Marketing Dynamic: New Identities, Co-Optation And
Fragmentation
Stream 23: Critical Marketing: Visibility, Inclusivity, Captivity
Gilles Marion
E.M. Lyon
23, avenue Guy de Collongue
BP 174, 69132 - Ecully Cedex
France
Tel. +33 4 78 33 78 00
E-mail : marion@em-lyon.com
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This paper strives to highlight that contemporary consumption is neither a consequence of
the needs, wants or desires of an emancipated consumer nor the effect of marketers’
coercion over an alienated individual. While this clash of opinions is becoming a
commonplace it remains that the third term, the ideas of co-production, co-design, indeed coresponsibility, merits closer examination. From an historical stance we want to look at
marketing not as a mere business activity but rather as a central signifying process that lead
to a fragmented society. Alongside the broad economic, demographic, social and
technological changes experimented by the western countries since the 1950s we shall
stress two marketing processes developed by marketers and advertisers to promote
consumption: the establishment of new identities through segmentation and the co-optation
of dissident style from subcultures and counter-culture. The conjunction of marketers seeking
alternatives to mass marketing and consumer asserting their independence from mainstream
culture bred an explosion of market segmentation, i.e. a fragmented market and a
fragmented society.
To study consumer-marketing development, we have to look at its growth in the United
States market not only because numerous American practices serve as a model for all
countries, but also because marketing tools were build in that country and disseminate
through mainstream (i.e. american) marketing management. Of course a lot of socioeconomics factors are to be addressed but what was the marketers’ singular contribution to
this process? We shall leave high class authors to concentrate on how did marketing pieceworkers conceptualise mass market as a discrete group of consumers with distinctive needs
wants and products preferences and today, with hyper-segmentation, to the vision of every
customer constituting a segment of one. Drawing on Cohen (2003), we want to investigate
the shifting strategies from mass to segment employed by marketers to promote the mass
consumption. And, drawing on Frank (1997), we want to emphasis that marketers were able
to reincorporate rebellion into the commercial marketplace.
However the shifting orientation within the marketing profession from mass to segment was
an interactive process. From the 1960s to the 1990s consumers contribute to this evolution.
The modern notion of the social subject as a self defining individual through consumption
emerged in a pas de deux with economic competition and strategic action of companies.
Moreover marketing and counter-culture develop in a symbiotic fashion.
Because all these processes are premised on the production of difference marketing will
appear as a system of a radically semiotic nature and we shall partly rejoin tenants of the
postmodern view of marketing. However, regarding the so-called postmodern consumer we
shall distance our position from that of the celebratory postmodernism. Our conclusion
highlights implications for the marketer, the citizen and the public sphere.
The elaboration of market segmentation
The proliferation of products, brands and styles and, then, the proliferation of consumer
choices is not a recent phenomenon. Although Smith (1956) is officially credited in the annals
of marketing with conceptualising the modern notion of market segmentation in the late
1950s, it was not an entirely new idea. Before the Second World War, different industries had
begun to take variation in consumer tastes into account. General Motors’ assault on Ford
unchanging Model T in the late 1920s (Tedlow, 1990, 112-81) is one of the first major
successes of the concept. General Motors, as an early ‘segmenter’, vary its products to
appeal to different ‘price classes’ (“A car for every purse and purpose”) compete with Ford –
mass production and mass consumption champion – and win the battle. From 1920 to 1927,
Ford’s market share dropped from 56% to 10%.
However the oldest form of market division was by some version of social class. According to
Marchand (1985-198), advertising tableaux of the 1920s emphasized the importance of class
distinction: “Advertising not only reflected but exaggerated and embellished the steeper
social pyramid of the late 1920s”. In the days of mass marketing differentiation – to the extent
it existed – segmentation usually mean dividing consumers by income groups. We have to
wait for the post-war explosion of market researchers’ interest in motivation, to see
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‘consumer psychologists’ (Dichter, 1947) shifted the focus to ‘why’: “Why do people buy”
(McMurry, 1944-114), “Why people behave as they do” (Schreier and Wood, 1948-172),
“Why people think and act as they do” (Britt, 1950-671).
Market segmentation gained ground by the late 1950s as mass marketing retreated in the
face of saturated markets. Smith (1956) understood that market segmentation depended on
product innovation and planned obsolescence was fully recognized as an innovation
strategy. In 1955 Harley Earl (Head of the GM’s Design and Style Department), who creates
the very idea that a car not only could be – but should be – a public declaration of personal
style asserted: “In 1934 the average car ownership span was 5 years; now it is 2 years.
When it is 1 years, we will have perfect score” (cited by Cohen, 2003-294). In time, more and
more manufacturers, facing with crushing mass market competition and armed with new
information technology would embrace small batch production and mass-customisation as
their salvation.
While marketers encouraged product obsolescence, Brandt (1966-23) states that “the mass
market is disappearing [several…] phenomena help to create the criss-crossed buying
patterns of the fragmented market.” Television, the ‘selling machine in every living room’
fosters a climate receptive to market segmentation. Network television was, of course, a
mass medium however, once the very early years of limited programming had passed,
programs were conceived to target distinctive audiences: children in the early mornings and
on week-end, homemakers during the day, teenagers in the late afternoon… Cable’s
success so tightly linked to market segmentation was more the logical extension than the
antithesis of network television. Television like radio was conceived with diverse fragmented
audience in mind.
The construction of new problems (why people act as they do?) leads to the development of
new solutions and open the door to new constructions of consumer identities. Then, during
the 1960s and 1970s market segmentation differentiated consumers along age, lifestyle,
gender, and ethnic lines.
1. Age
The first age cohort to attract marketers’ attention was teenagers (Gilbert, 1948). For
example, from 1961 to 1966 the successful advertising campaign ‘Pepsi Generation’
celebrates Pepsi drinkers as youthful rebels against the ‘establishment’, implicitly linked to
mass-marketed Coca-Cola. There was nothing inherent in the core product that indicated it
should be youthful in nature: “There was not such thing as Pepsi Generation until Pepsi
created it.” (Tedlow, 1990-371). By creating identification of their product with the new
generation “Pepsi not only recognized the existence of a demographic segment but also in
essence manufactured a segment of those who wanted to feel youthful” (Hollander &
Germain, 1993-101).
By the late 1960s “seniors” and “Gray Panthers” – after the militant Black Panthers – was
considered as a consumer segment free of mortgage and school tuition responsibilities
swimming in high salaries, pensions and savings. Goldstein (1968-67) states “in the future an
increasing number of older people will probably receive larger incomes through a widening
participation in pension plans, social security, and other benefits.”
2. Lifestyle and gender
From 1971 onwards, lifestyle analysis, or psychographics as it is called by some
researchers, enters marketing. The ‘new’ consumer is built upon the crisis of the model of the
social classes. Marketers rushed to promote the idea that the class structure has been
disbanded, that a new representation of society was born: a collection of individuals all from
the same middle class. In the modern consumer society people are freer to select the set of
goods, services and activities that define themselves: “You are what you buy” states Douglas
(1973). Therefore the oversimplified, albeit open to criticism, representation of a society
divided into classes, is replaced by a vision of a socially broken up world, with a juxtaposition
of individual destinies. Life-style marketing recognized that people sort themselves into
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groups on the basis of the things they like to do and how they choose to spend their
disposable income. Lifestyle is more than the allocation of discretionary income. It is a
statement about who one is in society and who one is not. Each life-style is (somewhat)
unique, and such a segmentation system assumes that every person can be given a lifestyle
‘label’.
In a model of how subcultural protest could inspires new strategies. Gender segmentation is
one of them. In the 1960s and 1970s feminism, with its challenge to traditional females roles
and gender bias in the media, was turned by marketers to their advantage: the creation of a
new feminist market segment. Reynolds, Crask, & Wells, (1977-38) assert that the rise of the
modern feminine orientation is evident and substantial. In 1967, 60% of the adult women
agreed with the statement: “A woman’s place is in the home”. In less than a decade the
percentage fell to 26%. Therefore they ask “The crucial question is: will the strategy expand
the market among modern women?”.
3. Ethnicity
Market segmentation transformed also the way marketers related to populations defined by
ethnicity. The first significant segment consists of African-Americans. As soon as 1945
comprehensive surveys are conducted among Negroes 1 and published in marketing journal
(Steele, 1947). Bauer, Cunningham & Wortzel (1965-1) ask the question “Are there any
special characteristics which distinguish the Negro […] The answer is yes”. Before the 1960s
marketers either ignored or sought to incorporate black consumers into a homogeneous
colour-blind mass market. In the era of segmentation, successful marketing to blacks meant
delivering to them a unique set of options, or, in some cases , the same options packaged
especially for them. Ironically, mainstream white-owned cosmetic companies were more
effective to market their products than black-owned companies.
In the 1970s ‘market segmenters’ extended their reach to other ethnic population: mainly the
“Hispanic” or “Latino” market, and the Asian-American market. And again those segments
are seen to be different and need to be treated differently. Market size and growth were, of
course, fundamentals determinants of the marketers decision to commit resources to a given
segment. As a result each of ethnic segments were considered as a more legitimate and
lucrative market, but increasingly a separate one.
Co-optation: the contribution of consumers
The shifting orientation within the marketing profession from mass to segment may give the
impression that the emergence of market segmentation was solely a top-down process, with
all initiatives coming from marketers. It was not the case, rather it was a much more
interactive process with potential consumers exerting influences on the marketing field. It
was for example the case for ‘subcultures’.
The concept of subcultures, which emerged in the late 1940s, flourished in sociological
literature during the 1950s and the 1960s. Soon marketing textbooks list subcultures, (then
‘tribes’ or ‘brand communities’ in the 1990s), that could become important market segment.
The attractiveness of members of subcultures as markets granted them legitimacy.
Segmentation thus help democratise mass market allowing subcultures to shape markets
around their own priorities. It was not an accident that the rise of market segmentation
corresponded to the historical era of 1960s and 1970s, when critique of mass consumption
flourished and when social and cultural groups began to assert themselves: youth, women,
senior citizens and, in the United States, African-Americans or Latinos.
The critique of mass consumption came first from analyses of intellectuals. Riesman (1950)
showed how advanced prosperity of the United States has brought with it conformity and a
new type of people: the ‘other-directed’ man, whose attitude and behaviour are, unlike his
‘inner-directed’ predecessor, guided by the behaviour and beliefs of those around him. The
1
When using “Negro” and not “African-American” or “person of colour” we are just using this term as a quotation
from marketing journal of the time.
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extraordinary echoes following Packard’s ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ (1957) – the book,
which discusses the ‘perfidy’ of the advertising industry and marketing, was on the best-seller
list for 47 weeks – gave rise to controversies relating to the ‘modern motivational research’
initiated by Dichter (1947). For Galbraith (1958) ‘The Affluent Society’ results from the
creation of demand by producers and Bell (1976) despaired that late capitalistic
consumerism undermined social solidarity. The critique went also far beyond these trenchant
observers of society. The Beats in the 1950s, the hippies in the 1960s, the ‘Small is Beautiful’
and environmentally sensitive Greens of the 1970s all developed identities based on a
rejection of a mainstream culture build around mass consumption.
Groups who often had defined themselves in reaction to the mainstream could at time be coopted by the commercial market, even when they brought their own meaning to the
exchange. Frank (1997) illustrates this process through the enthusiastic discovery by admen
and marketers that the counter-culture of the 1960s could be enlisted to drive the everaccelerating wheels of consumption. To understand this process we have to go back to the
1920s and 1930s. The proliferation of products at that time necessitates choices among
more consumer’s goods that any previous generation has faced. One of the response of
advertisers was to recognize a public demand for guidance and therefore to provide advice
to enhance the competence of the average consumer. At that time advertisers like to
describe their function as one of education. We do not know whether people effectively
employed advertising advice during this era to help them reduce complexity or anxiety. But
we do know that the ingenuity of the clichés offering much-sought-after advice will be more
and more considered as crass advertising techniques as well as the description of
advertising business as a ‘helping profession’.
What the advertising specialists call the ‘creative revolution’ in the 1960s (Fox, 1984)
represents a break from the past’s advertising clichés. William Bernbach the animator of the
Doyle, Dane and Bernbach created a style which could be called anti-advertising. This new
style of advertising acknowledges the audience’s advertising literacy and intelligence and
works by distancing a product from consumerism. The DDB ads reveal the ‘tricks of the
trade’ by using a form of meta-discourse to attract consumer attention to advertising
discourse itself and to promote a kind of ‘new complicity’ with consumers2. Advertising
became synonymous with difference, criticism, avant-garde and, even, subversion. The blue
chip clients of the big agencies sought to conform with the non-conformists. Therefore, good
copywriters and good art directors were often rebellious young people with long hair and a
flowery shirt: advertising creativity and counter-culture develop in a symbiotic fashion. This
example shows how advertising and marketing not only evolve with the economic climate
and the competitive game, but also through criticism.
Far from opposing the cultural revolution of the 1960s, marketing and advertising paralleled
the new values associated with the counter-culture (Frank, 1997). However, the difference
between the advertising critique and the social criticism was that the solution to the problems
of consumer society was: more consuming. This approach of smart marketing means greater
variety in product with shorter life cycles and more rapid changeover. The seasonal principle
of fashion becomes adopted by more and more industries: cosmetics, films, appliances,
furniture, recorded music, computers, toys... What happened was the generalization of the
fashion system to the consumption system as a whole. These changes lead to increasingly
short-lived products: the throw-away products, single use products, ‘instant’ objects,
produced in a few seconds (pens, razors, tee-shirts, plastic bottles) at a low cost to enable
the consumer to save some of his precious time. However, such products lack ‘memory’ and
authenticity, so both consumers and marketers alike began the search for objects that could
be out of the mass culture.
The small café, the exotic craftwork, the adventure holiday, the off-beat singer, the avantgarde artist… are all ‘authentic’ products - i.e. able to tackle consumer memory - dissected
2
For example the rejection of the planned obsolescence was a particular target of DDB’s Volkswagen campaign.
Beetle ads emphasized the car’s lack of highly visible change and mocked Detroit’s annual restyling.
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by the ‘trend’ specialists to design ways to reproduce and de-multiply what was unique. But,
once the consumer recognizes the meaning, which has been intentionally introduced by the
marketer, there is a loss of interest. Consequently, for example, adventure holidays have to
continually change destination, as the increasing numbers of tourists eliminates what made it
such an adventure.
Marketing is self-sustaining. It develops through incorporation and cooptation of all kind of
marketable ‘rebellion’, ‘dissident style’, ‘authenticity’, ‘liberation’, ‘relationship’…, in a nutshell
all kind of demands for individual differentiation, inasmuch individuals can pay for it. Today
marketers are constantly gaining more precision in pinpointing the demographic and life style
trends of consumer segm ent, employing such tools as Internet ‘cookies’ to monitor the
‘clickstreams’ of e-shoppers. Meanwhile television watchers are experimenting with the
advanced technology of “black boxes” to customize their viewing options. Forces pushing
toward hyper-segmentation and micromarketing are not solely on the supply side – notably,
marketers ability to conceptualise buyers as heterogeneous and to manage customer
relationship through information technology. There is also a demand on the part of buying
public. To state the obvious, people want what they want, not something made for some
average individual constituting the mythical mass market. In other words, the more
customized people want their products, the more marketers seek to customize them because
those firms that can adapt their product policy and their distribution systems to the new
‘reality’ have the chance to capture advantages.
By responding to the demands of small groups, tribes and individuals in the marketplace,
marketers ensure their own survival. In the same time, social groups nonetheless helped
shape the contour of that commercial culture and influence its impact3. For marketers,
segmentation and then hyper-segmentation had become the indisputable rule in marketing: a
wider variety of products each tailored to a specialized population, would create more buyers
in total and less cutthroat competition. For consumers, as mass markets increasingly
splintered, individuals gained more opportunity to express their separate identities through
their choices. Marketers and consumers co-produced the segmented and fragmented
market.
A methodological break: the production of difference
It’s time to make a break in order to emphasis the analytical framework we are using.
Drawing on Lévi-Strauss (1962) and Barthes (1964) consumers researchers have long
recognized the symbolic nature of consumption. Given that the consumer world is perfused
with signs, semiotic appears to be a relevant paradigm for studying marketing practices.
However the focus of semiotic is less sign than meaning.
1. The semiotic paradigm
The broad objective of semiotic is to make explicit the conditions under which meaning is
produced and apprehended (Floch, 1988). Therefore its concerns exceed signs alone, but
rather involve the recognition of systems of signification both verbal and non-verbal
languages. Taking Saussure’s (1915) assertion that there is no meaning without difference
we know that it is the recognition of any difference which came first for the production of
meaning. It means that in language there are only opposition and that meaning emerges
from differences. One thing can only be understood by contrast to another: high has no
meaning without low, dry without wet, premium without ordinary, etc. Language – indeed, all
systems of signification – is a system of relations and not a system of signs. We must go on
to consider the various differences which may create meaning. The terms themselves matter
less than the relations which inter-define them or, according to Saussure ([1915] 1966-114)
“the value of each terms results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others”.
3
This emphasis on the role of consumer does not contradict Gramsci, with his notion of ‘hegemony’ - i.e. a
capitalist ruling class manages not through coercion but more indirectly through “total social authority” to win the
consent of subordinates classes, thereby legitimising its own rule. By responding to the demands of social rebels
marketers and retailers ensure their own survival while social group nonetheless shaped the consumer culture.
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Therefore it is not sufficient to say, for example, that the name Nike signifies expensive
running shoes, which, in turn, signifies something else such as status, which signifies
something else, and so on. We have to understand how differences between ‘shoes’ and
‘running shoes’ are produced and apprehended as well as differences between ‘running
shoes’ and ‘expensive running shoes’, then between Nike and Adidas, etc. The meanings of
a brand is not inherent in its products themselves. They are generated through interaction
between marketer and consumer against the background of the system of brands and
products. Advertising and consumer behaviour are a mirror of these meanings even though
they do not faithfully reflect them. They place some in the foreground while they conceal
others at the same time. The focus on meaning sensitises us to the complexities of
meanings, inherent as well in media texts as in social sciences texts. Texts can be subject to
multiple interpretations but not to infinite interpretations. Authors attempt to guide the reader
towards a preferred outcome while the decoding activity of the reader assemble semiotic
elements into a meaningful whole within the interpretative realm.
2. Semiotic and marketing
Consumer meanings, just as literary meanings, are more or less open to interpretation: the
marketer attempt to ensure that the consumer derives a particular meaning from a particular
product or brand, while the active consumer assemble semiotic elements (image, sounds,
statements…) to produce an interpretation. Since marketing strives to maximize the
differences and to minimize the similarities between competing goods it’s a system of a
radically semiotic nature (Nöth, 1988). Segments, market positions, product designs,
packages, prices…, as identities, are constructed through differences, they are the product of
the marking of difference and exclusion as well as the sign of an inclusive sameness and
unity. This constructed form of closure establishes a kind of hierarchy between the two poles:
man/woman, youth/older, black/white. Identity is a representation which only achieves its
positive through the eye of the negative. It is always a temporary and unstable effect of
relations which defines by marking differences.
The so-called ‘father’ of segmentation (Smith 1956) trying to distinguish market segmentation
from product differentiation, can’t solve this conceptual problem. The two are inextricable
because a product difference must be a difference for someone: a particular consumer
segment for whom that difference has meaning and relevance. Therefore the central
question is how differences are produced. The so-called product differentiation – seen as the
older model – aimed at differentiate products from competition taking account of social
differentiation simply built through standard demographic categories and geographical
regions of family considered as a whole. Ethnicity scarcely figured among the classic
dimensions. Age and gender, became progressively more important criteria then marketers
disaggregates markets and consumption through lifestyles not defined by broad social
demographic structures but rather by cultural meanings which link a range of goods and
activities into a coherent image.
Our contention is that, from the beginning, marketers not only identify and target existing
segments but rather produce them through market research, product design, advertising and
the media. Then, the marketing dynamic goes that way: if product standardization leads to a
standardization of use and therefore of individuals, there is no more difference between an
individual’s desire for a standard object and another person’s desire for the same object.
What happens next, is that consumers tend to explore and seek out changes, novelties and
variety. The search for difference gathers strength through an increasing number of new
products with more or less marginal innovations and with the development of customized
products and through market fragmentation. Marketers and market researchers produced
segments, and even today segment of one, through the creation of differences. In that sense,
marketing has always been a postmodern institution in its fundamental tendency toward
fragmentation (Firat & Venkatesh, 1993) and “consumption is eminently social, relational,
and active rather than private, atomistic and passive […] On the one hand, demand is
determined by social and economic forces; on the other, it can manipulate, within limits,
these social and economic forces” (Appadurai, 1986-31).
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Therefore we agree with the tenants of postmodern marketing that: 1) culture and
economics are closely linked, 2) the consumer was not discovered by market processes and
marketers, but rather was constructed by them, 3) consum ers are also producers (of meals,
house, own library, experiences, appearances, self identity, social relations…), 4) reality and
truth are constructed, they have not to be treated as a given and are subject to manipulation
5) the spectacle of consumer soc iety knows no national boundaries but has become global,
6) critique of the marketing process is either marginalized or co-opted by the market.
Implications for the consumer self: liberation and freedom
From the 1960s onward, people increasingly viewed consumption as an autonomous space
in which they could pursue identities. The consumer has to negotiate his identity and self
through consumption. Of course, consumer motivations are much more complex and varied
than they are often given credit for. Simple purchasing acts invoke many potential motives:
exploration, pleasure, identity, resistance, activism, choice, consistency, culture. However
the quest for identity is a strong motivation which underlies most markets. Let’s take two
examples to illustrate this point: body customizing industries and new communication
technologies.
One of the biggest promises of body customizing industries (clothes, haircut, cosmetics,
body-building, piercing, tattooing, plastic surgery…), is to allow the consumer exercises free
will to form image of who and what he/she wants to be, when he/she wants. The project of
the self is treating as successive problems solvable through products (cosmetics for women
with thin lips, for men with bags under the eyes, for girls with frizzy hair…); or skills and
guidance sold like products (self-help books, recipes for developing assertiveness,
therapy…). The central theme behind the ‘customizing of appearance’ and the construction
of a ‘look’ is to escape from a formal and binding identification: to the nation, a religion, a
social class or the ‘bourgeois’ family. The rejection of ones social heritage opens the way to
a variety of possible or ideal selves: do not be the he or she others (parents, master, boss)
have ‘designed’; be who you want to be, when you want to. Differences of dress and
decoration pinpoint personal differences. Therefore what marketers are selling is increased
non-verbal communicative capability, a product for which there is always demand.
The promotion of ‘new’ communication technologies uses the theme of liberation in a
particular fashion. Consumer is no longer presented as a passive element of the mass
society facing ready to consume products. The working class family of the 1960s sitting in
front of the T.V. screen, fascinated by everything they see, is over. The ideal image of the
‘new’ consumer is the interactive member of the communication society: the co-producer, codesigner, co-creator… who manages himself through interactive activities (Ehrenberg, 1991).
The easy possession of a number of machines is no longer enough to acquire an identity; the
consumer needs to zap, dialogue, and surf. The interactive object is less a key to social
position or passive fascination than a means for personal development. The first users of the
new television gadget TiVo – a personal video recorder that can record 40 or 80 hours of
programming and skip commercials – swear that the device has making it possible to live a
life free of commercial interruptions (New York Times, April 2003). Is this ‘liberation’ a new
form of freedom?
As Foucault’s line of argument indicates (1988), we not only have to choose a self, but have
to constitute ourselves as a self who choose, i.e. a consumer. As a result, all aspects of our
existence are monitored and scrutinized as objects of instrumental calculation in the creation
of the self. Something to be constructed through individual choice and effort.
1. The consumer as a sovereign: freedom and power
The notion of consumer sovereignty is in the heart of economic and mainstream marketing
theorists. It is demanded to practitioners to follow the marketing concept, i.e. first find out the
consumer’s need and then satisfy it. In fact a lot of brilliant marketing practice defies this.
Marketing is not driven by the idealised king consumer. At least since the 1960s, the
opposition between the ‘king’ and the ‘dope’ is probably the central debate about consumer
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society. We shall stay close to the marketing literature, and mainly to Journal of Marketing
to illustrate the point.
Consumer sovereignty is the most powerful image of the consumer as social hero. Britt
(1960) conveys the impression that all control was in the hand of the omniscient consumer
and gives positive evidence that consumer is King. As a rational, autonomous and informed
individual his/her self defined needs give legitimacy to market and marketers: the consumer
is the hero of modernity. Whereas Packard (1957) asserts that people are being persuaded
in important way by marketers: as an irrational slave to trivial desires who can be
manipulated into childish mass conformity by calculating mass producers he/she is a cultural
dope. Dichter (1960) shares the assumption of Packard that people are persuaded by
marketers but he finds that this is a good thing. Persuasion is a universal mode. As Foucault
states: “there is not, on the one side, a discourse of power and opposite it another discourse
that runs counter to it. Discourse are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force
relations; there can run different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy”
(1984-101).
Are consumers free or manipulated? The irony of this debate is that most parties to it seems
to share the same basic assumption: freedom and determination are opposites. An increase
in freedom means a decrease in social regulation and power, and vice versa. However,
Foucault argue that freedom and power are not opposites, but rather that freedom can
operate as a very effective strategy of power. Market power produces the ‘freedom’ to
construct oneself according to any imaginable design through commodities (Slater, 1997).
Marketing relies on the self-managing capacities of individuals and requires them to manage
themselves. The ‘enterprising self’ seeks to shape itself in order to become that which it
wishes to be. We are personally responsible for every aspects of ourselves. For Foucault,
unlike for liberalism, becoming a ‘choosing self’ is not a liberation but a strategy of modern
governance.
2. The postmodern consumer
Some marketing academics, marketing research specialists and practitioners take for
granted that we do indeed live in new times representing a decisive discontinuity with
modernity, i.e. postmodernity. With this term English – and some French – speaking
research provide first a syncretistic conceptualisation of epistemological positions to capture
the postmodern consumer and the postmodern consumption and, second a general
experience of certain characteristics of Western societies: decline of social classes,
fragmentation of social identity and of personal identity, growing importance of the culture
industries and the aestheticization of everyday life, the importance of emotion, spectacle and
fantasy… We maintain that this issue is still open: postmodernity is debate, not fact4.
Consumers are neither the passive victims portrayed by the ‘critique of mass culture’ nor the
liberated individuals celebrated by the tenants of the reenchantment of consumption (Firat &
Venkatesh, 1995).
4
It’s now clear that there is no postmodern theory as such. There is only the writings of people categorized as
postmodernist. How to trace the flux of ideas? Going backward, we can notice in the field of marketing: Firat &
Venkatesh (1993, 1995), Brown (1993), Holbrook and Hirschman (1992), Badot et Cova (1991), Fiske (1989),
Bauman (1987), Jameson (1983), etc. All those authors reading carefully, directly or not (in reverse order of
appearance and with their original title and year of publication): Maffesoli ‘Temps des tribus’ (1988), Lipovetsky
‘Ère du vide’ (1983), Certeau ‘Invention du quotidien’ (1980), Lyotard ‘Condition post-moderne’ (1979), Bourdieu
‘Distinction’ (1979), Foucault poststructuralism (1975, 1976), Eco ‘Guerre du faux’ (1975), Deleuze et Guattari
‘Anti-Œdipe (1972), Baudrillard ‘Système des objets’ (1969), Debord ‘Société du spectacle’ (1967), Eco ‘Opera
Aperta’ (1962), Barthes ‘Mythologies’ (1957), Lefebvre ‘Critique de la vie quotidienne’ (1947). All those authors
reading carefully each other confronted, on the one side, with Marxist (Althusser) or Post-marxist (Gramsci),
Frankfurt School critical theorists (Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno), German sociology (Simmel, Weber) and
new born semiology or semiotic (Saussure, Hejmslev, Greimas, Barthes); and, on the other side, with U.S.
witnesses of the American situation: Riesman, Dichter, Packard, Galbraith, Bell, etc., and more recently Lasch,
Sennet, etc. It takes roughly 10 years to have main French critiques translated in English, and about 10 more
years to see them referenced (or used without quotation) in marketing journals and books .
10
Mainstream marketers and academics will argue that the consumer is King, postmodern
will rather ask: how consumer (as a king, a dope or another character) was constructed, how
needs were, and still are, increasingly constructed. Postmodern consumer culture produces
the consumer as liberated from old myths and free to play. However questions remain: 1)
Who is a postmodern consumer, when and under what conditions? 2) Are consumers free to
engage in multiple experiences without making any commitments to any? 3) Are they
responding strategically by making themselves unpredictable? 4) Are they subverting brands
and rather than being seduced by them? 5) Is the marketing organization disseminating into
the hands of each and every consumers? 6) Is, in the postmodern condition, market
hegemony decreasing and consumers finding a new freedom? 7) If consumption is
productive concept what are the skills required to do so? We shall try to provide some
answers.
We can recognize that we have ‘postmodern experiences’ however they do not constitute the
whole of our everyday life. Money and power restrict access to consumer goods or, more
generally, on the ability to construct one’s life along the model of postmodern consumer.
Many people are excluded from postmodern experience of mobile identity by clearly ascribed
identity such as coloured, old, or female 5. In France, some people are excluded from some
places (nightclubs for example) not because they are poor, but because they are people of
colour. So when they are coloured and poor… Neotribalism (Maffesoli, 1988) assumes that
we pick up and drop membership and identities rapidly, easily and without commitment. But,
people continue to be part of communities with considerable longevity: families, churches,
careers… The issue, then, is not whether modern or postmodern marketing have ‘liberated’
individual from power but the role played by marketing discourses and practices in producing
modern form of power. Thus the argument that the meaning of product and brand is
indeterminate and consumers are free to make their own meanings can be contested on two
grounds: that the meanings of things remain socially structured and that the actual acts of
consuming are socially structured (Slater, 1997).
On the first point marketers structure their objects in order to produce particular social effects
of meaning. Notably, marketers constitute markets through the dissemination of objects
coming from a narrow subculture and selling them to wider segments. Furthermore, objects
and social processes are not all equally polysemic and allow different degrees of room of
manœuvre and negotiation between producers and consumers. For example, there is big
differences between children’s sweets and town architecture (Miller, 1987). The
transformation of residential patterns resulting from the expansion of mass suburbia
introduced new kinds of divisions strongly constraining and largely inflexible to negotiation
with users. Yes, people are active in their consumption and diverse in the meanings that
objects have for them: to use things we must make meanings. Yes, meaningful appropriation
of things by consumer is firstly an aspect of the intrinsically cultural nature of consumption.
However, the structure of the consumer object and the structure of commercial marketplace
(shopping centres, retail stores, restaurants, clubs, movie theatres…) places social limits on
interpretative freedom.
On the second point it’s worth notice that for consumers wanting a taste of something
different, and empowering to, dress, music, food and other consumer products are relatively
easy conversions. But, for sub-cultural consumers who cannot, will not, or are less able to
step out of their skin, gender or social class it’s a different game. Moreover, when the
ordinary consumer ‘activeness’ appears more oppositional it is, as Certeau analyses it
(1980), a tactic in which they “make do with what they have”. They have neither the same
command over resources nor the power to structure objects and messages (and choose
which are to be produced) than marketers except in the one instance of spectacular
subcultures. Being active – as opposed to being a manipulated cultural ‘dope’ – does not
mean being free. Inasmuch that individual has to build their self and to ‘sell’ personality, this
requires work and competence. The flow of information and signs is so massive that access
5
The Faustian and pathetic efforts of Michael Jackson to transform himself through plastic surgery is emblematic
of this will to escape from ordinary categories: black or white, male or female, young or old.
11
to and control over information network arbitrate social power. Today, far from the
consumer being a sovereign subject, subjectivity can hardly be achieved through the
subjection and appropriation of objects because the possibilities of the object world are
endlessly proliferating. Consumers want to author they lives, but they increasingly are
looking for intermediaries because it is too taxing to constantly reassemble the knowledge
and skills on products meanings when they proliferate so rapidly. Culture, as Bourdieu (1979)
points it with his notion of “cultural capital”, has become definitively a form of capital and
consumption continues to serve as a consequential site for class reproduction in Europe as
well as in United States (Holt, 1998).
The question is not so much that consumers increasingly are involved during the cycle from
product development to marketing research to advertising copy to product display and
delivery. Rather, the question is the content and implications of such involvement. For
example, the consumer participation in R&D is mainly a limited interaction with some
selected individuals through concept testing, product testing, package testing, etc. It is
tempting to equate this kind of participation with consumer agency but the limits of such
consumer empowerment merit investigation. And so also does for marketers, the degree to
which marketing activities empowered as well as constraints them is important issue in
demystifying their positions and roles in the contemporary marketplace. In this connection it
would be naïve to consider that we have a precise and clear idea of the consumer
participation to product development through the marketing textbooks.
Marketers were able to accelerate swings of fashion as well as to differentiate endlessly
product. This endless process of marginal differentiation requires consumers to possess vast
amounts of information and competence to make quickly the right distinction. New
technologies offer objects which are much less foreseeable that in the past. They supply
increasingly polyvalent objects, which can be good or bad for us depending on how we use
them. Objects that need to be mastered. Now, the main question is change rather than
progress, i.e. the individual’s adaptation to the growing variety of connections and
relationships. The consumer is reckoned to be ironic, reflexive and aware of the game being
played whereas the mass consumer of modernity was truly in the game. However this ‘new’
consumer must have some cultural capital to obtain pleasure not from the things themselves
but from the experience of assembling and deconstructing images6. Unlike the romantic
traveller in search of authenticity or the mass package holiday maker who captures a ‘real’
experience in snapshots, the ‘post-tourist’ knows that she or he is a tourist and that tourism is
a game with no single tourist experience (Urry, 1990). “One might speculate that postmodern
theorists are embedded so deeply in the HCC habitus (High Cultural Capital resources
group) that they are unable to muster the requisite sociological reflexivity to note that the
ability to playfully aestheticize a wide range of consumption objects is esteemed, and so has
become naturalized, in their social circles, but not in those of lower social classes” (Holt,
1998-22).
Implications for the marketer
As Holt (2002-82) puts it: “As marketers learned how to negotiate the new consumer culture,
brands became more central in consumers’ lives, not less.” DDB experimented successful
new marketing techniques to create perceived authenticity that would work in the shifting
consumer culture: distance the brand from conventional advertising through irony and
reflexivity, forge a credible ongoing relationship with cultural epicentres before mass
commercialisation, claim authenticity through historical or subcultural story, avoid direct
brand communications using ‘viral’, ‘tribal’ or ‘buzz’ marketing (Holt, 2002, 84-85). Marketers
experienced news tools in order to have their brand perceived as invented and disseminated
by parties without economic agenda. However, as Friestad and Wright (1994) observe,
consumers are ‘moving targets’ whose knowledge about persuasion is changing. If all
advertisers strive for complicity this panacea will become just one more advertising
6
And, in the case of TiVo, the freedom comes at a price: 250 $ for a model capable of storing 40 hours of
program.
12
convention. Furthermore, consumers attend to the contradictions between the brand’s
espoused ideals and the real world activities of the company behind the brand.
Success bred imitation. As firms compete with ‘new postmodern marketing techniques’
consumers see them as what they are: tools to develop brands and profits. Ironic distance is
becoming an advertising cliché, buzz and viral marketing techniques are unveiled and
scorned. The new ‘authentic’ goods and services offered by smart marketers increasingly
give rise to the following question: what is the difference between products premeditated by
the marketer, and true-life spontaneity? The struggle against commoditization, which
threatens to remove choice and replace it by standard goods and standard human
relationships, led to the marketing of more authentic products, but the marketing of
authenticity led as well to deceptive mass products. Authenticity is becoming an endangered
species while relationship marketing as it is currently practiced has not brought marketers
closer to customers (Fournier et al, 1998).
On the consumption side, the acknowledgement of the fragmented life experiences of the
consumer leads putting the emphasis on the uniqueness, diversity, plurality of each and
every autonomous individual, and the development of his corollary: tribes and new
communities. On the production side, ‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘chaos’, disorganization, quickchange…, have entered management vocabulary (Peters, 1992; Bucci, 1992). Marketing
continuously deconstructs and reconstructs consumer environments and that is the way it
sustains itself.
Implications for the citizen
A chronic tension has existed between the idea of the consumer and that of the citizen (Lang
& Gabriel, 1995). Choosing as a citizen can lead to very different evaluation of alternatives
than choosing as a consumer. Consumers are free, able to choose, allowed to express their
individuality whereas the idea of citizen implies mutuality and control as well as a balance of
rights and duties. Citizens are at once listened, but also prepared to defer to the will of the
majority. In as much as they can make choices citizens have a sense of superior
responsibility. The consumer on the other hand, seeks the good life in markets and the
marketer is neither a dictator scheming to defraud consumers, nor a mystic diviner of the
consumer will. He provides products and advertising to incite the individual to ‘govern’
himself according to fundamental hedonism for which pleasure, happiness and well-being
are synonymous. In markets individuals are supposed to act as atoms, unencumbered by
social responsibilities and duties. Through money they can acquire a wide variety of things
as long as they afford to pay. In market economies, anything can be tried and dropped as
long as the buying power exists. If a product is in the market and is being paid for, it is
legitimate.
Marketing has sought to incorporate the citizen into its image of the consumer by using the
concept of votes and ballots: the consumer votes in the market place in the same way as
citizens are voting. In this way, the more wealth of purchasing power the consumer has, the
more ‘votes’ he/she gets. According to this view, it is up to citizens as consumers to decide
whether they want a service from the state, and what quality they are prepared to pay for.
Public space, from parks to pavements, is seen as an opportunity to sell: a market place not
a social place.
On the other hand consumer activists are promoting the notion of citizenship in contradiction
to the notion of the consumer which they see as too individualistic. Furthermore most cultural
theorists today argue that consumerism7 has triumph over citizenship. Both seek to enlarge
the consumer into someone who is responsible and socially aware and must occasionally be
prepared to sacrifice personal pleasure to communal well-being.
7
“Consumerism” was a label originally coined by industry to associate the emerging consumer movement with
other dangerous “ism”, such as communism and socialism. Consumer activists continued to used it nonetheless
to represent their campaign against corporate disregard of consumers (Cohen, 2003).
13
Marketing and markets enthusiasts have redefined the citizen as a purchaser while
consumer activists stretch the idea of consumer in the direction of the citizen. However, the
distinction between consumers and citizens remains acute, notably over such products as
cars. The SUVs (4x4) controversy in the United States is symptomatic of this situation 8. The
possibility to reverse a century-long of entwined citizenship and consumership remains a
question or, at best, a conviction.
Conclusion: limits to segmentation?
We have met a large casting of characters produced by marketers, i.e. various identities for
the consumer self: an average member of mass, an average member of segments, a
postmodern individual, or member of tribes. We argued that marketers encourage social and
cultural divisions in segmenting markets. Market segmentation has contributed to a more
fragmented society. When marketers singled out teenagers for special appeals or, in France,
single out adepts of Mecca-Cola9 they are segregating rather than integrating the public
sphere. Although individuals are complex composites of multiples identities – class, gender,
age, ethnicity, religion, geography – the reinforcement by marketers helped in shaping the
contour and divisions of consumer culture accentuating what divided people and
undermining common concerns.
In 1830, French visitor and wise commentator Alexis de Tocqueville (1850 [1947- 311]) saw
the value of self-interested action among citizens. But it led to an isolating individualism, to
the citizen who “to sever himself from the mass of his fellow and to draw apart from his family
and friends […] leaves society at large to itself […] Individualism at first not only saps the
virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length
absorbed in down-right selfishness”10 That’s why we tried to decouple the consumer and the
citizen. Some self-affirming segmentation of identities and interest are harmless but when
some groups enjoy more resources and power, and hence more choices than others,
fragmentation serves not to validate difference but instead to facilitate discrimination. That’s
to say it’s fallacious to assume that all interest or identity group enjoy authentic purity. It
follows that marketers, market researchers, as well as marketing academics, have to assess
their responsibility in such a process.
8
The purpose of the What Would Jesus Drive? educational campaign is to help Christians and others understand
that transportation choices are moral choices. Women are the biggest SUV buyers because of the relative safety
of the big vehicles, said the president of the Coalition for Vehicle Choice. "They're safe, they're high off the road
and they're good vehicles," said a syndicated columnist and SUV owner. But critics say that not only are SUVs
not safer - they are more likely to roll over than smaller cars - they are much less friendly to the environment,
sucking up large amounts of gas and spewing high levels of pollutants. (cf. www.WhatWouldJesusDrive.org).
9
Mecca-Cola is a me too of Coca-Cola targeting ‘engaged people’ and launched by Tawfik Mathloui on the
French market in October 2002. Teldlow (1990) recalls numerous historic imitations of Coca-Cola and notably:
Afri-Cola and Klu-Ko-Kola!
10
« L’individualisme est un sentiment réfléchi et paisible qui dispose chaque citoyen à s’isoler de la masse de ses
semblables et à se retirer à l’écart avec sa famille et ses amis ; de telle sorte que, après s’être ainsi créé une
petite société à son usage, il abandonne volontiers la grande société à elle même. […] L’égoïsme dessèche le
germe de toutes les vertus, l’individualisme ne tarit d’abord que la source des vertus publiques ; mais à la longue,
il attaque et détruit toutes les autres et va enfin s’absorber dans l’égoïsme. » Tocqueville (1850, second livre,
deuxième partie, chapitre 2).
14
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