Marketing Palliative Care: Ethnography of Dying and the Emergence of Palliative Marketing

Marketing Palliative Care explores what happens when marketing is confronted with dying. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in palliative contexts across Switzerland, Italy, and the United States, the book unfolds a radical question: can marketing grasp dying? Can it offer not only tools but also a language for societies to relate to finitude? Through the case study of a COVID-designated hospital in Locarno, the conceptualization of the temporal consumer, and the unveiling of palliative clearings, this monograph develops a new epistemology of marketing at the threshold of life.

Palliative clearings are proposed as fragile temporal spaces where care, consumption, and dying converge, opening a poetic vocabulary for fragility and compassion. Methodologically, the book advances an ethnography of dying, grounded in reflexivity and poetic inquiry. Theoretically, it reimagines the consumer as a temporal being shaped by mortality. Practically, it introduces the figures of the experiential assistant, the brand healer, and the healing brand as ways of translating compassion into organizational life and society.

Bridging marketing, medical humanities, and palliative care, Marketing Palliative Care will speak to scholars, healthcare professionals, and all those seeking a vocabulary for dying in market society.

Michele Corengia was trained in Economics (BSc) and Marketing (MSc) at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy) and received his PhD in Communication and Marketing from Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland). He also holds a Certificate in Applied Compassion from CCARE at Stanford University. After years of research on marketing and palliative care, he developed the concept of Palliative Marketing. He now serves as Chief Operating Officer of the Fondazione Sasso Corbaro for Medical Humanities (Bellinzona, Switzerland). As researcher, writer, and brand healer, he combines academic rigor, poetic voice, and applied practice to open new clearings between marketing, society, and care.