Degrowth

What the heck is "degrowth?" It's an important concept with, frankly, a negative-sounding name, though what it represents is anything but. To quote Jason Hickel, one of the movement's leading scholars and advocates:

Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. [...] It is important to clarify that degrowth is not about reducing GDP, but rather about reducing throughput. From an ecological perspective, that is what matters. Of course, it is important to accept that reducing throughput is likely to lead to a reduction in the rate of GDP growth, or even a decline in GDP itself, and we have to be prepared to manage that outcome in a safe and just way. This is what degrowth sets out to do. (Hickel, 2020)

While I personally subscribe to the philosophy of degrowth, my academic orientation as an advertising scholar would seem to run counter to its goals: the vast majority of degrowth advocates call for the hollowing out or even outright elimination of advertising and marketing practices, arguing that they do little more than contribute to greed, materialism, and ongoing acquisition of "stuff" we don't need.

I can't argue that advertising doesn't encourage materialism. However, I do maintain the following:

1. Advertising, at its core, is about spreading information. The late, great "father of modern advertising" David Ogilvy said precisely this in the first sentence or two of his seminal book Ogilvy on Advertising (1985). Just as one can "sell" a product using advertising, one can also "sell" an idea.
2. Advertising does indeed grease the wheels of capitalism. However, advertising has existed far longer than capitalism has (see Richards, 2022, for example). This demonstrates that advertising is not interminably intertwined with "needless consumption."
3. The sheer size and power of the advertising industry globally is so large and so complex that dismantling and discontinuing it would effectively be impossible; what's more, I believe that this would be undesirable, and it would be more productive to reorient the advertising industry to serve degrowth's goals.

These are the basic premises upon which I've started a new research agenda. My hypothesis is that advertising is not necessarily or automatically the enemy or antithesis of degrowth; rather, it can be harnessed and modified in constructive ways that can actually aid and support the movement.

I hope that this brief introduction to the concept, and my approach to it, has piqued your interest in this crucially important topic. To that end, I've collected a range of resources below that may be of interest, including my own list of work, which I will continue to update as time goes on.

References

• Hickel, J. (2020). What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification. Globalizations, 18(7), 1105-1111. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1812222
• Ogilvy, D. (1985). Ogilvy on advertising. Vintage.
• Richards, J. I. (2022). A history of advertising: The first 300,000 years. Rowman & Littlefield.