Detlev Zwick

Putting Consumers to Work `Co-creation` and new marketing govern-mentality

Co-creation is a new paradigm that has captured the imagination of marketing and management professionals and scholars. Drawing on Foucaults notion of government and neo-Marxist theories of labor and value, we critically interrogate the cultural, social, and economic politics of this new management technique. We suggest that co-creation represents a political form of power aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and controllable, creative and docile. We argue that the discourse of value co-creation stands for a notion of modern corporate power that is no longer aimed at disciplining consumers and shaping actions according to a given norm, but at working with and through the freedom of the consumer. In short, administering consumption in ways that allow for the continuous emergence and exploitation of creative and valuable forms of consumer labor is the true meaning of the concept of co-creation.

Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images

Through explication of a visual research method, this paper theorizes how masculine identity interacts with consumption—of imagery, products, desires, and passions in advertising and consumer culture. We analyze the male body as a discursive “effect” created at the intersection of consumption and several marketing discourses such as advertising, market segmentation, and visual communication, balancing between brand strategy—what the marketer intends—and brand community—the free appropriation of meaning by the market. The paper’s contribution rests in extending previous work on male representation into historical, ontological, and photographic realms, providing a necessary complement between understanding advertising meaning as residing within managerial strategy or wholly subsumed by consumer response. We argue that greater awareness of the connections between the traditions and conventions of visual culture and their impact on the production and consumption of advertising images leads to enhanced ability to understand how advertising works as a representational system and signifying practice.

Mapping Consumer Power: An Integrative Framework for Marketing and Consumer Research

To help shape a more cohesive research program in marketing and consumer research, this paper presents a systematic effort to integrate current research on consumer empowerment with highly influential theories of power. We develop a conceptual overview of power consisting of three dominant theoretical models onto which we map existing consumer empowerment research. A synthetic review focuses on three perspectives of consumer power: consumer sovereignty, cultural power and discursive power, drawing from sociological, philosophical and economic literature. These models are then applied to consumer research to illuminate research applications and insights. Research of consumer empowerment has grown significantly over the last decade. Yet, researchers drawing from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions have generated a multitude of heuristic simplifications and mid-level theories of power to inform their empirical and conceptual explorations. This reviews helps clarify consumer empowerment, and offers a useful map for future research. Researchers in consumer empowerment need to understand the historical development of power, and to contextualize research within conflicting perspectives on empowerment. The paper makes several contributions: 1) organizes a currently cluttered field of consumer empowerment research, 2) connects consumer and marketing research to high-level theorizations of power, and 3) outlines specific avenues for future research.

Critical perspectives on consumers’ role as ‘producers’: Broadening the debate on value co-creation in marketing processes

This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake — conceptually and politically — when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide definitive answers but instead lead to a more elaborate set of questions. By doing so, they broaden the critical engagement with value co-creation in marketing.

Whose Identity Is It Anyway? Consumer Representation in the Age of Database Marketing:

In the information-intensive marketplaces of the networked economy, database-related marketing techniques have gained unprecedented popularity. Their development is based on the assumption that greater capturing of customer information in digital databases leads to epistemologically superior insights about the customer. The proliferation of customer databases, however, has triggered privacy concerns and has encouraged consumers to devise information externalization strategies to maintain control over their digital representation (identity) vis-à-vis companies. Drawing on poststructuralist theory, the authors argue that current consumer strategies are ineffective in maintaining control over one’s identity in the electronic marketplace because such strategies are based on an obsolete ontological distinction between material identity and digital representation. They suggest that in the age of database marketing, digital consumer representations in fact constitute the consumer. Therefore, only if consumers are given full access to companies’ customer databases can they maintain a sense of control over their identities in the marketplace.

Manufacturing Customers: The database as new means of production

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life.We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production—consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site of flexible accumulation processes in information capitalism.The result of our undertaking is a model of customer databases that foregrounds the far-reaching effect of potent simulational capabilities intersecting with constantly increasing computational power to transform the database into the factory of the 21st century.

The Epistemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer‐Object Theory in Consumer Research

We introduce the concept of the epistemic consumption object. Such consumption objects are characterized by two interrelated features. First, epistemic consumption objects reveal themselves progressively through interaction, observation, use, examination, and evaluation. Such layered revelation is accompanied by an increasing rather than a decline of the object’s complexity. Second, such objects demonstrate a propensity to change their “face‐in‐action” vis‐à‐vis consumers through the continuous addition or subtraction of properties. The epistemic consumption object is materially elusive and this lack of ontological stability turns the object into a continuous knowledge project for consumers. Via this ongoing cycle of revelation and discovery, consumers become attached to the object in intimate and quasi‐social ways. Therefore, the concept of the epistemic consumption object brings the “object” directly into theorizations of consumer‐object relations, extending current theories of relationship, product involvement, and consumption communities. We draw from research with individual online investors to illustrate the theory of the epistemic consumption object.

Consumer Subjectivity in the Age of Internet: The Radical Concept of Marketing Control through Customer Relationship Management

In this paper, we present a poststructuralist analysis of customer database technology. This approach allows us to regard customer databases as configurations of language that produce new and significant discursive effects. In particular, we focus on the role of the databases and related technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) in the discursive construction of both customers and customer relationships. First, we argue that organizations become the authors of customer identities, using the language of the database to configure customer representation. From this perspective, we can see the radical innovation that the customer database brings to the organizational construction of its market: the emergence of the individualized customer. The cultural novelty of the database - ignored by instrumental analyses of information technology - also requires a theoretical reconceptualization of the notion of virtual identity. Against existing positions we posit a non-essentialist theory of virtual identity where the subject is constituted outside the immediacy of consciousness and thus emerges as the result of the technological and linguistic context in which it was produced. Second, we take our analysis of the discursive construction of the customer further by proposing that the emergence of the individualized customer was the prerequisite of the social construction of customer relationship management as one-on-one affair between the customer and the organization. We suggest that this is a limited and limiting understanding of the concept of relationship especially if the one-on-one relationship is placed in a computer-mediated environment (CME). By mobilizing theories of play developed in the fields of human-computer interaction and consumer research, we propose that organizations would benefit from opening up the current discourse on customer relationship management to include relationships between customers, customers and non-customers, and customers and the virtual organization.

Bringing the Market to Life: Screen Aesthetics and the Epistemic Consumption Object

This article argues that the new ‘visuality’ (Schroeder, 2002) of the Internet transforms the stock market into an epistemic consumption object. The aesthetics of the screen turn the market into an interactive and response-present surface representation. On the computer screen, the market becomes an object of constant movement and variation, changing direction and altering appearance at any time. Following Knorr Cetina (1997, 2002b) we argue that the visual logic of the screen ‘opens up’ the market ontologically. The ontological liquidity of the market-on-screen simulates the indefiniteness of other life forms. We suggest that the continuing fascination with online investing is a function of the reflexive looping of the investor, who aspires to discern what the market is lacking, through the market-on-screen that continuously signals to the investor what it still lacks. Implications for existing theories on relationships and involvement are discussed.

Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay Reproduction of Desire and the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization

Ritzer suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of prosumption (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies. This essay presents the results of a qualitative study of the lived experience of “doing prosumption,” in particular, how prosumption work in user-generated media environments is experienced by prosumers over time. For the purpose of this investigation, the authors conceptualize eBay as a space for the social production and consumption of desire, where, akin to the concept of prosumption, the consumer of these experiences is also, at least in part, a producer of the same experiences. The authors argue that the experience of prosumption changes over time even as the frequency of using eBay as a marketplace may not. The data suggest a trajectory from “enchanted prosumption” to “disenchanted prosumption” as, over time, the collective social production and consumption of desires, daydreams, and fantasies give way to a sense of eBay as a place for routine, efficient, and habitual buying and selling activities. In the final analysis, the authors argue that the disenchantment of and through eBay is a function of the routinization of the self and the rationalization of eBay as technological structure. Hence, the authors extend recent theorizations of the de-McDonaldizating effects of user-generated Web 2.0 spaces by suggesting that the dimensions of McDonaldization built into the technological structure of such spaces can encourage a slow re-McDonaldization of the user experience, albeit not universally. In sum, a longitudinal view of prosumption in user-generated online spaces cautions those studying new media spaces, not to underestimate the power of the McDonaldization processes.