Discourse analysis, trust and marketing

In order to understand the service encounter, which lies at the heart of all marketing processes, it is necessary to focus on consumer and consumercontact personnel interactions. We view the marketing encounter between the consumer and organisation personnel as a narrative event. Since social life is a narrative (MacIntyre 1981), what we are saying is that marketing processes are part of the narrative of our social lives. We understand narrative as a discursive ‘form of meaning making’ (Polkinghorne 1988, p. 36). We use Potter and Wetherell’s approach to discourse analysis (1987) to focus less on an objective outcome constructed in the marketing encounter (the transaction, the purchase) and more on the variations and consistencies in language use, to discern what collective, interpersonal meaning is being constructed in the encounter. In other words, we look at what people say and consider how this then creates the marketing encounter. In this chapter we explore this encounter and examine discursive processes for capitalising on and building trust in marketing encounters.