Needs and desires in marketing discourse: consistent base or legitimating rethoric?

In this paper we do a critical analysis of marketing field since its beginning until today aimed at analysing if customers' needs and desires are a consistent marketing base on marketing historical discourse or just a legitimating rhetoric. We have adopted an philosophical-epistemological orientation based on Michel Foucault's discourse theory that allowed us to verify the core role of needs and desires concepts on marketing is a result of a series of transformations and disputes towards hegemony of ideas or ways of seeing but always anchored on favorable socioeconomic scenario. Marketing discourse transformation happened more as a result of social and historical process than as a natural 'vocation' of the field.

Needs; Desires; Marketing; Discourse Analysis; Foucault