In this paper, I analyze documentary evidence from a pharmaceutical company's strategic marketing campaign to expand the sale of an antipsychotic medication beyond its conventional market. I focus on the role of the managerial function known as channel marketing, the task of which is to minimize friction, achieve coordination and add value in the distribution of the company's products. However, the path to achieving these objectives is challenged because members of the marketing channel, or intermediaries, may not be contractual members of the channel; in fact they may have widely divergent goals or may even be hostile to the manufacturer's efforts at control. This can be construed to be the case for physicians and others who are in the pharmaceutical manufacturer's distribution channel but not of it. Their views and actions must somehow be brought into alignment with the manufacturer's goals. This paper seeks to show part of the process from the manufacturer's strategic standpoint, in which potential dissenters are incorporated into the pharmaceutical company distribution channel. The routinization of this incorporation results in the diminishment of psychiatry's professional autonomy by means of what is-paradoxically to them, but not to a student of marketing-a competitive threat. The paper concludes with a discussion of corporate power.

Applbaum demystifies some of the assumptions at work in the "culture of marketing," toward the goal of explaining contemporary disease mongering.

No abstract

In this article, I explore the strategic practices and cultural theories of marketing managers in three U.S.-based transnational corporations (TNCs) as they seek to meaningfully direct their products across national borders. While cultural anthropologists have lately focused on local adaptation and appropriation of TNCs' products to local meanings, the reverse process by which TNCs co-opt local meanings to a universalizing evolutionary paradigm-in what they have come to regard as a consumption-led new global order-has not been examined. Globalization is explored as a key cultural concept driving marketing managers' practices-the myth and charter behind large TNC border crossings, [consumer marketing, globalization, transnational corporations, United States] The accumulation of capital has always been a profoundly geographical and spatial affair. Without the possibilities inherent in geographical expansion, spatial reorganization, and uneven geographical development, capitalism would have have ceased to function long ago as a political-economic system. This perpetual turning to what I call "a spatial fix" to capitalism's contradictions has created a global historical geography of capital accumulation. David Harvey, 1995The global world is the marketer's myth for the golden age to come-and he is its prophet. Ingrid Jordt, personal communication, May 25,1999While geographical expansion has historically typified the capitalist system, from a managerial economic perspective, corporate expansion has only recently been impelled by extrinsic factors that have changed the conditions for the survival of firms. Management expert Ken'ichi Ohmae (1990:7) explains that the shift in the cost structure of the modern corporate enterprise from a variable-to a fixed-cost environment has stimulated the current expansion efforts of firms, driving them to globalize. Various factors have raised the ratio of fixed to variable costs-including automation, the high costs of research and development, and the growing expenses of establishing a brand name among excessive advertising clutter. This shift has prompted firms to confer American Ethnologist 27(2):257-282. Copyright C 2000, American Anthropological Association. 258 amerlcan ethnologist central significance to marketing, since the most profitable and sustaining way to maximize marginal contributions to fixed costs is to boost sales. Thus, marketing logic now subsumes corporate goals in manufacturing, finance, human resources, and general management. Peter Drucker, often cited as the world's leading management theorist, declares, "Marketing is so basic it cannot be considered a separate function. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view" (in Kotler 1991:1).Concurrent with this growing emphasis on marketing's integral role in corporate expansion, there is a mushrooming of popular literature issuing from the social sciences that describes the world as altogether different from what it was 20 years ago. This n...

No abstract