Marketing the Third Reich

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right

by Nicholas O'Shaughnessy

In this fascinating volume, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy elucidates the phenomenon of the Nazi propaganda machine via the perspective of consumer marketing, conceptualising the Reich as a product campaign. Building on his acclaimed Selling Hitler (2016), he uses marketing scholarship to show how propaganda and political marketing existed not merely as an instrument of government in Nazi Germany, but as the very medium of government itself.

Marketing the Third Reich explores the insidious connection between a mass culture and a political movement, and how the cultures of consumption and politics influence and infect each other – consumerised politics and politicised consumption. Ultimately its concern is with the ‘engineering of consent’ – the troubling matter of how public opinion can be manufactured, and governments elected, via sophisticated methodologies of persuasion developed in the consumer economy. Nazism functioned as a brand, packaging almost everything with persuasive purpose.

Revealing obvious parallels between Adolf Hitler’s use of the living theatre of politics, and our present public–political dramaturgy, between Nazi lies and our post-truth, the book raises the chilling question: was Hitler ahead of his time? This radical, original, in-depth study will be an invaluable resource for all scholars of marketing history, political marketing, propaganda and history.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

290 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy is professor of communications at Queen Mary, University of London.

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a horrible idea: you take the regime that has led to a worldwide disaster and compare its practices with marketing practices (go Mr Huxley, McDonalds and Amazon and Apple...)

I do understand the author was trying hard to be original and, to some part, succeeded. What I don't undersand is why the fuck the world is getting so flippant about fascism? Are we being subtly told that it was wrong but generally ok to be fascist?

Fascism is reviewed as some godforsaken marketeer's set of tricks. It wasn't so. It was a horrible self-perpeuating set of crimes, a self-sustaining world view that led to staggering amount of abominable situations.

The 'packaging' and persuasion? Fuck packaging and persuasion! Think burned children, brutalized women, slave labour, families gone, lives ended, nations threatened, Holocaust. Think front lines in the middle of cities. Think rows of small children's shoes near a warm crematorium. Think crows sated on human flesh. Think women and kids and elders rambling through the fields after battle and somehow recognising their loved ones' remains, what's left of them.

This book misses the point altogether. It treads flippantly on horrendous subject. I gather it's getting to become a fashionable trend...

[Tezer Aktay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yer yer uzun ve karmaşık cümleler biraz can sıkıyor. Yazarın dili tabi. Tercihi. Onun dışında süper. Yıllardır anlatılan bildiğimiz bilgilerden altın değerinde çok az bilinen infoları kaynaklarıyla vermesi muazzam olmuş.

[Indah Threez Lestari · Rating 3 out of 5]

553 - 2019

[Özge Günaydın · Rating 4 out of 5]

İkna sunum hitabet imgesel bütünlük

[Carlos Filipe Bernardino · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well written book, with an interesting approach to the way the nazis took power in Germany, and the techniques used by them.