Marketing Discourse Community Essay (Essay Sample)

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Marketing Discourse Community
The term ‘discourse community' is difficult to define thanks to the multiplicity and variations in the examples of discourse communities that exist. John Swales tries to define the term as a ‘center of the set of ideas', rather than a community that creates ideas. Swales in his study of discourse communities identified six salient features that are common to most discourse communities. Swales assert that a discourse community must; exhibit communality of interest, possess mechanisms for intercommunication between members, thrive on the dissemination of information and feedback. It facilitates the spread of genre-specific discourse expectations, hold a dynamic and increasingly discourse-oriented terminology, comprise of a critical mass of members who have skills and expertise that is pertinent to the discourse (Swales 34). To understand the concept of a discourse community, this paper shall evaluate the features of the articles contained in a Harvard Business Review Marketing edition journal. The analysis shall focus on establishing the purpose of the articles, the audience, their defining and shared characteristics, context of the journal, style of writing; academic, journalistic or entertainment, and the design of the journal.
Swales, through the study of speech communities, attempts to derive a correlation between the defining feature of these two communities (Swales 35). The importance of using appropriate utterances in a discourse community is critical for membership and relevance. Individuals who belong or wish to participate in a marketing discourse must at least be conversant with the language used for both spoken and written communication. However, over-reliance on language patterns to identify discourse communities may be misleading. (Fairclough 76). The discourse community may be created based on cultural knowledge and value systems, which are difficult to identify superficially. Furthermore, Swales argues that "unlike speech communities, discourse communities are medium-neutral, and unconstrained by time and space." The choice of marketing language is significant to marketers. Research by the American Marketing Association indicates that words such as; new, free, better, gift, special, extra, sale and good have profound impact on consumer purchasing patterns. In marketing discourse communities that comprise of experts, words such as; marketing research, market penetration, market share, pay per click, return on marketing investment, sales forecasting, quality assurance and retention rate are more likely to come up.
The marketing discourse community is mainly created as a platform to evaluate, analyze, critique, and provide solutions to common or daily business problems. For instance, websites such as CNN Money, Huffington Post, Top Rank Blog, Sparksheet and Engage have provided online platforms for marketing professionals to discuss emerging issues, solutions to problems in business and trends in marketing and consumer behavior. The rapid advancement of communication technology and internet has changed the way marketing discourse communities are made. Traditionally, such communities comprised of only elite and highly educated management and marketing experts who met and interacted at elitist functions such as marketing galas, conferences, and capacity building forums. However, the internet has brought individuals from all parts of the world together to share ideas, knowledge, and information through blogs, chat rooms, marketing journals, and news websites.
The purpose of forming marketing discourse communities is central to their existence. Ideally, the members of a marketing discourse interact to evaluate academic research studies, engage in intellectual banter, disseminate information, and receive feedback regarding their profession. They clarify and expose loopholes in the regulatory standards that govern their practice and propose best practices in marketing. The members share a common goal that is to improve and develop their profession. The discourse community serves an important function of furthering knowledge among members of the community (Fairclough 56).
Swales asserts that a discourse community is defined by its ability to develop disbursal expectations (Swales 38). This means that the members of the discourse community are expected to continually come up with topics and agendas that will drive forward the expectations of the community. The topics generated by community members must be relevant and aligned to the overall objective of the community. For instance, some of the current hot topics in marketing discourse communities revolve around business-to-business marketing, social media marketing, customer service, brand creation, consumer loyalty, and market research. Brown and Duguid (34). On the outside, these topics appear to be very wide and unspecific. However, they provide enough material for marketing bloggers, marketing experts, salespersons, consultants, managers, and scholars participate in the discourse. The internet in particular provides an excellent resource for research regarding these topics and acquiring information that drives forward the discussions. In addition, the anonymity provided by the internet and the ease of access and connection to online marketing discourse community facilitates growth of the community.
Membership in a discourse community is restricted to outsiders through the development of inbuilt, dynamic, and specialized terminology (Brown and Duguid 80). Like in any other society, members of the discourse community have inbuilt terminologies that proffer different meaning in the community from ordinary use of language. Understanding the dynamic language and terminologies used, acronyms, and phrases is central to participation and membership in the discourse community. For instance, acronyms such as B2B, SEO, and NBM for network-based marketing are common. Members of the discourse community understand and use such terms with relative ease, compared to non-members. Social media best exemplifies the development of discourse-specific terminologies. Different media such as Twitter and Facebook have different lingo, styles of writing, and expression. It creates a huge difference between the Twitter community and the Facebook community, especially due to their use of language and the development of specialized terminology. Nevertheless, this does not imply that Twitter and Facebook are discourse communities, since they lack most of the other defining characteristics.
The final defining characteristic of a discourse community, according to Swales (6), is the existence of a critical mass of members with relevant degree of expertise, knowledge, and skill in the field or discipline covered by the discourse. This means that a discourse community must be composed of individuals who are experts in a particular field that is relevant to the discourse. In a marketing discourse community, the minimum qualification to gain meaningful membership is possession of at least a diploma or bachelor's degree in marketing or a relevant business-related degree. The individual member has to comprehend the foundations of marketing as a discipline, the objectives of marketing, the process, and the latest developments in the field of marketing. For instance, most marketing professionals in advertising firms and ordinary offices are likely to be university-trained. For top marketing agencies such as Dataxu, Rocket Fuel, Videology, AdRoll and Altitude Digital, a bachelor’s degree in marketing or business-related field is a prerogative. The members of these agencies are highly likely to participate in marketing discussion on many platforms.
Successful development of a discourse community is based on the ability to generate...