“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 University
“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-Bear
Customer relations: from Fordism
to post modern consumers
Fordism
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 target
Customer relations: from Fordism
to post modern consumers
A 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.
Customer relations: from Fordism
to post modern consumers
The 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)
Customer relations: from Fordism
to post modern consumers
The 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 management
Customer relations: from Fordism
to post modern consumers
1990 new Hyper-Competition
Need to Delight, not simply satisfy
consumers
Similar relationship as Kotler presented:
dominated by corporation with need to
intimately involve consumer.
Customer relations: from Fordism
to post modern consumers
The 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.
Value Co-creation:
Radicalizing Kotler
Market: 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 exchange
Value Co-creation
Getting Further Away from Fordist Views
More concerned with devising, marketing
and delivering services
Service-dominant instead of goodsdominant
Goods are intermediate products –
appliances in the value creation processes
or consumers
Everything including goods becomes a
service
Value Co-creation
Getting Further Away from Fordist Views
Consumer = 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.
Value Co-creation
Getting 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.
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.
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
economy
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
use
Co-creation Paradigm
Attempt 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 end
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
Consumer Government and Mass
Intellectuality
Contemporary marketing is driven by the pursuit
of developing management techniques that
bring about consumer population for demands of
21st century
Pursuit 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 consumers
Platforms For Action
Intensify 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.
Social Individual
With 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
General Intellect
The ‘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
Post-Fordist Capitalism
Posits 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 public
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 cooperation where joint production of value occurs

Representing an attempt to mobilize and appropriate the general
intellect of consumers
Expropriating Free Consumer
Labour
Surplus 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
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 benefits
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)
Think Back To...
O’Reilly:
User participation as part of business
model and strategy for corporations
Agrees that users are important codevelopers
Again ignores darker implications for
consumers/users
Critique
A 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”?
Discussion
Zwick 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?
Discussion
How do autonomous consumers generate
value that marketers can appropriate and
subsume under capital?