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

1. “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

2. “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

3. 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 target

4. 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.

5. 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)

6. 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 management

7. Customer relations: from Fordism to post modern consumers1990 new Hyper-Competition • Need to Delight, not simply satisfy consumers • Similar relationship as Kotler presented: dominated by corporation with need to intimately involve consumer.

8. 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.

9. 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

10. Value Co-creationGetting Further Away from Fordist Views • More 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 service

11. Value Co-creationGetting 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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.

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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 consumers

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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)

27. 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/users

28. 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”?

29. 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?

30. Discussion • How do autonomous consumers generate value that marketers can appropriate and subsume under capital?