Broadening the Collective Turn in Marketing: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption Agencements

Abstract

et me start from a striking paradox: on the one hand, one of themost remarkable accomplishments of marketing—from a technical rather than moral standpoint—is its long-standing ability to successfully fabricate consumer collectives in the form ofmarket segments (Smith 1956); on the other hand, the same discipline never ceased to envision consumers as single, isolated, disconnected entities (here it is the entire corpus of the marketing and consumer research literature that should be quoted!). There would be no paradox in bringing together these two statements if market segments were just descriptive constructs aimed at categorizing various sorts of consumers in order to get a clearer view of market realities and thus better target transaction opportunities. But as we all know, when successfully designed, market segments may cease being just descriptive concepts and become performative ones (Cochoy 1998). Like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, market segments often end up existing and start living their own life. To put it in Marxist terms, a segment “in itself” sometimes becomes a “segment for itself”: consumers who belong to a given segment both identify themselves with their market depictions and sometimes resist such commodification (Arsel and Thompson 2011); emotional branding faces the risk to create a “doppelgänger brand image” (Thompson, Rindfleisch, and Arsel 2006); “feral segmentation” evidences a process where market segments even emerge independently frommarketing efforts—see the rise of the lumbersexual seg-