RPB Marketing | Content Marketing & Growth Marketing
For this entry, I’m feeling somewhat poetic (or naive, since, in my opinion, modern marketing is more about operations than creativity). I am a fervent lover of literature and linguistics, so I wanted to talk about the relationship between words (in terms of their meaning) and marketing (a cold, behind-the-scenes hemisphere of sales). I have always found that the humanities (as a field of study) and marketing have a close but conflicted relationship.
It seems redundant to say that words have an active role in how we think or speak (since much has already been said about it). But in 1955, when John Langshaw Austin, at Harvard, said that words not only serve to say things but that they “do”, he changed the way we conceive any discourse.
But, beyond the theoretical, something else worries me: what happens when words and, specifically, language, are placed at the service of the market (specifically, the digital market)? In other words, what happens when it is given a “useful” function? Here we begin to think that many of the things we say are said because someone (or something) led us to tell them. And even worse: the words we say serve a transactional purpose.
Data analytics, databases, machine learning, digital data, algorithm-based ways of thinking, and language processing technologies have something to say on the matter. This could be where the problem of “doing things with words” today leads to “saying things with data”.
I’d like to address this problem. I will discuss the interesting aspects of Austin’s proposal, but I will also highlight how this situation becomes more complicated when the language is applied to the digital market.
What John Austin says about “doing things with words”
In 1955, Austin presented his lectures at Harvard University on “How to Do Things with Words.” He brought to us a curious idea: words can create, form, make, say, and build situations.
Later, in 1962, the book How to Do Things with Words was released. In this work, Austin introduces and develops the theory of speech acts. It examines how words serve not only to describe the world but also to chain actions. In a nutshell, the book deals with the problems of:
- Distinguishing realizational utterances. Distinguishing between constatative utterances, which describe the state of affairs (whether true or false), and realizative (or performative) utterances.
- Speech acts. One of the best-known points of his lectures. He identifies three types of speech acts: the power and effects of speech. They can be emotional/psychological/linguistic acts of words. Locutionary acts, or saying something with a specific meaning and reference. Illocutionary acts, which are performed by saying something (such as promising, ordering, asking, etc.). Perlocutionary acts, or the effects or consequences that words have on the listeners (such as convincing, frightening, inspiring, etc.).
- Conditions of success. Certain felicity conditions must be met for an illocutionary act to be successful. For example, when making a promise, one must intend to keep it and be in a position to fulfil it.
- Felicity and failure of speech acts. Discusses how speech acts can fail. For example, someone promises something without intending to fulfil it. Then, the promise is unhappy.
- Importance of context. Emphasises the importance of the context in which speech acts are performed. The meaning and effectiveness of words depend to a large extent on the circumstances in which they are uttered.
How “doing things with words” is complicated on the Internet
We advance to the second level of the problem. Words have power and consequences; these words that “do” or “make” have practical/material implications. They can be used for what they say and the possibilities they generate. But, what happens when that word that “does” something is also capable of materialising/functioning on a transactional-commercial perspective? At this point, I would like to delve into the internet and digital media.
The things we say today are tremendously conditioned by the information we receive. This information, moreover, is filtered by algorithms. In other words, we are referring to codifications constructed from quantitative languages that provide responses and actions in response to commands.
Different marketing strategies filter certain types of content. Nowadays, doing things with words has a significant impact on the interests of both sellers and buyers. The language that “does” also “says”, but is backed by data. It is data that organises, quantifies, categorises, and prioritises certain types of content. We’re not talking about disinterested terms; there are competing interests on the part of businesses that exploit language to make a profit.
As Boris Groys mentions in his concept of Art in Flux, the graveyard of web pages created by web browsers is a consequence of deliberate manipulation of digital language. In this context, language plays an active (but automated) role. It behaves as a referent. Language is turned into an index, a hook, a key point. Language is subjugated to the analytical role of a nonexistent judge in the form of AI, which, automatically, determines what is being used and what is not.
Saying things with data to sell
Saying things with data means that words that describe things are only there because a digital language led us to them. The content we consume and the way we think are influenced by the media.
Whether we sit down to read a book, watch the news, enjoy a football match, or play video games, all these activities are deliberately mediated for our consumption. And who mediated to us to do so? It may be a private company or a government party, but language is what brought about this phenomenon. Language becomes a catalyst for sales and preferences.
Computer languages are supported by data analytics and other marketing strategies, allowing these conditions to be applied to our consumption style. A market superstructure has turned language into a tool to conceive us as pieces of human capital.
Doing things with words that sell
Behind the feeling (and likely the fallacy) that we are masters of our decisions and that the world is full of things to choose from, we find ourselves trapped in a cycle that crudely forces us to emulate our same actions, perpetuating the notion that consumption is natural; that we live in a free market that offers us a tremendous array of choices; or that our decisions are truly our own.
In this case, digital languages are promoting these ideas.
Austin’s proposal in his lectures extends to a performing function. However, taken in a modern context, we see that the word (concretely, language) suggests that not only is saying things to materialise a world, but that thinking is itself to make, to produce.
The deliberate linking of language to the interests of specific sectors devalues its worth. And, at the same time, the productive power of language as a mechanism of syntax is thereby fully understood. Here, companies, in the backstage of the backend of a server, tell us what to say, when, and how. They use the language to generate this event.
There is a malicious intent behind the use of language in digital media. Today, it is a subscriber to the means of reproduction of the digital capital market. This language quantifies and enumerates what we say (or what we seek) to turn it into an object of consumption on the Internet.
The irresponsible and excessive use of these “words” as “tools”, for example, in a content campaign, can have a major impact on the development and formation of new digital technologies.
