Abstract

"Communication as Promotion: The Business Roots of Communication Research"

Devon Powers, University of Michigan (powersdj@umich.edu)

This paper offers a new way to think about “the encroachment of the market” on the communicative sphere. Since the early 20th century, communication researchers have fretted over the coercive power these promotional genres possess, and been vocal about how they perpetuate unnecessary desires, deleterious half-truths, and debilitating anxieties. Contemporary critics continue to bemoan the invasiveness and the corrosive effect promotional communication has on communication in general and have argued that its presence is rapidly expanding. This state of affairs operates on the normative assumption that a style of pure, untainted communication once existed outside of the sphere of commerce and capitalism, only to be adulterated by the insidiousness of the market.
This paper will take a different view. I will re-examine the business roots of early communication research to make two interrelated arguments. First, through a fresh reckoning with the research of well-known scholars such as Everett Rogers, Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld and others, I will show how the lines between promotional and nonpromotional communication have long been blurry at best, and in some cases nonexistent. Pioneering researchers developed theories that transferred from one zone to another, easily borrowing and sharing insights across these so-called boundaries. This suggests that studying promotional genres of communication such as advertising and marketing was constitutive of communication research itself. My second argument follows: the core characteristics of communication—such as its ability to connect, inform, and persuade—are, and always have been, not just shared by promotional communication such as advertising, marketing, and public relations but in many ways exemplified by them. Rather than being something insinuated into the communicative sphere by business interests, promotional communication embodies and indeed has much to teach about what it means to communicate well. Indeed, it might be useful to think of all communication as promotion, insofar as it seeks to bring about connection, belief, understanding, and action.