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“Putting Consumers to Work: “Putting Consumers to Work:

“Putting Consumers to Work: - PowerPoint Presentation

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“Putting Consumers to Work: - PPT Presentation

Cocreation and New Marketing Governmentality Date of Publication July 2008 Journal Journal of Consumer Culture Authors Detlev Zwick Associate Professor of Marketing Schulich School of Business York University ID: 320053

consumer consumers labour production consumers consumer production labour creation social marketing market communication corporations free customer fordist form control

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Slide1

“Putting Consumers to Work: ‘Co-creation’ and New Marketing Govern-mentality”

Date of Publication

:

July 2008

Journal

:

Journal of Consumer Culture

Authors

:

Detlev Zwick:

Associate Professor of Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University

Samuel K. Bonsu:

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University

Aron Darmody:

PhD Student in Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York UniversitySlide2

“Putting Consumers to Work” Central Argument

:

Co-creation as part of a new consumer management strategy that allows corporations to exploit consumer labour in the production and innovation of new products

“Co-creation represents a

political form of power

aimed at generating particular forms of consumer life at once free and controllable, creative and docile” (163)

Role of the company: resource provider

Role of consumer: innovator

Support

:

Theoretical: Marxist labour-theory-of-value and Foucault’s notion of government

Qualitative, not quantitative research

Examples: LEGO, Build-a-BearSlide3

Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumersFordism

Problem

align inflexible production (fordist) with fragmented market (consumers with needs, wants, and desires)

Solution(?)

market research activities (commercial research)

Consumer = manageable, stable, homogeneous and immobile targetSlide4

Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumersA shift in Thought

Psychology now plays a role.

Consumer = ‘A physical and psychological itinerant whose needs and wants vary on spatial and temporal context’ (169)

New Solution(?)

Control the consumers needs wants and behaviours within the market using these new ideas.Slide5

Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumersThe Next Step Away from Fordist Views

Philip Kotler – marketing as an applied science

“..a concern with production efficiencies should be subordinate to discovering what consumers wanted… such acquiescence would ultimately prove to be a superior firm strategy for securing market share and maximizing profits relative to a production-driven model that assesses opportunities based on a firms manufacturing efficiencies.” (170)Slide6

Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumersThe Next Step Away from Fordist Views

Customers = difficult to manage and control, but are responsive to marketing management techniques. They are hard to retain due to their changing needs and wants.

Conceptual Tools to combat this:

relationship marketing

market orientation

customer relationship managementSlide7

Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumers1990 new Hyper-CompetitionNeed to Delight, not simply satisfy consumers

Similar relationship as Kotler presented: dominated by corporation with need to intimately involve consumer.Slide8

Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumersThe Postmodern Consumer

Need to improve relating to and knowing the consumer

Customer =

weary and cynical to Advertising

avoids market control

subverts corporate marketing (dominant meanings) for own projects

fluid, fragmented, heterogeneous

less able to be categorized, managed or directed.

End of sales through domination.

Market place partners – mutually beneficial relationship.Slide9

Value Co-creation: Radicalizing KotlerMarket: no longer mundane site of exchange but a communicative hive

Customers = people with specialized skills that companies can’t match or even understand

New Challenge:

attract and retain these consumers

provide a creative and open communication

The Market is now a platform for participation in a culture of exchangeSlide10

Value Co-creationGetting Further Away from Fordist ViewsMore concerned with devising, marketing and delivering services

Service-dominant instead of goods-dominant

Goods are intermediate products – appliances in the value creation processes or consumers

Everything including goods becomes a serviceSlide11

Value Co-creationGetting Further Away from Fordist ViewsConsumer = member of corporations production and marketing project

They therefore need to be controlled in ways that make sense for the company

Consumer goes from being unruly and unmanageable to being more amendable to:

Rationalization

rapid innovation

operational predictability

Consumers are now seen as a source of cultural and social knowledge that is constantly being updated and reproduced.Slide12

Value Co-creationGetting Further Away from Fordist Views

Co-creation is not an attempt to study then satisfy demands, but to aid the consumer’s inventiveness in the corporate-consumer partnership.

The marketer is no longer the seller of product but someone who makes suggestions, someone that facilitating the communication between consumer and corporation.Slide13

Value Co-creation Appropriating the common

Companies are now seeing the value in allowing consumers places for playful production of their own consumption experiences in an attempt to “appropriate, control and valorize the creativity of the common”. (174)

Consumers then are determining the use values of products, marketing only offers ‘value propositions’ while utilizing the knowledge of the consumer, and their creative interests to tap into the desires of a vast and changing market.Slide14

Theorizing co-creation: Governmentality and exploitation

We place the concept of co-creation within the logic of production

Arvidsson observes that postmodern information economies configure all communication as part of the productive labour process

Communication produces information

Information as the core resource of information economySlide15

Information Economy Rather than have traditional separation of production (by corporations) and consumption (

by consumers

), there is a need to complicate relationships so the circulation of information is seen as production

Increasingly dependent on Immaterial Labour of Consumers

Value of production fueled by ‘free labour’ of consumers as producers

Collapse of communication into production

Social communication is the value that occurs at the point of product useSlide16

Co-creation ParadigmAttempt to establish a specific form of government (like the one proposed my Michael Foucault)

Consumers voluntarily provide unwaged and exploited – but enjoyable – labour

ethical surplus’

- creation of economic value

‘social factory’

– work processes have shifted from factory to society

Co-creation paradigm -

value production and consumer management (like the production and management of the brand)

Fusion of social communication and social production

Marks less effort by marketers to support consumers in individualist consumption

Markets continue to strive for control over consumption practices to redefine strategic actions towards this endSlide17

Societal Environment to Foster Co-Creation

Seductive retail environments are designed to set free consumers in a controlled environment to engage in act of co-creation

Capitalist strategy of consumer control

Form of government of consumers that gives birth to an active consumer

independent, creative, and voluntary activities can be produced into raw materials.

Right now consumer labour is expropriated as surplus labour because it’s unpaid labour that doesn’t necessarily contribute to the consumer’s ability to buy more goods Slide18

Consumer Government and Mass IntellectualityContemporary marketing is driven by the pursuit of developing management techniques that bring about consumer population for demands of 21st centuryPursuit involves mobilization and expropriation of knowledge, creativity, and communication of consumers as the direct basis for economic value

Managers seek to identify modes of social cooperation with consumersSlide19

Platforms For ActionIntensify demands on consumers to be active participants in the creation of economic value

Advances in industrial production towards automation transformed structural organization of wage labour

Worker no longer appeared to be included within production process – more as a watchman and regulator as the production produces itself. Slide20

Social IndividualWith capitalist production machine automation increasingly relies on ability of workers to communicate with each other

Machinery mediates communication

social individual

appears as great foundation stone of production and wealth.

Often constitutes ‘free’ unpaid labour

Older forms of sociality have become capital – so social cooperation is already available for appropriation and commodification

Social cooperation as a mode of capitalist

Companies require workers to develop and share their know-how to improve efficiencies of production and organization of labour more generally Slide21

General IntellectThe ‘monological feature of labour dies away – so the RELATIONSHIP with others is a driving basic element

Virno employs Marx’s concept of the

general intellect

to express this transformation of life itself =

the social communication of living people, the dialogical performances, and communicative competence of individuals into living labour

Intellect refers to a set of competencies (centered around cognitive, cultural, linguistic, and affective capabilities) that are freely available to any social individual who is a member of the specific form of sociality constituted capital Slide22

Post-Fordist CapitalismPosits any interaction and all communicative action as a potential form of labour (employed, surplus-value producing labour) therefore inserts social cooperation squarely into the sphere of the material production of life.

Under current conditions of networked communication capitalist mediation of social relations now takes place outside the traditional confines of the company and increasingly within the networks of communication and interaction of the publicSlide23

Conclusions This ‘rootedness’

of the general intellect features social life, rather than limiting it to the spatial and temporal boundaries of life lived within the factory gates

Extension of the general intellect into all spheres of life = ‘

mass intellectuality

So how is capital trying to embed mass intellectuality into the structure of the market?

How do managers capture the intellectuality of the

consumer masses

‘creative underground

’ – as a voluntary, motivated unpaid potentially exploited workforce?

Idea of co-creation - corporations relationships with customers being a form of mutually beneficial social co-operation where joint production of value occurs

Representing an attempt to mobilize and appropriate the general intellect of consumersSlide24

Expropriating Free Consumer LabourSurplus value is gained from free consumer labour as corporations use unpaid customers to co-produce products which are then sold back to them (Marx)

Exploitation on two levels:

Consumers not paid for their contribution

Consumers pay higher price for the fruits of their own labour (Build-a-Bear—exploitation in disguise as fun)

YouTube, Second Life, etc. – economic value created by

making audience work

It is still exploitation even if consumers enjoy the work they do Slide25

Think Back To...Kelly:

Enthusiastic and optimistic about user participation; “bottom-up takeover” – participation as liberation, empowerment, freedom

Agrees that users/consumers contributing work and labour to corporations

Ignores exploitative aspect; focuses solely on user benefitsSlide26

Think Back To... “The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloguing the votes in the Senate. ... When a company opens its databases to users, as Amazon, Google, and eBay have done with their Web services, it is encouraging participation at new levels. The corporation’s data becomes part of the commons and an invitation to participate. People who take advantage of these capabilities are no longer customers; they’re the company’s developers, vendors, skunk works, and fan base” (Kelly)Slide27

Think Back To...O’Reilly:

User participation as part of business model and strategy for corporations

Agrees that users are important co-developers

Again ignores darker implications for consumers/usersSlide28

CritiqueA question of Resistance:

“co-creation expands upon Fordist modes of control by transforming resistance and opposition to marketing power into a source of economic value and by actively

encouraging

consumer experimentation and innovation, even if resistive in nature” (168)

“...it becomes clear that the notion of co-creation represents a radicalization of the co-optation of resistance by the market because it suggests nothing less than the complete incorporation of

all

of consumers’ productive capacity” (185)

How do we resist? Can we be truly “free consumers” without being exploited by the corporations? Can we use our freedom, creativity, and innovation against, rather than for, “the man”? Or is the only solution to completely abandon these products and services and try to “break out of the system”?Slide29

DiscussionZwick et al argue that co-creation still represents a form of exploitation even if consumers enjoy the free work they contribute to the production and innovation process.

Does it piss you off to think that by using YouTube, Facebook, or Build-a-Bear, you are being exploited by these large corporations?

Or does it not bother you so long as you are benefitting and having fun yourself?

Is it a question of who benefits, or who benefits

more

?Slide30

DiscussionHow do autonomous consumers generate value that marketers can appropriate and subsume under capital?