Faces of the New Consumer: A Genesis of Consumer ...

Recherche et Applications en Marketing, vol. 24, n° 3/2009

Faces of the New Consumer: A Genesis of Consumer Governmentality Bernard Cova Professor Euromed Management, Marseille Visiting Professor Università Bocconi, Milan

Véronique Cova Professor Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III Centre d’Étude et de Recherche en Gestion Aix-Marseille (CERGAM) Faculté d’Économie Appliquée, Aix-en-Provence

ABSTRACT This paper is less concerned with discussing the reality of the new consumer than in discovering how researchers and consultants construct this through their marketing discourses. A genealogical approach uncovers the three major faces of the new consumer that have emerged over the past twenty years: individualistic consumers in the early 1990s; hedonistic consumers at the turn of the millennium; and creative consumers in the mid-2000s. The paper then shows how these faces interact within a consumer competency structure in which individualistic dialogue competencies combine with hedonistic play competencies and creative resource integration competencies. The conclusion focuses on the existence within these different marketing discourses of a governmental process pressuring today’s citizens to see and think of themselves first and foremost as consumers. Keywords: Co-creation, competencies, creative, governmentality, hedonistic, individualistic.

The authors can be contacted at the following e-mail addresses: [email protected]; [email protected]

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Bernard Cova, Véronique Cova

INTRODUCTION

“It has been widely argued that the new consumer is active, knowledgeable, demanding, channel-hopping and, above all, experience seeking” (StuartMenteth, Wilson and Baker, 2006, p. 415). “Consumers are changing and becoming more unstable and variable” (Dion, 2008, p. 1). These short excerpts from recent academic publications offer a good summary of the sort of problems that new consumers are likely to encounter. Despite some observers’ sense that this kind of research suffers from a certain lack of empirical certainty (Goulding, 2003; Miles, 1999; Ohl, 2002), many of the texts produced in this field try to outline faces of the new consumer in a bid to sustain the originality of their authors’ approaches and thought processes. Such attempts at mutating consumers’ image are old chestnuts that have given marketing literature something to talk about for more than two decades now, in France (Badot and Cova, 1992; Dubois, 1991) as well as other Western countries (Baker, 2003; Brookes, 1988; Dussart, 1985; Ferrero, 1990). One of the main manifestations at present is the discourse announcing the advent of “consum’actors” (also called “prosumers” or post-consumers), meaning consumers who are the “agents of their own destinies and choices and of the products that they imagine and criticize and whose chances of success they determine” (Florès, 2008, p. 79). Following a genealogical approach, the purpose of the present article is to uncover some “hidden truth”. The goal is to find out what has organized the discourses witnessed over the past 20 years regarding the faces of the new consumer. This effort can be classified as part of the so-called school of critical marketing (Saren et al., 2007) that examines the discourses produced by marketing professionals and tries to reveal their historical, social and cultural origins (Cochoy, 1999). The purpose is to study the construction of these new consumer discourses without delving either into the reality of such consumers’ alleged novelty (Marion, 2001) or into the reasons why marketing actors produce such rhetorical new consumer faces. In other words, the text aims to identify how such discourses progressively construct reality, as well as the form that such reality assumes.

This effort is proximate to sociological studies focused on the configuration, representation and categorization of consumer faces (Cochoy, 2002). Two important differences should be highlighted, however: 1) the present text does not focus on the adjustments between supply-side representations and consumer faces within the confines of a commercial relationship (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2004) but instead on authorized discourses relating to this commercial relationship and their impact on consumer faces; 2) the text is not positioned as something external to the discipline, i.e., as an analysis whose object of study is marketing per se (à la Cochoy, 1999) but instead takes a reflexive internal stance toward marketing as a disciplinary field, as per precepts developed by the critical school (Saren et al., 2007). This means that the present text will have no choice but to mobilize certain normative perspectives. Instead of underplaying such outlooks, however, it will openly acknowledge them – the hope being that this will help prevent its choices from diminishing overall objectivity. The specific normative perspective being mobilized here is the primacy of primary sociality (direct and concrete interactions between individuals) over secondary sociality (the intermediation of relationships) generated notably by the market and by consumption (Caillé, 2000). All in all, the present article does not try to prove a particular hypothesis but instead proposes one interpretation for a batch of available historical information, thereby opening new perspectives for the field of marketing. The paper’s specific contributions are to show (and not to demonstrate): • How, and by whom, the main faces of the new consumer have been presented and popularized over the past 20 years, an era characterized by an explosion in the number of studies in this area; • To what extent these faces are both different and complementary, and how they interlink to formalize the attributes of the consumer in evolution; • To what extent the successive propagation of these faces can be analyzed as a “governmentality” of consumers, as well as the implications thereof.

Faces of the New Consumer: A Genesis of Consumer Governmentality

THE THREE MAIN FACES OF THE NEW CONSUMER

Discourses relating to a new kind of marketing – one apt to revitalize our discipline – have proliferated since marketing suffered it famous midlife crisis, generally considered to have occurred around the late 1980s (Brown, 1995). Thus, it is from this date onwards that we analyze the production of new marketing approaches and the many so-called consumer mutations that have accompanied them. A number of texts written since the early 1990s in an attempt to rethink/reshape the discipline offer a slew of panaceas (Brown, 1995). According to certain recent calculations (Badot and Cova, 2008), around 100 new marketing approaches have been proposed (Cova, Louyot-Gallicher and Louis-Louisy, 2006). Publication-related indicators offer one suitable tool for structuring this cornucopia. We have chosen to use the number of times that a particular text or article dealing with a marketing approach that the author qualifies as something new has been listed on Google Scholar – a tool whose usefulness resides in the fact that it highlights not only articles published in academic reviews but also books, unlike other indicators like EBSCO. This is because the new marketing approaches are being produced within the framework of a heterogeneous literature characterized by variable levels and where managerial writings are mixed up with scientific articles. Our sense is that the sum total of this output should be taken into consideration. We have therefore examined all the panaceas listed by Badot and Cova (2008) and chosen the 50 most frequently quoted texts and articles dealing with one or the other. We then grouped these texts in accordance with our own expertise in this discipline. All in all, we were able to define three main marketing approaches – we will not be using the term “paradigm” here since we agree with Marion (2000) that our discipline has over-used it, with each being attributed a number of pre-selected texts and articles. Each approach was embedded in a precise temporality (See Table 1) and subsequently extended. We are aware that this kind of identification involves a construction effort, if not a reduction of reality. Moreover, it silences (Maclaran, Stevens and Hogg, 2009) a number of major studies covering other new marketing approaches that exist outside of the grou-

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pings we created – one leading example being communitarian approaches to marketing (McAlexander, Shouten and Koenig, 2002). Nor does it include texts published outside the core period for this specific approach. For instance, with regard to the first approach that we identified (relationship marketing), we do not use a text by Grönroos (2000) despite the fact that this was mentioned 603 times – the reason being that the article was published much later than the studies that we did choose. Lastly, this juxtaposed presentation of the three approaches constitutes a mere modeling of reality, one destined to sharpen the image of the consumer faces generated by each. We are aware that the history of each approach starts well before the era we identified – as demonstrated by Tadajewski and Saren (2009) with regard to relationship marketing – and that it continues for a long time afterwards. We are also aware that these three approaches are not independent and will subsequently show how they mesh with one another. Globally, our objective is not to be exhaustive but to construct a history of marketing (Cochoy, 1999) capable of highlighting the key moment when each approach was first introduced, as well as the discourses and new consumers associated with it. Three periods have stood out over the past 20 years, intimating the existence of three new approaches to marketing and three new consumer faces: • The early 1990s was an era of one-to-one marketing (Peppers and Rogers, 1993) or relational approaches (McKenna, 1991a and b; Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne, 1991) highlighting the face of individualistic new consumers; • The late 1990s and early 2000s were marked by the rise of experiential marketing approaches in the US (Schmitt, 1999 and 2003; Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and sensorial derivatives (Hetzel, 2002) affirming the advent of hedonistic consumers; • The mid-2000s signaled the rise of collaborative marketing approaches (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) carried by a new dominant logic of marketing (Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Vargo and Lusch, 2004) based on the emergence of creative consumers.

New marketing approach (in brackets) = Google Scholar score as of 15.4.09

World: Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a (501); Vargo and Lusch, 2004 (637)

de Certeau (1980) Fiske (1989) Keat, Whiteley and Abercrombie (1994)

Creative

Mid-2000s Collaborative marketing + Marketing 2.0 onwards

Lipovetsky (1987, 1990) Ehrenberg (1991) Jameson (1991) Elias (1991) Gergen (1991)

Sociologists

Featherstone (1991) Maffesoli (1990) Baudrillard (1992)

Individualistic

Face of the new consumer

Late 1990s Experiential marketing Hedonistic + Sensory marketing – Early 2000s World: Schmitt, 1999 (226); Pine II and Gilmore, 1999 (549) France: Cova and Cova, 2001 (58); Hetzel, 2002 (48)

McKenna, 1991a (181); McKenna, 1991b (233); Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne, 1992 (338); Peppers and Rogers, 1993 (435); Pine II, 1992 (1043)

Late 1980s Relationship marketing – Early + One-to-one marketing, Interactive marketing 1990s

Period

Toffler (1980) Seybold (2001) Wipperfürth (2005) Credoc Observateur Cetelem Remy Sansaloni

CRÉDOC Observateur Cetelem Gérard Mermet Danielle Rapoport Etc.

Popcorn (1992) Naisbitt and Aburdene (1990) CCA Cofremca Observateur Cetelem Gérard Demuth Etc.

Sociomarketers

Table 1. – New marketing approaches and faces of the new consumer

Firat, Dholakia and Venkatesh (1995) Firat and Dholakia (1998) Firat and Venkatesh (1995) Elliott (1997) Badot and Cova (1995) Hetzel (1996) Firat and Dholakia (2006) Muniz and Schau (2007) Berthon, Pitt, McCarthy and Kates (2007)

Dubois (1991) Firat (1991) Van Raaij (1993)

Market-sociologists

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We detail Table 1 these three periods successively by showing for each: 1) how the characteristic new marketing took shape; 2) which analyses this new marketing used as a basis for the discourse it was promulgating; 3) the standout traits of the new consumer that it was constructing; 4) how the new marketing would structure the new consumer’s practices.

Relationship marketing and the emergence of individualistic consumers The development of relationship marketing and its derivatives in the early 1990s has been analyzed (O’Malley, Patterson and Kelly-Holmes, 2008) as an extension of the metaphor of interpersonal relationships to all exchanges between customers and companies. Since the mid-1970s (Guillet de Monthoux, 1975), industrial marketing had stressed the importance in purchasing decisions of the relationships between suppliers and customers. Work done by the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group) paved the way to the notion of an original marketing approach (Hakansson, 1982; Ford, 1990) viewed as the construction, development and maintenance of long-lasting relationships between suppliers and customers. From the early 1980s onwards (Berry, 1983), the field of services marketing also began to integrate the management of personal relations between service providers and customers, deeming this the cornerstone of its approach. During the 1980s, Gummesson (1987) and the Northern School of Service Management broadcast the advent of a new marketing based on the development of long-term relationships with customers. Until the late 1980s, however, the idea of relationship marketing remained confined to two specific areas of marketing: business; and services. The early 1990s saw it overcome this marginal status to become a truism applicable to all areas of marketing, notably mass consumption. Relationship marketing (Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne, 1991; McKenna, 1991a and b) and proximate panaceas like one-to-one marketing (Peppers and Rogers, 1993), interactive marketing (Blattberg and Deighton, 1991), individualized marketing (Rapp and Collins, 1990) or database marketing (Petrison, Blattberg and Wang, 1993) all relied on the idea of market fragmentation (McKenna, 1988)

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resulting from the individualism of the consumers typifying this era, called “the age of the individual” on the cover of Rapp and Collins’ book (1990). To substantiate their discourses, proponents of these new approaches (McKenna, 1991a; Rapp and Collins, 1990) integrated the ideas of futurologists and consumption futurists like Faith Popcorn (1992), John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (1990), not to mention published and unpublished French analysts like CCA’s Bernard Cathelat, Cofremca’s Alain de Vulpian, Gérard Demuth or the members of the Observateur Cetelem. To some extent, the American futurist Faith Popcorn, called the “Nostradamus of marketing” by Fortune magazine, was the most prolific member of this cohort. In particular, she gained a great deal of fame for inventing a term that was widely used by marketing managers at the time: “cocooning”. Such futurists would recycle sociological texts announcing the rise of individualism in our Western so-called post-modern societies (Lyotard, 1979) as well as the growing role of consumption (Baudrillard, 1970). Indeed, according to the sociological school of research that dominated toward the late 1980s (Lipovetsky, 1983 and 1987; Ehrenberg, 1991; Elias, 1991; Jameson, 1991), post-modernity constitutes the culmination of individuals’ quest for liberation. The right to freedom, which in theory is unlimited but until that point (in modernity) had been socially circumscribed within economic, political and knowledge-related spheres, would soon be viewed as something that is normal and routine. This gave strength to the concept of a post-modern condition where individuals, freed from collective ideals and from the rigours of education, family and sexuality (Lipovetsky, 1990), undertake a personalization process, which then becomes a way of managing their behavior with the fewest possible constraints and widest possible choices. Consumer behavior researchers also integrated these sociological concepts (Dubois, 1991; Firat, 1991; van Raaij, 1993). This latter group would then move on to study the fragmentation and instability of post-modern consumption behavior. The specialist press at the time collaborated by sketching an identikit face of this individualistic new consumer: “A revolution in marketing! Chasing down new consumers will become a real high wire act over the next few years. Things like targets, segments or lifestyles were simple in the past, back when

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consumers could be categorized by their socio-economic characteristics, gender or age, and when professionals could use this information to predict the kinds of items that consumers would have in their shopping baskets or how powerful a car they were likely to purchase. Things are much tougher for analysts today, what with product life cycles sometimes shortening to a matter of months and consumer behavior no longer being characterized by any seasonality whatsoever ever since short channel developers starting offering new product alternatives every two months. The new millennium will be a dizzying time for consumers.”1 From the early 1990s, consumers began doing whatever they wanted to, upsetting all the contemporary benchmarks that had governed individuals’ lives until that point. They also proved to be highly inconsistent and volatile, purchasing one thing in the morning and the exact opposite in the afternoon. This made it impossible to characterize their behavior for a sustained period of time. Eclecticism (van Raaij, 1993) was the new marching order. As Rapp and Collins (1990, p. 11) wrote, this led to “the disappearance of Mr. or Mrs. Average Consumer”. The new approaches that arose in the wake of this ferment (Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne, 1991; McKenna, 1991a) took note of the situation and suggested using technological progress to track consumers individually, thereby creating the capability of reacting as quickly as possible to peoples’ new aspirations by establishing continuous contacts. Approaches characterizing new consumers as individuals capable of dialoguing with a company and exchanging opinions with it (Peppers and Rogers, 1993, p. 309) and getting involved in communications and knowledge-sharing efforts (McKenna, 1991b, p. 67). McKenna (1991b, p. 66) started with the idea that consumers would soon assume the power in their relationships with companies: “The 1990s will belong to the customer”. Similarly, there was a sense that consumers were likely to have a greater role to play in product and service adaptations. This paved the way to “mass customization” techniques (Pine II, 1992) that assumed, on the one hand, that consumers and companies could dialogue and therefore specify a

1. Portrait-robot du nouveau consommateur (“Identikit of the new consumer”), L’Expansion, 15 October/10 November 1992.

priori certain details of the goods/services on offer; and, on the other hand, that consumers themselves could adapt some of these details ex post facto.

Experiential marketing and the advent of hedonistic consumers The rise of experiential approaches in marketing toward the late 1990s concretized Holbrook and Hirschman’s seminal consumer behavior studies (1982) of experiential consumption and how this might translate into a managerial approach. Holbrook and Hirschman (1982), like other authors in their wake (Bourgeon and Filser, 1995; Filser, 1996), viewed an experiential outlook as a way of counterbalancing the functional and utilitarian view of consumption within the field of consumer behavior research by a so-called experiential view stressing hedonistic values and individual subjectivity. This vision enabled other authors to draw the face of a new, experiential-type of consumer (Pine II and Gilmore, 1998 and 1999; Schmitt, 1999). In turn, this called for the construction of a new kind of marketing approach. Experiential marketing (or the marketing of experiences) represents, according to its advocates, an innovation that is as least as important as relationship marketing had been during the previous era. Here, it is the management of a consumption experience that becomes the marketing means for promoting a brand, with the consumer being considered not only as a rational being but also as an emotional one. “Today, consumers take functional benefits features and benefits, product quality, and a positive brand image as a given. What they want is products, communications, and marketing campaigns that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts and stimulate their minds” (Schmitt, 1999, p. 22). In other words, experiential approaches account for the fact that what consumers seek through (and in) their consumption is pleasure. Toward this end, the proponents of experiential marketing (Pine II and Gilmore, 1999; Schmitt, 1999) relied on the output of certain futurists and trend analysts. In France, this included work done by Credoc’s Robert Rochefort (author of La société des consommateurs), the Observateur Cetelem, Gérard Mermet and his “Portrait-robot du nouveau consommateur”, and Danielle Rapoport, all of whom


announced that consumption in today’s society had become a question of enjoyment and pleasure. Experiential marketing’s supporters also relied on work by marketing researchers who were increasingly transforming themselves into consumption trend detectives. This latter group included A. Fuat Firat, Alladi Venkatesh and Nikilesh Dholakia (1995 and 1998); Richard Elliott (1997); Olivier Badot and Bernard Cova (1995); and Patrick Hetzel (1996). Quite significantly in France, a special issue of the Revue Française de Gestion (N° 110, SeptemberOctober 1996) devoted to “Searching for new consumers” combined an experiential consumer research perspective (Filser, 1996) with the presentation of a new experiential and hedonistic consumer (Hetzel, 1996). Researchers in this school relied on developments from the field of post-modern sociology to substantiate this new face of the hedonistic consumer. For some sociologists (Gergen, 1991), postmodern individuals can be constructed by intensifying a particular moment through the aestheticization of daily life (Featherstone, 1991). This is notably characterized by a search for fleeting passions, with everything being experienced cyclically and all the more intensely due to the ephemeral nature of the cycle in question (Maffesoli, 1990). Note that this hedonistic orientation would also mobilize all of the simulation capabilities offered by the new technologies, something that Baudrillard (1992) would in turn call hyper-reality. A text by Patrick Hetzel (2002, p. 25) delineated clearly the way in which consumers had been transformed: “Consumers no longer have a complex about seeking pleasure through consumption. Quite the contrary, they demand, affirm and display this openly”. In addition to the eclecticism highlighted by the advocates of relationship marketing, Hetzel (2002) added hedonism as a key element for understanding contemporary consumption. In this view, new consumers try to re-enchant their lives via consumption (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). The idea of re-enchantment was introduced in marketing to affirm consumers’ demand for sensuality (Schmitt, 1999). Toward the late 1990s, new consumers were said to prefer being immersed in consumption experiences instead of purchasing single products or services (Pine II and Gilmore, 1999). For some analysts, postmodern consumption could be summarized as “an immersion into experiential moments of enchan-

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ted, multifaceted and spectacular encounters” (Firat and Dholakia, 1998, p. 101). Thus, the focal point for experiential marketing was consumers’ immersion in experiences. Toward that end, however, it was also necessary that consumers invest themselves in an experience, and that they commit to (and interact with) a company. It is not enough to create stimulating contexts and environments (“theaters of experience” in the sense attributed to this term by Pine II and Gilmore, 1999). Consumers also had to play an active role in the theater, i.e., assume a positive role as an actor. Returning to ideas formulated by Deighton (1992) regarding consumer performance, Pine II and Gilmore (1998, p. 101) stated that consumers “play key roles in creating the performance or event that yields the experience”. By so doing, they help to customize experiences since “no two people can have the same experience, because each experience derives from the interaction between the staged event (like a theatrical play) and the individual’s state of mind” (Pine II and Gilmore, 1998, p. 98). As such, experiential approaches position consumers as individuals capable of playing a defined role. They do this by mobilizing their bodies insofar as “an experiential happening will only materialize when it has been mobilized” (Hetzel, 2002, p. 50). This mobilization can involve a playful mode where “consumption becomes a game” (Hetzel, 2002, p. 23). In this view, consumers are both actors and players – they play with the brands and products that companies offer them, and in the locations that companies have made available to them.

Collaborative marketing and the rise of creative consumers The roots of collaborative marketing reside in innovation and design studies that view users as a company’s potential collaborators – in line with the concept of lead users (Von Hippel, 1986). They also derive from service marketing studies (Eiglier and Langeard, 1987) that view the co-production of service as the basis for servuction systems. The strong emphasis on consumer collaboration from the mid2000s onwards corresponded to a re-integration of these seminal studies into a new marketing approach that would become known as a Service Dominant

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Logic (Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Vargo and Lusch, 2004) or SDL. The aim here was no longer to “market to” consumers but to “market with” them. The cocreation of value (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) by the company and its consumer(s) became the key process in the new marketing logic. By operating in this manner, marketing specialists would start considering consumers as “market partners” (Peppers and Rogers, 2005). Note, however, that SDL never referred explicitly to the notion of a new consumer to argue its originality. On the other hand, neighboring approaches like collaborative marketing (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a; Peppers and Rogers, 2005) and marketing 2.0 (Dussart and Nantel, 2007; Laurent, 2008) did refer explicitly to new creative consumers and their new technological context. To substantiate their ideas, the proponents of collaborative marketing (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) drew inspiration from older visionary studies like those undertaken by the American sociologist and futurologist Alvin Toffler who had announced the advent of prosumers (producers-consumers) back in 1980. In addition, and even more importantly, this school of thought (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b) relied on recent studies like those undertaken by Patricia Seybold or Seth Godin, analyses combining sociological developments with technological evolution and announcing the imminence of a revolution in which consumers would be empowered (Seybold, 2001). Extending this idea even further, Alex Wipperfürth (2005) announced that brand hijack was about to become new consumers’ favorite mechanism. In France, futurists and trend analysts like Gérard Mermet or members of the CRÉDOC or Observateur Cetelem centers took to announcing a takeover of power by consumers, with Rémy Sansaloni envisaging a “consacracy” of responsible “consum’actors” or non-consumers. This rising power of consumers, associated with a confusion of producers and consumers’ roles, was also predicted by other marketing researchers. For example, Firat and Dholakia (2006, p. 151) stressed that “marketing becomes everyone’s activity, and the post-consumer is a marketer”. Other researchers who were part of the CCT (Consumer Culture Theory) school – like Arnould and Thompson (2005) – agreed with this vision and developed the concept of “consumer agency”, one that becomes particularly operative when consumers generate ideas that companies could

use (Berthon et al., 2007; Muniz and Schau, 2007). This elimination of the border between consumers and producers, a proposition advocated by the proponents of collaborative marketing, was also an idea inherited from sociology. It was based on one of the main components of post-modernity, i.e., anti-totalitarianism (Lyotard, 1979). In the post-modern vision, individuals reject dominant and universal values and everything that is normal or average. They all want to live in their own way and by so doing become the coproducers of their daily lives. De Certeau (1980), for instance, had already noted that users are always part designers and part producers, silently subtracting themselves from products and services’ utilization structure as defined by the producer, and re-inventing their daily routines thanks to the artfulness, subtle ruses and resistance tactics that they use to hi-jack objects and codes and to re-appropriate space and usage as they see fit (de Certeau, 1980). According to this sociological school of thought, post-modern individuals resist, alone or in a group (Fiske, 1989), the meanings that institutions and companies try to force upon them, instrumentalizing this as a concrete means of regaining power and autonomy (Keat, Whiteley and Abercrombie, 1994). The Internet enables a good understanding of this new consumer: “Technological developments are progressively giving birth to new consumers, ones who are more intelligent and therefore better informed and more demanding, who are freer and show greater strength in their dealings with distributors and brands. Consumers are becoming actors in their own consumption. This is a rapid mutation, the new world in which new generations operate from day one” (http://lenewconsumer.blogspot.com/2006/03/rappel-du-contexte.html). One way or the other, today’s consumers want to collaborate in defining the products, services and experiences they are being offered. They are co-creators of value (Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) and it is in this sense that they can be globally qualified as “consum’actors” or post-consumers (Firat and Dholakia, 2006). The Internet is a platform where they can learn to build a different relationship with companies, one based on equality since their exchanges with other consumers allow them to develop knowledge about a given product or brand without having to wait for the company to take the initiative (Laurent, 2008; Seybold, 2001). Thanks to


the Internet, consumers have become more powerful and creative as subjects (Muniz and Schau, 2007). This new way of being has a knock-on effect on their consumption and the way they use the market, with the act of consumption itself having turned into an area where they can exercise creativity and power (Berthon, Pitt and Campbell, 2008). Having said that, it is also worth noting the opposite tendency, with new consumers frustrated by technological solutions that they no longer understand and whose utility they no longer perceive, leading to what has been called “consumer fatigue” (Berthon et al., 2007). All in all, collaborative marketing would view consumers as fully-fledged subjects in their relationships with companies, i.e., as subjects possessing their own resources and the capacity to implement them. The school reproduced the aforementioned construct of consumers as actors while enriching its meaning. The new depiction stated that consumers materialising their consumption experience integrate the resources offered by companies and combine them with their own resources (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) to co-create and co-extract value from a consumption experience (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a). Thus, the new consumer assumed the shape of an integrator of resources (Vargo and Lusch, 2008). By becoming companies’ partners in this way, “consumers have to also learn that co-creation is a two-way street. The risks cannot be one-sided. They must take some responsibility for the risks they consciously accept” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b, p. 14). Collaborative marketing saw new consumers as companies’ equals, with both sides being resource integrators capable of agency in their consumption and in the marketplace. It is interesting to note here that this approach (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a) sensed a reinforced need for dialogue (the “D” in Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s Dialogue/Access/Risk/Transparency DART model, 2004b) between the two categories of actors. This constituted an unprecedented type of dialogue since consumers chose with whom they would dialogue and not the other way around.

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A POST-MODERN CONSTRUCTION OF CONSUMER COMPETENCY

Several lessons can be derived from this historical reconstruction of the new consumer faces highlighted in the different marketing approaches that have emerged since the early 1990s. First and foremost, it has helped to identify four categories of authors specializing in faces of new consumers. It has also demonstrated that such faces stem from a construction process that is continually being renewed, while indicating that the faces’ attributes belong to a stock of sociological concepts that has remained relatively unchanged ever since the 1980s and 1990s and the great wave of post-modernity. Lastly, it has highlighted a process where individuals are being formatted and asked to become increasingly competent consumers.

Authors of new consumer faces Throughout this history of new marketing approaches, we have identified four major types of actors involved in the production of the three faces of the new consumer (See Figure 1). First of all, there are sociologists in general (and the sociologists of consumption in particular), analysts supplying general keys that help to decipher the evolution of consumption. These are authors who worked between the late 1970s and early 1990s and were responsible for a significant literary output. Then came what Ohl (2002) called the group of socio-marketers, comprised of analysts with ties to research and marketing firms who would systematically emphasize certain sociological dimensions. In France, this group included Gérard Mermet, Gérard Demuth, Danielle Rapoport, Bernard Cathelat and the CCA, Robert Rochefort and the CRÉDOC, the Observateur Cetelem, etc. The list can be supplemented by North American futurists like Faith Popcorn, Naisbitt and Aburdene, Seybold, etc. All of these actors translated sociological studies to try and insert them into a more applied and up-to-date context. Unfortunately, “they rarely relied on published data or substantiated argumentation, seeking instead to free themselves from any critical debate in an attempt to ensure the

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autonomy of their output” (Ohl, 2002, p. 33). Supplementing Ohl’s analysis (2002), we would say that alongside these socio-marketers, a third group of actors also developed, one that might be called – to mirror their counterparts – market-sociologists. In France, this included Olivier Badot, Bernard Cova and Patrick Hetzel. In the United States, A.F. Firat, Nikilesh Dholakia and Alladi Venkatesh should be mentioned. Similar to the socio-marketers, marketsociologists drew inspiration from post-modern sociological literature to sustain their texts. It remains that this scientific research into new consumers, one informed by a strong tendency toward post-modernism, denoted a lack of field work, something that Miles (1999) and Goulding (2003) criticized because the studies involved featured “seductive nature of post-modern rhetoric which can result in an over-exaggeration of social change” (Goulding, 2003, p. 156). Having said that, even if socio-marketers and market-sociologists did not refer excessively to one anothers’ work, participated jointly in the construction of new consumer faces. Lastly, the proponents of a new kind of marketing, one that would

target individualistic consumers (Peppers and Rogers, 1993), hedonistic consumers (Pine II and Gilmore, 1999) as well as collaborative consumers (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a), came to constitute a fourth group of actors engaged in a second translation process that tended to reify a new consumer face into a few canonical traits capable of justifying the new marketing approach.

New consumer faces derived from a process of construction This new consumer faces concept, comprised of a construction of actors, is neither surprising nor disturbing. One would do well to recall that the very notion of consumers can be considered the result of a construction or succession of constructions ever since the distant era when such actors were called “households” (Ohl, 2002). According to Marion (2004, p. 53), “Every marketer, like every critic of marketing, tries to construct a representation of

POST-MODERN SOCIOLOGISTS

SOCIOMARKETERS

MARKETING SOCIOLOGISTS

MARKETING PROPONENTS

Figure 1. – Authors of the new consumer faces


consumers and attribute a role to them”. AngloSaxon researchers use the expression “Making Up Consumers” (Cayla and Peñaloza, 2006; Nairn and Berthon, 2003) to signify marketers and their allies’ constantly renewed efforts to construct consumers, and by so doing, to shape markets. Each new consumer face is based on joint output by socio-marketers and market-sociologists, reflecting a whole series of sociological studies, most of which were published between 1980 and 1992. This gap between the time when sociology studies were published and socio-marketers and market-sociologists produced their work – together with the time that different marketing approaches’ proponents required for their diffusion – illustrates this phenomenon of constructing new consumer faces. Each of these faces is embedded in a well-defined period of time (late 1980s-early 1990s; late 1990s-early 2000s; mid-2000s-etc.) whereas the different sociology studies evoked by socio-marketers and market-sociologists do not in fact date from the same periods. Thus, some work needs to be done sifting through the body of literature, selecting those ideas and items that are most useful because they support people’s intuitions regarding the reality of a new consumer at that particular moment in time. Proponents of new marketing approaches (sometimes the aforementioned sociomarketers or market-sociologists – although the search for legitimacy means that they are generally different) rely on these translations to promote their own studies, often presenting them somewhat abusively (Marion, 2000) as a “paradigm reversal” capable of opposing the face that they have chosen for the new consumer. This is a cyclical movement and one that has been repeated for more than 20 years now.

All of these faces originate in the post-modern sociology of the 1980s and the 1990s Very often over the past two decades, the face of the new consumer has been associated with the descriptor “post-modern”, seeing how new and postmodern consumers have been portrayed as very similar if not synonymous constructs in a large number of studies (Simmons, 2008). At the same time, using the descriptor “post-modern” does not facilitate the definition of this new consumer, given the many (often

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conflicting) definitions of the term “post-modern” (Simmons, 2008). As we mentioned before, the postmodern-dominated sociological texts written during the 1980s and the 1990s already featured new consumer faces. Confirmation of this state of affairs can be witnessed in the way in which a relationship was postulated between new consumer faces and the faces presented in the impressive study that Gabriel and Lang published in 1995, listing ten major consumer faces. The new consumer from the “late 1980searly 1990s” corresponds to the “consumer as identity-seeker” in their Chapter 4, with the consumer from the “late 1990s-early 2000s” corresponding to the “hedonist consumer” detailed in their Chapter 6 and the new consumer “mid-2000s onwards” more or less corresponding to the “the consumer as rebel” detailed in their Chapter 8. At different moments in time and depending on the actors involved, one characteristic of a consumer has generally received special attention, whether individualization, hedonism or creativity. The analytical matrix has always remained the same, however – post-modern sociology. This is the basis of all the new consumer faces that have appeared over the past 20 years. Whether actors were socio-marketers or market-sociologists, they all used a certain translation effect to accentuate one facet of post-modern consumption at a given moment in time, turning it into a function as much of external (social, economic, technological) contingencies as of personal strategies or beliefs.

Faces embedded in one another to structure the consumer’s competency The faces on offer may appear at first glance to have been lacking in any obvious connections. Marketing discourses have tended to accentuate a few specific traits of the consumer face that each school defends in its attempt to differentiate itself. What our analysis of the new consumer’s supposed practices has actually revealed, however, is continuity and even a kind of sedimentation. Each new approach seemed to take for granted some of the new consumer’s capabilities from the preceding period. Collaborative marketing, for example, was based on consumers capable of dialoguing (relationship marketing) and being actors (experiential marketing)

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while adding to this the capacity to integrate resources, thereby creating a sedimentation effect (See Table 2). The three consumer faces were not born in the guise of spontaneous new generations but all assisted in a progressive construction of consumer competency, as anticipated by Hetzel (2002). One could even say that they traced a genealogy of consumer competency, ranging from a superficial level of dialogue to a deeper level of integration and including an intermediary level of playfulness and performance, in the sense attributed to these terms by Deighton (1992). A question remains whether all of these dispersed and multiple discourses voluntarily construct this consumer competency or if they induce it involuntarily. Some analysts (Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody, 2008, p. 164) speak of a “large marketing project currently underway” that they see as constructing such consumer competency. We prefer instead the idea of “chaotic production” – in Dubet’s sense of the term (2009) – by intellectuals and scientists occupying a dominant position enabling them to prescribe the faces of individual subjectivity. The one proviso is that “it is not necessary to want to dominate to be dominant” (Dubet, 2009, p. 244). Rising consumer competency as identified in new marketing texts should be connected to the process of “consumer empowerment” as first described by Wathieu et al. (2002) before being integrated by an entire trend of marketing literature (Wright, 2006). The term empowerment should be understood reflexively as the fact of acquiring power over oneself. Consumer empowerment in marketing is therefore associated with the idea of power, and with its exercise through the control that consumers have over their consumption. Increasing consumers’ control can be expressed at two levels in the relation-

ship with a company (Wathieu et al., 2002). First, at the consumption level, consumers have greater control over issues that concern them, i.e., that concern their decisions and their consumption experiences. Subsequently, at the marketing level, consumers have greater control over issues concerning companies’ marketing action, i.e., that concern certain marketing mix variables like product definition, product information, distribution or communication. Consumer empowerment implies that consumers develop competencies based on exchanges and dialogue and leading to customization (Pires, Stanton and Rita, 2006). This can materialize through daily resistance to marketing abuses (Denegri-Knott, Zwick and Schroeder, 2006) and through collaborations with companies on new product developments (Fuchs and Schreier, 2009) or on service design (Cova, 2004).

THE GOVERNMENTALITY OF NEW CONSUMERS

At this stage of the analysis, we would say that the three faces of the new consumer generated by our genealogical approach all derived from a constantly renewed construction driven by sociological writings and concepts dating from the 1980s and the 1990s and from the great wave of post-modernity. This construction rejoiced in the existence of rising consumer competency. Along with Beckett and Nayak (2008), we can therefore enquire about the actual

Table 2. – Marketing approaches, faces and competencies of the new consumer New marketing approaches

Faces of the new consumer

Competencies of the new consumer

Relational marketing Experiential marketing

Individualistic consumer Hedonistic consumer

Collaborative marketing

Creative consumer

Dialogue Dialogue + Role fulfillment Dialogue + Role fulfillment + Resource integration


tenor of this trend. Some authors, like Arnould (2007, p. 192) are already convinced that passive consumers have in fact shifted to an active and even creative state: “Whether one chooses protagonist, consum’actor, prosumer or some other neologism of choice, the point of these awkward verbal gestures is that the co-creative producer of genuine, political, less commercial experiences is far removed from the passive mass market consumer of the post-war consumerist boom”. These authors laud consumers’ growing ability to mobilize their competencies and play with brands and products in a personalized and unpredictable manner, thereby producing their own daily lives. This takeover of power by consumers allows them to reintegrate resistance phenomena (Roux, 2007) like committed consumption, which entertains ambiguous relationships with the marketplace, contesting the latter as much as it expands it (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2009). Other more critical authors see in this supposedly more competent consumer a depiction of individuals as beings who only exist by and through consumption and whose practices are shaped and disciplined by marketing discourses. For example, commenting upon new consumers of financial services, Hodgson (2002, p. 323) stated that, “individuals must embrace their identity as consumer, learn to play their part in the game of production and consumption, and take responsibility for the accomplishment of this role”. This school of critical authors continues to harbor some doubts, with the occasions and opportunities that consumers are offered to develop and exercise their competencies – a trend that has given them greater control – mainly relating and applying to consumer practices. The idea here is that individuals are being given an impetus to determine themselves more and more within a consumer framework. This raises a fundamental question about what lies behind the constructed face of the new and increasingly competent consumer identified in our analysis of new marketing discourses.

The Foucauldian concept of governmentality The concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1978 and 1994) has recently been mobilized in different marketing approaches (Arvidsson, 2006; Beckett and Nayak, 2008; Hodgson, 2002; Robert-Demontrond,

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2004; Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford, 2006; Skalen, Fellesson and Fougère, 2006; Zwick et al., 2008) to interpret the role that marketing plays in the evolution of consumers who have increasingly become “agents” of their consumption. This is because the notion of governmentality “is useful in discussing how the authoritative realm learns about and forges self-disciplined consumers” (Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford, 2006, p. 1018). Governmentality studies the capacity of autonomous individuals to control themselves and analyzes the connection between this capacity and different forms of political power and economic exploitation. According to Foucault (1978), governmentality corresponds to a formation of the kind of political rationality that characterizes the transition from sovereignty to government. In sovereignty, the art of governing (together with the associated knowhow and techniques) revolves around the aptitude for conquest and above all for preserving power. In government, governance is based on two fundamental elements: technicization based on a series of specific governmental apparatuses; and a greater sense of responsibility based on appeals to a sense of citizenship. This leads to a central transformation in the conception of how to exercise power, which no longer involves conquering or possessing something but instead producing, provoking and organizing a population to help it develop all of its competencies. In this view, power is based on an exploitation of wealth and individuals’ resources through activities structured by the political authority. In arguing this analysis of power, Foucault (1994) distinguished three levels: strategic relationships, government techniques and states of domination. Strategic relationships are envisaged as a strategic interaction between freedoms, creating a situation where some parties try to determine others’ conduct, with the latter responding by trying to avoid any external determination of their conduct or by trying to determine the other parties’ conduct in turn. In a broad conception, government techniques encompass all governance practices in human and institutional terms. States of domination represent what is ordinarily called power. By differentiating between these three levels, Foucault (1994) tries to emphasize the role that the first two play in establishing and preserving the third. Governmentality is viewed here as a concept forged to designate “the conduct of the conducts” of people corresponding to a combination of these three levels.

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Governmentality of consumers Based on these elements, we can envisage marketing discourses as participating in a governmentality of consumers (Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody, 2008) through the faces that they produce and promote. Returning to the Foucauldian principle of subservience, these discourses create a face of consumers who are autonomous co-producers thanks to their own competencies, and who are therefore subjected to a system of consumption by which they are subsequently moulded. As demonstrated by Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford (2006), this type of discourse is simultaneously liberating and disciplining. Researchers who argue marketing’s governmentality of consumers use this to stigmatize the liberating discourses of consumer power (Wathieu et al., 2002) along with the discourses of consumer agency (Arnould, 2007) and the service dominant logic (Lusch and Vargo, 2006) that accompany them – the idea being that they are only superficially liberating. Our analysis of the construction of new consumer faces, based on the actors identified in Figure 1, therefore agrees with Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody’s analysis (2008) of governmentality. In this view, the spectre of competent, empowered and freed consumers haunts today’s marketers: “All the marketing powers, business academics, advertising agents, marketing executives, and journalists have entered into a holy alliance to (no, not exorcise!) understand, celebrate, and ultimately harness this spectre. The image in the epigraphs, of a brave new world where nonplussed marketers have lost control over the management of their ‘core assets’ such as brands and customers, has diffused quickly through the halls of business schools and corporations” (Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody, 2008, p. 164). Pursuing this analysis, Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody (2008) showed that this spectre, constructed by the aforementioned actors, does not at all liberate consumers but instead establishes a form of governmentality, the purpose being to summon a specific form of life where consumers participate voluntarily in the co-creation of value. Indeed, to be able to act as creative consumers, individuals must have been “shaped, guided and moulded” (Hodgson, 2002, p. 326) into this personage of the new consumer. Thus, the three faces of the new consumer along with ancillary competencies all show how marketing dis-

courses are used to shape governmentalized consumers (Skalen, Fellesson and Fougère, 2006). Although we do not adhere to the conspiracy theory of a large governmentality marketing plot (Zwick, Bonsu and Darmody, 2008), there is little doubt that the discourses that we have identified combine with other actions within a governmentality framework. In short, actions undertaken by companies and advertising agents interact with these discourses. “What emerges from collaborative marketing is not a hyper-confident, empowered consumer but one susceptible to the suggestions and incitements of producers” (Beckett and Nayak, 2008, p. 313). Robert-Demontrond (2004) has also denounced consumers’ governmentality in the field of sustainable behavior. In his view, such conduct not only involves people becoming more aware of the principles of sustainability but above all requires a greater conscience, i.e., an integration/assimilation/appropriation of what should constitute a demand that is ethical and which has also been inspired, shaped and formatted by companies’ actions. Producing a reality that is concrete and actionable through the reality of governmentality is therefore tantamount to denouncing the negative secondary effects generated by consumers’ development of competencies. In practice, and according to Robert-Demontrond (2004), governmentality is mainly realized through information and communications. In other words, our analysis would have to be extended at a more upstream level. Competencies may be “informable” but they are more than just this, in part because they are also comprised of the techniques that people apply to themselves. Alongside communications of events and commented publications with undertones of mass denunciation and stigmatization, there are also learning policies that can help to shape and nurture consumers’ generic competencies (relating to consumption) but also each individual’s specific competencies (relating to sustainable consumption).

Discussion of consumers’ governmentality In governmentality, individuals become “entrepreneurs of themselves” (Foucault, 1978). As such, they find themselves connected to society, through the choices they make, the risks they take, the ensuing responsibility for themselves and for others


– risks that they must assume. According to this reasoning, the “consum’actor” or creative consumer described in the introduction to the present text is no more than the most recent stage of a governmentalization process where consumers are supposed to become capable of dialogue, role-playing and resource integration (See Table 2). Moreover, this stage cannot be avoided. Transforming individuals into competent consumers means that they should become relatively attached to the project of consumer empowerment (Shankar, Cherrier and Canniford, 2006) and increasingly competent in their consumption practices. The question is whether consumers are aware of the real issues at stake in this governmentality – and what they might lose. An ancillary question is whether the competencies being acquired and developed to help them assume the role of new consumers are detrimental to non-consumption-related competencies like walking outdoors, picking flowers or mushrooms, pottering around their house, chatting with friends and, more than anything else, doing nothing at all. Manzini (2001) stigmatized the loss of contemplative time as one of the main possible outcomes of this trend toward the development of contemporary consumers’ competencies. So do new consumer discourses impoverish us in terms of nonconsumption-related competencies? The current crisis, far from being a corny old tune, is actually there to remind us that in the absence of financial resources, consumer competencies are not very useful in daily life. From a managerial perspective, this updating of the governmentality process underlying new consumer discourses should remind companies that they would be wrong to believe that all of their customers have succumbed to the lure of the creative consumer (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004a). Nor do they all possess the competencies enabling them to dialogue, play a particular role and integrate the products or services that a company offers. Take, for instance, the example of a large French company that has just discovered, after implementing a multi-channel strategy, that consumers are unwilling to mobilize all the channels it has created for their benefit (Bonnemaizon, 2008). Despite the range of platforms it has organized, consumers continue to communicate solely via telephone. Does this mean that they are incompetent and dis-empowered? Yes, if we have the same understanding of consumer competencies

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as this large company does. No, if we reason in terms of daily competencies, and notably “organizational competencies” (Dujarier, 2008) – this being the idea that people know how to optimize their personal energy, managing daily and/or domestic problems in a way that will allow them to cope with the risks they face. In this one instance, the end result was simply that they felt that telephone contacts sufficed as a means for staying in contact with the company. From a theoretical perspective, consumers’ governmentality (achieved through marketing discourses) invites us to reflect upon the ethical aspects of our analysis. Are people always aware of what they are doing when they promote a new consumer face? Do they realize how this contributes to neo-liberal discourse and its managerial excesses (Witkowski, 2005; Hackley, 2009)? If we were to take a greater interest in other people’s well-being, we might become less inclined to create, convey or promote some of the new consumer discourses in such an uncritical manner. This might help us to detect what is liberating about recently structured theoretical frameworks like CCT (Arnould and Thompson, 2005) or SDL (Lusch and Vargo, 2006), but also what is disciplining.

CONCLUSION

Remember that the present text’s starting point was the rise of consum’actors or creative consumers in recent marketing discourses. This led us to identify the three faces of the new consumer that have emerged from marketing discourses over the past 20 years: the individualistic consumers of the early 1990s; the hedonistic consumers from the turn of the millennium; and creative consumers since the mid-2000s. It also helped us to reveal the common thread linking these three faces, i.e., the rise in consumer competency. Individualistic consumers’ capacity for dialogue has been enhanced by hedonistic consumers’ playful and aesthetic practices and creative consumers’ resource integration capabilities – all of which empower consumers in their relationships with com-

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panies. We interpreted consumers’ progressive takeover of power in new marketing discourses as a process of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense of the term (1978). Such discourses shape present generations, getting them to participate (through their competencies) in a movement where they can assume power over their consumption and thereby become consumers. As such, the discourses place people in a situation where they increasingly determine themselves as consumers and above all as competent, creative and responsible consumers. By so doing, they help people today to disengage from determinations that are external to the consumption sphere – creating a risk that competencies will be lost in many areas of daily life. This genealogy of the new consumer remains one construction but others are possible as well. It is prone to the limitations inherent to this kind of exercise, specifically a modicum of subjectivism. Even when substantiated by quantitative data found on Google Scholar, the choice of these three marketing approaches is tied to the authors’ personal history and to their own construction over the 20 years in this field. The thesis of governmentality could be subtly altered and even disproved by different movements relating to consumers’ conscious compromises or even consumer secession (Cova and Cova, 2004) that attests to consumers’ critical reflexivity (Ozanne and Murray, 1995). Nor does this interpretation exhaust all the issues raised by the production of new consumer discourses. For example, we might study why such discourses emerge and are pushed by certain actors, above and beyond an ambient level of imitativeness. What is the impact of technological innovation (databases, customer relationship management software, the Internet) on the emergence of these discourses? How important is their authors’ desire to differentiate themselves in the marketing knowledge and consultancy markets? We could also analyze the degree of novelty of these discourses and show how they help to produce novelty intrinsically or artificially by trying to depict something as new even if it is only a product of some actors’ differentiation efforts. We could also do more precise investigations to determine whether these discourses – as we have tried to show – shape a new consumer face or if they are simply a way for theory to catch up with reality and the trends that observers have detected.

The present study confirms the ideas developed over more than a decade concerning the construction of consumer faces via marketing discourses (Cochoy, 2002; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2004; Marion, 2004; Ohl, 2002). It shows how, over the past 20 years, marketers have expanded upon something that Peter Drucker first launched in the 1950s (Cochoy, 1999), promoting the faces of complex consumers that operate outside managers’ intuition and therefore necessitating a marketing apparatus capable of understanding them. Along these lines, an initial contribution of the present article is to enable researchers, above all young ones, to relive the dynamics driving the three approaches that we identified as being particularly significant: relationship, experiential and collaborative marketing. In addition, this study has expanded upon the aforementioned analyses by identifying the different categories of authors who have written about new consumer faces. In addition to the socio-marketers identified by Ohl (2002), there are, in particular, market-sociologists who translated the sociological texts used by the proponents of new marketing approaches. The present article showed how different parties recycle the post-modern sociological writings of the 1980s. A second contribution by the present article is its rejection of the claim to newness made by many new consumer texts. It does not achieve this through the references it makes to reality (Marion, 2003) but by contextualizing what people have written. Lastly, the study identifies in the texts that it analyzes the notion of rising consumer competency, a trend that it views in the light of the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as introduced into the field of marketing by Robert-Dentremond (2004). However, by focusing on texts and not on actions, it shows that consumers’ governmentality is also related to our discipline’s intellectual output. Thus, the third contribution of the present article is to shift criticism from corporate action to marketing analysts’ research and publication work and to raise questions about what is liberating but also disciplining about the most recent theories that we use.


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