Religion - marketing's unwitting godparent

This book provides an in-depth understanding of the analogy between marketing and religion: how an effective marketing campaign makes consumers construct an entire worldview with a corresponding ethos regarding an advertised commodity, which results in exceptional consumer loyalty and high profit margins. This book scrutinises the advertising campaign ‘Nespresso. What else?’. The study is based on an audio-visual analysis of selected commercials, and on an analysis based on primary data about Nespresso drinkers and, as a control group, about consumers of other coffee brands. The statistically highly significant results are impressive and to some degree disturbing. They shed light on how the exchange value of a profane consumer item is increased to a multiple of its use value and how, in accordance with Walter Benjamin’s thesis, the symbolic charging of a commodity, stripped of its profane attributes, is taken to extremes.