Joel Hietanen, University of Helsinki

Søren Askegaard, University of Southern Denmark

Onni Tulensalo, Aalto University School of Business

There was a time when postmodern thought complicated the conventions of marketing and consumer research, marked by the promotion of a liberatory view of the consumer lifestyle and an expansion of the field's methodological toolkit. While this optimism pluralised academic discourse, its emancipatory logics soon took on a more sombre late capitalist tenor in more critical corridors of the field. Today, very little is debated in postmodern terms, with concepts of suspicious playfulness and ironic bricolage now fallen silent.

Baudrillard's profound critique of consumer society has been significantly neglected in interpretive marketing and consumer research, despite him being one of the few contemporary philosophers who truly focused on consumption. His work has been recognised as canonical in consumer research, yet remains remarkably underutilised. Apart from a vanishing number of texts, Baudrillard's challenge has been seriously considered only in limited ways, often accompanied by misreadings and hasty rejections of his work.

Baudrillard's body of work traces how signification in consumer culture constantly intensifies towards implosion and cataclysm. In Consumer Society, consumption is theorised as a system of signs that exposes how everyday objects organise social differentiation. Symbolic Exchange and Death radicalises critique by opposing symbolic exchange to the structural logic of value, foregrounding death as a challenge to linear narratives of modernity and progress. The Ecstasy of Communication traces how proliferation of communicative networks and technologies collapses distance between subject and world into obscene overexposure where meaning and reality implode.

Baudrillard has been described as a dangerous writer whose work should be entirely rejected, an enemy of science, and lacking any affirmatory solution. Yet his work remains potently revealing, offering an inescapable mirror of consumer culture as an extreme social form. When analysed, a culture of constant implosion presents itself through Baudrillard's descriptions of our being in late capitalism, which cannot be neatly given in data.

The question of what to do with Baudrillard today requires accepting his invitation to play with serious excesses and responding to his challenge by staking that which guarantees realities in interpretive marketing and consumer research. Without keen sensibility to the excessive, we will continue to be caught off guard by consumption phenomena labelled as irrational. We inhabit a generalised mania where the alibi of use operates everywhere for things of no use apart from their signs.

The emergence of sustainability as a megatrend demonstrates how environmental action transforms from practices addressing ecological limits into a hyperreal system of signs reproducing themselves regardless of material outcomes. As something becomes more sustainable, its sustainability vanishes into its own signification and retreats from reality, not because it is unreal but because it is overexposed. Baudrillard's theory is not critical but catastrophical, attuned to how events attain their effects without passing through causes.

Fatal strategies, as Baudrillard conceptualised them, emerge from awareness of the object's cunning genius and victorious strategy over the subject. They involve abandoning the subject's losing game and siding with the object, letting the system's own logic run to its fatal excess rather than attempting resistance or mastery from within. Theory becomes fatal itself through injections of the absurd capable of challenging the object's power, pushing dominant systems to the point of reversibility where they begin to undermine themselves.

The special issue welcomes all kinds of Baudrillardian critiques and contributions on studies of consumption, marketing, consumer culture, and social sciences in a broad sense. Contributors are encouraged to explore what has been repressed, avoided, and tempered – all that which remains too revealing of our contemporary situation and too cunning to be satisfied with affirmation.

Potential topics

• Baudrillard's social theory and its application to consumption and consumer research
• The neglect of Baudrillard's work in marketing and consumer studies despite its relevance
• Consumption as a system of signs and social differentiation
• Critique of consumer society and the order of signs
• Symbolic exchange versus the structural logic of value
• The implosion of meaning and reality in consumer culture
• Hyperreality and spectacle in contemporary consumption
• Fatal strategies and their potential for understanding late capitalism
• Postmodern theory in marketing and consumer research
• Environmental action and sustainability as hyperreal systems of signs
• The role of excess and the obscene in consumer culture
• Resistance and emancipation in the context of systemic totality
• Death and symbolic exchange as challenges to modernity and progress
• Communicative networks and technologies collapsing distance between subject and world
• The relationship between appearance and depth in consumption

Timeline

• June 30, 2027: Manuscript deadline