes from beyond the recommended reading (and beyond merely articu­
lating established scholarly perspectives) and stress-tests their relevance through peer
collaboration, which enables: ‘a constant reinvention of what these texts and the ensuing
experience communicate’ (Stock, 2021, p. 14). In this way, the two pedagogical lessons of
the case study outlined at the beginning of this section converge. This occurs as ideas and
experiences are assembled to enhance the understanding of complex consumption
practices within the classroom, while at the same time these emerging ideas are produc­
tive in reflecting on the learning process itself: ‘the classroom should be constantly
questioned as the space of pedagogical hegemony’ (Stock, 2021, p. 15)

Conclusion
The pedagogical strategy underpinning this exercise must remain experimental and tenta­
tive, not least to avoid being incorporated into the learning approach that it challenges. To
be subsumed into the marketing educational structures that it questions risks it becoming
a ‘dangerous’ supplement because by supplementing these approaches to marketing and
consumption pedagogy, it implies the need for critical thinking to overturn them, which, in
turn, undermines them by emphasising their limitations, filling the vacuum of that which
‘ought to lack nothing at all in itself’ (Derrida, 1976, p. 145). In simple terms, a course module
focussed on undermining the very ideas taught throughout the entire course would be
writing its own obituary. Alternatively, by being subsumed it would become complicit with
the ideological assumptions that it seeks to address. As Nicholas Stock observes with Fisher’s
pedagogy: ‘if Fisher wished to exit that of capital, then to allow his style to become another
manual of pedagogy would allow it to become a part of the dominant paradigm of
pedagogy itself and inherently another capitalist tool’ (Stock, 2021, pp. 14–15).
This relationship between educational paradigms also reshapes the benchmark for
assessing the success or failure of the strategy presented in the case study. In addition
to a resistance to incorporation, success or failure are difficult to predetermine in terms
of a successful outcome, as this process is an emerging feature of the experiment. Any
success in building classroom consensus concerning the reformulation of the OPP
might be derived from a pedagogical failure to enhance critical engagement and to
develop critical thinking skills among the participants, i.e. no success at all.
Alternatively, within these terms of reference, success can be judged instead: in
terms of engagement with the task (see Taylor et al., 2011), the appropriateness of
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 13

the task for peer learning, particularly in developing critical analysis (see Klebba &
Hamilton, 2007) and to consider if such student-led collaborations on theory and
research could be adapted: ‘to spark meaningful change in how pedagogies are
perceived in higher education’ (Bustillos-Morales, 2021, p. 223) without foreclosing
the roles or structure of its pedagogical hegemony, as discussed in the previous
section. In addition, the case study could be considered successful in drawing attention
to hidden pedagogical factors, including the complexity of theory building, even when
the framework and context are pre-determined, which provides insights for students
into the balance of academics roles, research design and the shaping of interpretation,
evidence and findings. This helps students to decode some of the underpinning
narratives of mainstream textbooks and reverse engineer academic writing as
a strategic, as much as a scholarly, enterprise.
To be more explicit concerning the success of the case study as an insightful way of
conceptualising contemporary marketing and consumption phenomena, the written
reports, presentations and discussion reveal the OPP’s relevance to students in explaining
marketing practice. The evidence from these exchanges suggests that the OPP was
treated with the same type of respect given to the variety of established perspectives
and rigorous academic concepts that students encountered throughout the course. This is
suggestive of a tentative strategy to incorporate other omitted approaches and thus
‘diversify’ the curriculum through a similar strategy of stress-testing perspectives intro­
duced from sources beyond the marketing and management mainstream, allowing this
approach to pedagogy ‘to enter educational discourse and consider how other divergent
ideas could take place’ (Stock, 2021, p. 15)
It is easy to conclude from the exercise that assessing learning outcomes is difficult,
particularly when the diversity of aims and objectives does not express a unified whole and
otherwise eludes simple metrics. The limitations of such a case study are self-evident:
a relatively small number of participants and the specificity of the course environment
mean that the strongest claim that can be made about this exercise in theory building is that
it is an intriguing example of many pedagogical features in parallel with those discussed in
Fisher’s work. To build a robust pedagogy to develop critical analytic skills through student-
led theory construction remains a challenge for academics, but a challenge that itself might
serve a useful purpose, particularly if it extends the creative process into a more contem­
plative approach to linking teaching, exemplification, theory and broader marketing/con­
sumption trends that are as yet under theorised. Any enticement that stimulates academics
to reflect on theory construction and consider framework examples appropriate for detailed
evaluation is helpful in highlighting that academics are, after all, in the business of ideas,
irrespective of the academic rewards system that focuses on concepts only to the point that
they afford publishable accounts of research findings – and the irony of this being sub­
mitted for publication is indeed noted (although see Tadajewski, 2016, p. 1531).
With these considerations noted, and perhaps in what might be seen as an after­
thought, there was some agreement concerning the reformulated OPP. Reflecting on the
topic and with the exercise nearly at an end, there was sufficient consensus (albeit with
caveats) to reformulate the OPP in the following way:

In a world in which marketing is a powerful presence, every product tends to rise to its own
level of embellished promotion
14 P. HAYNES

While this might seem banally eloquent, a more detailed evaluation might also indicate
that it is both unnecessarily general and unnecessarily specific, picking up on a marketing
irony, i.e. the inexorable, though counter-productive, nature of pervasive exaggeration.
Though its reformulation was a heuristic device for the pedagogical approach rather than
an intended outcome, the reformulated OPP makes a serious point, if not an entirely
serious observation, explaining how marketing managers are driven in their decision-
making processes. It is by making a serious point that the exercise works and illustrates
the most important reflection on the educational process itself, albeit as almost an
unintended consequence of the exercise. Pedagogically, a good way to understand
a concept is to create it and, in this way, it should reflect on marketing thought itself as:
‘hyperstitional. It helped to bring about the very thing which it was describing’ (Fisher,
2021, p. 37). Marketing research and practice can create better ways to drive consumption
or create suitable tools to critically reflect on marketing and consumption practice.
Marketing education should be able to provide the skills to maintain an appropriate
balance. This case study details a pedagogical innovation designed to contribute to this
process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Paul Haynes teaches Marketing at the School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway,
University of London. His core research interests include analysing the ways networks and assem­
blages impact on innovation and marketing practices including branding, social innovation and
new technology. He previously worked at Cambridge University researching new energy technol­
ogies. Paul studied philosophy alongside Mark Fisher at both Hull University and Warwick
University. He holds a PhD from Lancaster University, with a thesis on Deleuze and the role of
non-linear dynamics in innovation. He has held post-doctoral research positions at Trinity College,
Dublin, and the Saïd Business School, Oxford, and a Lecturer position at Pembroke College,
Cambridge.

ORCID
Paul Haynes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6868-7780

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