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

2021; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/716069

2378-1823

Franck Cochoy,

Consumer Retail Behavior Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeInsights On Consumption CollectivesBroadening the Collective Turn in Marketing: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption AgencementsFranck CochoyFranck Cochoy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLet me start from a striking paradox: on the one hand, one of the most remarkable accomplishments of marketing—from a technical rather than moral standpoint—is its long-standing ability to successfully fabricate consumer collectives in the form of market segments (Smith 1956); on the other hand, the same discipline never ceased to envision consumers as single, isolated, disconnected entities (here it is the entire corpus of the marketing and consumer research literature that should be quoted!).There would be no paradox in bringing together these two statements if market segments were just descriptive constructs aimed at categorizing various sorts of consumers in order to get a clearer view of market realities and thus better target transaction opportunities. But as we all know, when successfully designed, market segments may cease being just descriptive concepts and become performative ones (Cochoy 1998).1 Like the brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, market segments often end up existing and start living their own life. To put it in Marxist terms, a segment “in itself” sometimes becomes a “segment for itself”: consumers who belong to a given segment both identify themselves with their market depictions and sometimes resist such commodification (Arsel and Thompson 2011); emotional branding faces the risk to create a “doppelgänger brand image” (Thompson, Rindfleisch, and Arsel 2006); “feral segmentation” evidences a process where market segments even emerge independently from marketing efforts—see the rise of the lumbersexual segment, at the crossroad of the narcissist metrosexual and the rough lumberjack (Diaz Ruiz and Kjellberg 2020). In this respect, marketers’ inability to acknowledge one of their greatest achievements is puzzling; the endless focus on consumers, reinforced by individual-based surveys, lab experiments, face-to-face interviews and people-oriented observations is hard to understand.2In this commentary, I first attempt to explain where the consumer-centric orientation comes from and why it is so hard to escape. Then I join the current, late but most welcome, effort for an enlarged view focusing on consumer collectives, and I provide two examples that could feed this research agenda. Finally, I build on the same examples to go further and explain why it would be even better to move from consumer collectives to consumption agencements.Resisting Consumer Collectives: A Century of Consumer-Centric Research in MarketingThe consumer-centric bias of the marketing discipline, far from being self-evident, is the result of a long history, fueled by economics and psychology. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, economics should not be taken as the main and first culprit. Indeed, the individualist Homo economicus approach was very long to penetrate the marketing field. If the first marketers were economists, these pioneers received their training from the German historical school of economics, a tradition with a focus on markets as sets of institutions, rules, and aggregated behavior. As a consequence, early marketers promoted the so-called commodity-functional approach, that is, a view aimed at describing the organization and functioning of marketing channels, with little care for consumer behavior (Jones and Monieson 1990).Psychologists played a different role. First, they spread the technique of market surveys in the early 1920s (e.g., Starch 1914). The reliance on surveys is not innocent: it takes the consumer as the privileged lens to describe markets and thus favors the focus on the individual consumer rather than collective entities. Of course, surveys aggregate individual answers to form an overall picture, but this procedure rests on the debatable assumption that the whole can be reduced to the sum of its parts. The consumer-centric influence of psychology was radicalized in the subsequent decades. First was motivation research. By recommending going deep in the consumer’s psyche through projective techniques (Schwartzkof and Gries 2010), this technique surreptitiously moved marketing analysts away from the market scene. The final blow came from the Ford Foundation-driven reform of management sciences in the late 1950s. The Foundation astutely conditioned the allocation of its generous grants to the adoption of behavioral and quantitative approaches inherited from World War II. As a result, cognitive psychology, laboratory experiments, and neoclassical economics based on Homo economicus and mathematical modeling invaded research in marketing and succeeded in turning the discipline into a consumer-centric science (Cochoy1998). The recent emergence of neuromarketing, on the one hand, and experimental economics, on the other, are just the latest outcomes of this long process.Of course, this evolution was challenged in the 1980s by the development of “interpretive” and “naturalistic” consumer research, notably thanks to the well-known and influential Consumer Behavior Odyssey (see fig. 1). The Odyssey was a spectacular effort to leave laboratories, surveys, and models in order to reconnect research with in situ market behavior (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989). This effort was further enriched by Consumer Culture Theory, with its call to account for the “sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption” (Arnould and Thompson 2005). However, even when field-oriented, consumer research remains paradoxically extremely close to the approaches it pretends to distance from. The whole problem lies in the name: consumer research tautologically means “research about the consumer”; it is “consumer-centric” by definition. Being deeply rooted in a long history of individual-based research, consumer research tends to equate consumption with the consumer, as if everything that happens in a given market rested on the consumer side only, as if the role of marketers and “market-things” took a little or secondary role in the consumption game (Cochoy and Mallard 2018). After a century of consumer-centric marketing, it seems hard to take another road and adopt another view.Figure 1. Van of the Consumer Behavior Odyssey.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointJoining the Consumer Collective Turn: Two Marginal ContributionsIn this respect, the “consumer collectives” research agenda is a wonderful and welcome surprise, and I am happy to support and join the effort. It seems that at some point, consumer researchers cannot but take into account all that overflows their traditional focus. The digitalization of consumption certainly plays a catalyst role, with the proliferation of online communities, social networks, crowd sourcing schemes, and other consumer collectives that become harder and harder to ignore. But it also leads to a focus on most traditional collectives like consumer tribes, political consumerism, or social movements. After having reviewed all sorts of consumer figures (Cova and Cova2012), it seems time has come to describe every kind of consumer collective. For a start, let me provide two examples among a huge list.The first is consumer crowds, that is, large groups of persons that share a common direction without necessarily being physically present together (Arnoldi and Borch 2007). Strictly speaking, envisioning crowds as “collectives” is debatable, because a crowd is more than a collection; it is a specific entity with its own agency that often surprises its members. From Gabriel Tarde’s criminal crowds of the nineteenth century (Tarde 1890) to modern crowds of Twitter messages (Arvidsson et al. 2016; Boullier 2017), crowds swarm, vibrate, and exert their own force independently from the individuals they are made of. At first glance, crowds seem remote from the marketing perspective, because marketing is about channeling and disassembling them; marketing management aims at converting the mass into a set of single clients; it is about shifting global market behavior into bilateral transactions (Callon 2021). This said, before and after transactions, marketing is also about creating crowd effects and monitoring the crowds it constructs. A few works have focused on such issues: see Delphine Dion (2004) work on retail crowding or Paco Underhill’s (1999) fascinating study on the role of bodily friction in supermarket settings. That said and as far as I know, no consumer researcher has attempted to envision consumer crowds with the knowledge gained by animal crowds specialists (ethologists) on fish schools (see fig. 2), insect societies, flocks of starlings, sheep herds, and the like: based on models mimicking real crowd behavior, it shows that the latter can be reduced neither to the individuals nor to the collective (Bonabeau, Dorigo, and Théraulaz 1999). Consequently, building on this exotic, sophisticated, and inspiring expertise to account for consumer crowds would certainly represent an exciting and fruitful challenge.Figure 2. Fish school.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe second case is about a more classic type of consumer collective that emerged from the recent pandemic. With the help of regional newspapers, my colleagues and I gathered more than 2,000 testimonies about the use of sanitary masks in France, in April (lockdown), May (post-lockdown), and October (back to school) 2020. At first glance, calls for testimonies are close to consumer-centric surveys, even if aimed at collecting open narratives rather than formatted answers obtained through questionnaires. The consumer-centric approach seems well suited to the lockdown context, where people are trapped at home with reduced social interactions. However, among the several themes that emerge from the data, the practice of fabric mask homemaking revealed another reality. When facing the pandemic, people did not remain isolated but quickly gathered into various sorts of collectives: online groups where they could find, exchange, and discuss sewing patterns, do-it-yourself templates, and ideas; family, neighborhood and solidarity networks where they distributed the self-made masks, mostly through gift-giving practices. Are these groups consumer collectives? Yes and no: yes, to the extent that consuming means using, but no, because mask making is an answer to a market failure. With mask making, the “producer-user collective” alleviates the disappearance of the consumer as a buyer. In France, the shortage of masks, and the early State refusal to recommend mask use for the general public, inflamed the desire for masks. Homemade masks quickly appeared as a way to reduce the tension provoked by market failure and State impotence, all the more so that one adopts better what one does oneself, rather than what is imposed from the outside. Of course, mask-making practices sharply declined when commercial masks became available again. But these practices clearly played a crucial role in the wide acceptance of the mask device by the French public; they created a sense of pride, responsibility, and solidarity, that is, collective feelings and attitudes that helped counter the “everyman for himself” logic that often goes with a shortage of vital appliances (Cochoy, Gaglio, and Mallard, forthcoming).Going Further: From Consumer Collectives to Consumption AgencementsBut the mask example shows that caring for consumer collectives is just one step on the road away from consumer-centric consumer research. Consumer collectives help shift from the singular to the plural, but this plural is still too restrictive; the collectives are still consumer ones, at the risk of neglecting all the other entities that these collectives are made of. To begin with, when addressing mask makers, we should not forget the masks! The social group is defined by the object it makes; mask-making groups are about differentiating from industrial, plastic, and disposable masks by crafting homemade, cloth, and reusable ones. Consumer collectives are inseparable from the objects’ collectives (if one may so phrase it), or rather, consumers and objects are part of a wider collective that I propose to label a “consumption agencement,” if by agencement we mean an articulated and moving set of actors and artifacts, “a form of arrangement that acts and at the same time imposes a certain format on the action” (Callon 2016, 13). The properties of people are closely tied to the properties of objects; consumers and masks exchange their properties and define each other, and as such they should be studied with the same scrutiny, symmetrically, without privileging one (the consumer) over the other (the mask). Of course, consumer research has been sensitive to objects, for instance, by showing how they could work as “extended selves” (Belk 1988). This approach is useful, for instance, to envision the mask as a way for the consumer to express his or her identity.However, the extended self framework reduces the object to the consumer, at the risk of neglecting its own agency. Masks can certainly be symbols, as the US election drama shows well (see fig. 3). On the American scene, masks were quickly interpreted as symbols: these devices were coded as signs of political affiliation, so that people from “the other side” refused to wear them. Hopefully, this story reminds us by absurdity that objects are not symbols only; they are also material artifacts with their own agency. The mask-as-symbol conception is (or should be) challenged by the mask-as-tool conception. Obviously, masks are also antivirus barriers with distinct filtering properties. But the differences are not functional only. Disposable masks have not the same properties as fabric ones, notably in terms of convenience and sustainability; FFP1 and FFP2 masks are different in terms of aesthetics, price, and efficiency; in January 2021, the French scientific council warned that some cloth masks are not good enough to protect wearers against the UK COVID variant, and so on.3Figure 3. Symbolic sanitary mask.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointBy the way, when describing masks, we discover that these devices are attached not only to various sorts of consumers but also to various species of viruses: the original SARS-CoV-2 now comes with its UK but also Brazilian, Japanese, South African, and Indian brothers and sisters. We understand that depending on consumers, masks, and viruses, we get neither the same relationships between the three collectives nor the same consumption practices. We realize that we don’t have just consumer collectives but a much wider and heterogeneous set, made of varied consumers, different masks, and mutant viruses. Moreover, it is important to note that this encompassing set is not restricted to the human, technical, and biological entities it is made of—consumers, masks, and viruses; it also involves a wider web of distribution procedures. At the beginning of the pandemic, the market framework failed for masks, but this failure was soon alleviated by State intervention at the institutional level (requisition) and theft (reported by the press) and gift-giving practices at the individual level (see preceding section). Consumers, masks, and viruses are thus linked to a “distribution collective” (Table 1) made of distinct marketing channels that combine institutional/arbitrary and egoistic/altruistic dimensions.Table 1. Distribution Collective of Masks EgoismAltruismInstitutionalMarketPublic administrationArbitraryTheftGift giving View Table Image Where have we gone so far? What kind of framework do we need to identify and account for mask consumption? Is the focus on consumer collectives enough to reveal how the mask “market” works? Is mask use a matter of consumer culture only? Could we reduce the “nonconsumption of masks” in Sweden and their wide use in France to cultural patterns? The answer depends on what we mean by culture. If culture is restricted to its classic human-centered dimension, the answer is no: culture may be involved (different people may be more or less sensitive to restrictions on freedom, however they define it) but just partially: institutional frameworks obviously play the greater role (the Swedish health agency chose not to recommend masks; French authorities made them mandatory). However, consumer culture can take another meaning by referring to what the word means in biology: as suggested elsewhere, consumer behavior is “cultivated” in market settings just like germs are grown in a Petri dish: in French, “cultiver” means both educating and breeding, and market professionals and devices obviously do both about consumers (Cochoy and Mallard 2018; Cochoy 2019). Understanding consumer behavior thus relies not only on the study of consumers themselves, whether they appear isolated or in groups like bacteria colonies but on the description of the wider milieu made of consumers, artifacts, marketers, institutions, and so on. This milieu is the true collective, in sociologist Bruno Latour’s sense: in a book about earlier pandemics, Latour called “collective” not the group of humans but the assemblage made of human and nonhuman agencies we live in (Latour 1988). At a lower scale and as we saw, this type of collective can be called an “agencement,” that is, a set of varied articulated agencies aimed at performing a given task (Cochoy 2014; Callon 2016; Cochoy, Trompette, and Araujo 2016).According to these views, it would make sense to move from consumer collectives to consumption agencements. Indeed, the latter notion helps understand that consumption does not rely on consumers only, but on the heterogeneous web made of consumers, “market-things” and marketers (Cochoy 2007), and not only those as the COVID example illustrates. It is important to stress that such a view is in no way about diverting marketing and consumer research from their roots and traditions. Paradoxically indeed, it is rather the contrary: thinking in terms of consumption agencement is about rediscovering what research in marketing was in its early years, as evidenced by the wonderful but forgotten monographs that depicted the functioning of varied markets in the interwar period (see, e.g., Cherington 1916; Weld 1916; Copeland 1917; Erdman 1921; Hibbard 1921). The only novelty would be to take into account the input of recent consumer research and marketing knowledge, changing consumption practices, new technologies … and maybe a drop of exotic economic sociology.NotesFranck Cochoy ([email protected]) is professor of sociology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France, a member of the LISST-CNRS, and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France. The author warmly thanks Eric Arnould and Johan Hagberg for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this commentary; he is most grateful to Brian D. G. Jones for his advice about the literature.1. According to Austin’s linguistic, a constative statement describes the world (e.g., “the consumer is in the shop”)—you can check whether it is true or false—whereas a performative utterance makes it happen (e.g., “I invite consumers to grasp the deal”); it is neither true nor false, but it may become real. This distinction has fueled a new program in economic sociology aimed at tracing how various views about markets (economic models, managerial theories, etc.) shape the world, whatever their relevancy (Callon 1998; Mason, Kjellberg, and Hagberg 2015).2. Even the focus group, with its welcome interest for sets of consumers, suffers from a double bias: the method is still focused on consumers, and as such it neglects their equipment and buying or consuming context; the method is aimed at triangulating individual consumers’ experiences rather than grasping group-like behavior (Nilsson 2020).3. 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