Reply to criticisms of marketing, the consumer society and hedonism

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reply to Andrew V. Abela's “Marketing and consumption: a response to O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy”: European Journal of Marketing. The article challenges a number of alleged claims in their paper “Marketing, the consumer society and hedonism”, and the authors' response seeks to present a systematic and, hopefully, intellectually coherent answer to Abela's critique.Design/methodology/approach – The paper proceeds via discussion, argument and conceptual analysis. The three key areas of critique, which focus on the notion that these authors are somehow desensitized to the ethical significance of materialism and marketing's role in its causation, are examined in succession.Findings – There can be no finality in this discussion, only further debate; nevertheless we believe we substantiate our claim that marketing alone does not “cause” materialism but that it is an inalienable fact of human nature. The first claim attributed to us was that the harms of materialism h...