When I first stepped into my high school classroom as a marketing teacher, it felt like an ironic turn. I had spent my early university years studying business administration, only to leave it behind for sociology—a discipline that offered a critical lens on the very world I had once aspired to join. The corporate sphere, with its relentless pursuit of profit and efficiency, had lost its appeal. Sociology, with its ability to interrogate power structures, social relations, and cultural dynamics, provided a far more compelling framework for understanding the world.

Yet here I was, back in business—teaching marketing, no less. But from the outset, I saw my role not as training the next generation of marketers but as equipping students with the tools to see through the industry’s illusions. I make it clear to my students early on that I am trained as a sociologist, and that I approach marketing not just as a business function, but as a social institution embedded in systems of power, identity and inequality.

Marketing, at its core, is about social engineering. It is the study of how people make choices, how messages shape behavior, and how identities are constructed and commodified. In other words, it is applied sociology. Traditional marketing education frames this as a neutral or even benevolent process—companies merely responding to consumer needs, creating value, and driving innovation. But as a sociologist, I teach my students to ask: Who defines those needs? Who benefits from this system? And at what cost?

One of the first things I did was integrate concepts from sociology into my lessons. When discussing segmentation and targeting, we explored class, race, and gender—how marketers don’t just respond to social divisions but actively reinforce them. When covering branding, we examined how corporations appropriate social movements and identities, turning resistance into marketable aesthetics. And when looking at consumer psychology, we interrogated the ideological assumptions embedded in marketing discourse—assumptions about rational choice, individualism, and happiness as consumption.

Students were quick to pick up on the implications. A lesson on advertising techniques led to discussions about the social construction of beauty. A case study on influencer marketing turned into a debate about authenticity and self-branding in the age of social media. Even the driest topics—like pricing strategies—became a launching point for talking about precarity, monopoly power, and the financialization of everyday life.

Rather than training students to be better marketers, I encourage them to be skeptical ones. If marketing is, as its practitioners claim, about storytelling, then students should learn to interrogate whose stories are being told—and whose are being erased. If marketing is about persuasion, they should understand not just how it works, but to what ends it is used. And if marketing is about creating consumer demand, they should ask whether the world truly needs more demand—or if it needs a different way of thinking about economic and social relations altogether.

This approach does not mean rejecting marketing outright. Teaching marketing is not the same as teaching students to be marketers. There is no necessary connection between explaining the existence, origins, and function of something and endorsing it. This distinction is obvious in many other fields—a history teacher explaining the causes of Hitler’s rise does not imply moral approval. Why should marketing education be any different? If anything, the best way to teach it is by subjecting it to the same scrutiny as any other social institution. Through the lens of sociology, students can see marketing not as a neutral tool, but as a force that both shapes and is shaped by the economic and cultural structures in which it operates.

The initial reactions from students to my approach have varied, but most are receptive. Some express surprise at how marketing can be analyzed in this way, but many are relieved to discover a framework that gives them language for their discomfort with certain industry practices. A few are skeptical at first, especially those expecting a more traditional or career-focused marketing curriculum. But over time, they often come to value the critical tools the sociological approach provides, particularly as they navigate the contradictions of branding in an era of media saturation and economic precarity. 

By teaching marketing as sociology, I am not simply preparing students to navigate the business world; I am preparing them to critically engage with it. In an era when branding permeates politics, social movements are commodified, and consumer culture shapes personal identity, critical marketing literacy becomes more than a professional skill—it is a form of resistance and a means of reimagining the social world. I cannot predict how this approach will influence students’ career paths. Some may go on to work in business with a sharper critical edge; others may reconsider their aspirations altogether. But my aim is not to moralize or prescribe a particular direction. It is to foster a capacity for critical reflection, so that whatever paths students choose, they do so with greater awareness of the structures they operate within—and the potential they hold to change them.

Sam Chian teaches marketing and social studies at an upper secondary school in Oslo, Norway. He holds a master’s degree in sociology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research has appeared in outlets such as Review of African Political Economy and Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.