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The reflexive consumer Antony Beckett and Ajit Nayak Marketing Theory 2008; 8; 299 DOI: 10.1177/1470593108093558 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mtq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/299

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Volume 8(3): 299–317 Copyright © 2008 SAGE www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1470593108093558

articles

The reflexive consumer Antony Beckett Bristol Business School, UK

Ajit Nayak School of Management, University of Bath, UK

Abstract. Drawing on a detailed reading of the work of Peppers and Rogers (1993, 1997, 2004, 2005), this paper argues that their work offers an emblematic problematization of traditional mass marketing, which articulates a new mentality of marketing – collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing, implemented through the practices of CRM, reframes the role and identity of the individual consumer within producer–consumer relationships, transforming them from sovereign chooser to active collaborator, or as they are termed here, reflexive consumers. Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality the paper articulates the achievement of this transformation and the central role of reflexivity in this transformation of the consumer. We conclude that in redefining the nature of marketing, RM and CRM form new relays of power linking producer and consumer and that these relays re-interpret the antagonism between freedom and subjugation that lie at the heart of producer–consumer relationships. Key Words collaborative marketing governmentality reflexive consumption reflexivity

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Introduction Over the past 20 years the concepts of relationship management (RM) and customer relationship management (CRM) have generated a significant body of both academic and managerial literature (Ballantyne et al., 2003; Egan, 2003). This considerable academic interest has been reflected in the widespread use and implementation of RM and CRM discourses and practices within a variety of organizations, stretching from banks and retailers through to local government and the Inland Revenue. It has also led to extensive discussions on the definition, role and applicability of these concepts (Boulding et al., 2005; Payne and Frow,

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marketing theory 8(3) articles

2005; Sheth and Parvatiyar, 2000; Smith and Higgins, 2000) and a number of critiques. One set of critiques questions the suitability of the relationship analogy, particularly in its application to individual consumers (Barnes, 1994; Gutek et al., 1999, 2000; O’Malley and Tynan, 1999), and the use of the marriage analogy (Levitt, 1983) when used to characterize marketing relationships (Tynan, 1997). Rather than questioning the suitability of the relationship metaphor, Foucauldianinspired critiques of RM and CRM practices (Gandy, 1993; Goss, 1995; Humphreys, 2006) focus on the implications of its deployment. They emphasize the role of technology in forming and developing relationships and constructing consumer identities. For example, Zwick and Dholakia (2004a, 2004b), extending the arguments of Poster (1990) and Foucault’s metaphor of the Panopticon (Foucault, 1977), view consumers’ identity as an epistemological construct discursively created within the technologies of CRM. Such technologies enable organizations to produce, circulate and strategically act upon the discursive identities they generate. These critiques focus on the ‘objectivization’ of the consumer through technologies of surveillance and individuation. This paper significantly extends these Foucauldian critiques. Rather than focusing on the objectivization of the consumer, it draws on the notion of governmentality (Foucault, 1991) to explore the interconnections between the objectivization and the subjectivization of the consumer. The significance of CRM lies not only in its individualization of marketing and the objectivization of the consumer, but also in its attempt to subjectivize the consumer through the construction of forms of identity with which consumers are encouraged to identify. The emphasis here is not one of the individual being governed by producers, but individuals governing themselves through association with forms of identity promoted by producers. In developing this critique of RM and CRM the paper draws extensively on the work of Peppers and Rogers (1993, 1997, 2004, 2005), whose works have been highly influential in setting out the philosophy and practical application of RM and CRM, or what they term 1:1 marketing. The use of their work is a reflection of the general significance of practitioner literature in shaping RM and CRM discourse and an explicit recognition that Peppers and Rogers’ ideas form what Furusten (1999), citing Gramsci (1971), terms a ‘centre of influence’, a set of works that carries a highly influential manifestation of a management concept or idea. Their work, beginning with the 1993 text ‘The One-To-One Future’, right through to the recent text ‘Return on Customer’ (2005), develops a sustained critique or problematization of mass marketing practices. Such problematizations are a key starting point for governmentality studies, as they call into question existing patterns of government, or more specifically how we shape our own and other’s conduct in the exercise of power. Although other critiques of mass marketing exist (Gronroos, 1990, 2006; Gummesson, 1987; Tedlow and Jones, 1993), it is the sustained nature and breadth of this critique together with its commercial success that makes it so influential. Peppers and Rogers’ work, however, calls into question not only the practices of mass marketing, but the role of the consumer within those practices. They recast consumers as active agents, keen to engage organizations in a dialogue about their needs, able to interpret their desires, and responsive


The reflexive consumer Antony Beckett and Ajit Nayak

to suggestions from their trusted trading partners. In their hands, RM and CRM strategies and practices come to reframe what it means to be a consumer in a digitally enabled world. To articulate the problematization of mass marketing and as an exemplar of successfully implemented RM and CRM practices, Peppers and Rogers frequently turn to the example of Tesco’s Clubcard. Clubcard, the loyalty card of Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, is held by approximately 12 million UK customers and is one of the largest and most active loyalty card schemes in the UK. Clubcard’s significance rests in part on its size and very public success, but also because it has been held up as a paradigmatic example of what RM and CRM practices can achieve. We develop an analysis of Clubcard to illuminate some of the broader claims Peppers and Rogers make. This analysis is based on a programme of empirical work undertaken by the authors with firms connected to the operation of Clubcard. Over a period of eighteen months we conducted a series of interviews with Tesco’s data analysis subsidiary, their direct marketing agency and their publishers, who commission and produce the material for Tesco’s various consumerfocused publications. These interviews were supplemented by material drawn from the archives of these firms and from ‘Scoring Points’ written by Humby, Hunt and Phillips (2003). In combination, these sources provide a detailed insight into the operations of Tesco’s RM strategy. Our analysis does not attempt to ‘prove’ a set of claims relating to RM and CRM, but to develop a new interpretation, which offers fresh insights and understanding. Methodologically this approach is similar to Alvesson’s (2003) ‘reflexive pragmatism’. Alvesson (2003) argues that rather than viewing qualitative data as evidence that proves or disproves a hypothesis, complex qualitative material should be viewed as a resource, and the task of researchers is to offer interpretations of that resource. Such a position avoids the naïve belief that qualitative data accurately reproduce reality, but instead focus on the generative qualities of that data in producing alternative accounts of ‘reality’. In offering new insights into accepted ideas through interpretation, we engage critically with this material, where: ‘A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices we accept rest’ (Foucault, 1988: 154). Through the discussion of Peppers and Rogers’ work the paper makes a contribution to a number of contemporary debates within marketing, highlighting issues of power within marketing practice and theory (Denegri-Knott et al., 2006), reflexivity and the constitution of the consumer (Hodgson, 2000, 2001), empowerment of consumers (Sturdy et al., 2001) and the redefinition of marketing (Firat and Dholakia, 2006). Our contribution is three-fold: it (1) articulates the emergence of a new mentality of marketing, collaborative marketing; (2) traces the creation of new relays that connect producers and consumers and which enact the collaborative marketing mentality; and (3) outlines a form of consumer identity to which those relays give rise, the reflexive consumer. Beginning with a brief discussion of governmentality and its links to identity



and reflexivity, we examine Peppers and Rogers’ problematization of mass marketing and articulate the new mentality or rationality that runs through their work, that of collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing we argue sets out a framework in which the sovereign needs of the consumer and the desires of the producer are reconciled. Following Foucault (1986) our analysis moves along two dimensions. On the one hand we explore the technologies and techniques of CRM that translate the mentality of RM into strategy. We focus on the interaction between the value of the consumer and their governance in terms of expanding their consumption horizon. On the other hand we explore the practices of the self; the enfolding of the mentality of collaborative consumer–producer relationships within the consumer. We articulate the connections between reflexivity and identity and the government of the consumer. We conclude that the emergence of collaborative marketing reframes marketing in blurring the boundaries between producer and consumer and between freedom and subjugation.

Reflexive modernity and governmentality One of the recurrent themes in contemporary social theory has been the notion of the ‘reflexive self’ (Beck, 1992, 1994; Giddens, 1990, 1991; Lash, 1993): the argument that modern individuals have to actively construct a meaningful, viable and coherent sense of self-identity through reflexive choice. Consumption plays a key role in this identity formation. Whereas in traditional societies consumption was a reflection of one’s existing social identities, modern individuals actively construct their social identity through their consumption choices. Self-identity is constructed from a range of elements that the individual reflexively assembles to project or inhabit a particular identity. Reflexive consumption, it is claimed, liberates consumers from marketing’s social domination, offering a new form of freedom where consumers express their individuality and identity (Bauman, 1988). An alternative interpretation of reflexivity is found in the area of governmentality studies (Dean, 1996, 1999; Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1996, 1999). In these studies, rather than liberating the individual, reflexivity is a central mechanism in locating individuals in relation to authority and power across a diverse range of sites (Foucault, 1988). Governmentality is a study of how we behave and act and can be broadly defined as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault, 1991). Questions of governing are no longer simply conflated with Government, but interpreted far more broadly to all attempts to govern human life by a whole variety of institutions. A mentality of government is the collective body of knowledge, beliefs and opinion that informs the practices of government (Dean, 1999). Such mentalities are translated into material and non-material elements, technologies, practices of calculation, vocabularies, modes of perception, forms of judgement, inscription techniques, forms of expertise, to form ‘regimes of governmentality’. Practices of government seek both to dominate the individual by making them ‘known’ and to enfold the mentality of government within those individuals through the shaping of their desires, needs, aspirations and fears. Practices of punishment, for example,



seek both to make the prisoner ‘known’ and to enfold the mentality of discipline within their ‘soul’ (Foucault, 1977). In Dean’s (1995) study of the unemployed in Australia, individuals are governed through the calling into existence of new identities with which they are called to identify, aspire to and act out in their lives. So those seeking work come to define themselves not as the unemployed entitled to receive unemployment benefits, but as job seekers whose responsibility it is to be ‘enterprising’ and actively re-train themselves in the pursuit of new employment (Dean, 1995). Identification occurs through a process of reflexivity in which the individual creates a divide between their thoughts and actions, and in creating that divide steps back from action and reconsiders their behaviour (Foucault, 1984). This act of stepping back, of reflecting on one’s actions, carries the potential to transform one’s life: to become a better father or mother, a more caring person, to control one’s anger, to become an enterprising employee. Such reflexive questioning of the self occurs in response to new identities and is intimately tied to the creation and absorption of such identities, the job seeker, the responsible driver and the organized parent.

The problematization of mass marketing Analytics of regimes of governmentality often commence with a problematization of existing regimes of governmentality, questioning how we shape our and other’s conduct. Peppers and Rogers’ work begins by problematizing traditional marketing ideas and techniques and calls into question the conduct of producers and consumers. The construction of regimes of governmentality to govern consumers can be traced back to the 1920s in the USA, where producers and retailers faced the problem of oversupply and saturated consumer markets (Packard, 1957). Their response was to find ways of stimulating demand, and this was achieved by drawing together a range of techniques, knowledge and technologies into a regime of governmentality conventionally termed mass marketing. Mass marketing operates through the mobilization of a number of interrelated practices, which identify and then satisfy human needs (Applbaum, 2004), including market research, segmentation of consumers into groups (Smith, 1956), targeting those segments with suitable products and services, and market positioning or the differentiation of the producer vis-à-vis other competitors (Kotler and Armstrong, 2001). Peppers and Rogers argue that the overriding objective of these practices is to generate high levels of market share, which in turn enables producers to achieve the economies of scale that underpin cost-focused pricing strategies. The task of mass marketing is to ‘increase your (the producer’s) market share (by) selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as you can’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 18). The problem with such an approach is the focus on large ‘segments’ of consumers who, it is assumed, have broadly homogeneous tastes; the role of the individual consumer in determining consumption patterns is lost. This failure to



recognize the heterogeneity of individual consumers and in particular of the relationships they form to structure their consumption patterns lies at the heart of Peppers and Rogers (1993, 1994) critique of mass marketing. Through its focus on individual consumers and the nature of their relationships with producers, RM ‘problematized’ or called into question the mass marketing approach and that problematization critiqued three aspects of mass marketing practices. First, the inability of such practices to identify consumers individually; second, their inability to recognize differences in profitability between loyal and non-loyal consumers, and finally their inability to engage consumers in dialogue (Gronroos, 1994; Gummesson et al., 1997). The first of these criticisms forms a ‘call to arms’, a liberating vision for relational marketing in which the individual is recognized as an individual and not as a part of a larger sub-segment of customers (Peppers and Rogers, 1993). The second focuses on the technical operation of mass marketing and its inability to differentiate between profitable and unprofitable customers, encouraging a focus on the recruitment of new customers, irrespective of the costs involved (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990). What links these critiques is a need to ‘know’ the customer; to be able to identify, measure, select and understand the individual customer. ‘Knowing’ the customer enables the producer to identify and respond to them individually through customized products and services, thus increasing their loyalty. The third critique calls for an interactive pattern of communication with customers, which is contrasted with traditional forms of mass marketing that create ‘broadcast’ messages which are neither attuned to the needs of individual consumers, nor encourage interaction between the producer and consumer (Gronroos, 2004; Peppers and Rogers, 2005; Varey, 2003). For Peppers and Rogers, mass marketing practices are animated by what they term ‘adversarial marketing’; ‘it is impossible even to talk about mass marketing without thinking of customers and marketers as adversaries’ (Peppers and Rodgers, 1993: 54). What their critique of mass marketing points to, and is explored here in detail, is a new basis for marketing, what they term ‘collaborative marketing’. The notion of collaborative marketing is not confined to the writing of Peppers and Rogers but has emerged across a range of influential marketing texts. Sheth and Parvatiyar (2000), for example, offered the following definition of RM: ‘We define relationship marketing as the ongoing process of engaging in co-operative and collaborative activities or programmes with immediate and end-user customers . . . ’ (Sheth and Parvatiyar, 2000: 9, emphasis in the original). Similar definitions can be found in Gummesson (1997) and Sawhney (2002).

The new mentality of marketing: collaboration The shift from adversarial to collaborative marketing is significant as it signals Peppers and Rogers’ attempt to articulate a new mentality of government. Modes of government are characterized by a rationality which articulates the moral justifications for the particular ways of exercising power and an epistemological understanding of the persons who are to be governed (Rose and Miller, 1992). In



conceiving RM in terms of the collaboration between producers and consumers Peppers and Rogers frame a new moral justification for marketing that articulates a new role for both parties. Traditionally, the moral authority of the consumer is enshrined in the first-person claims regarding their preferences and needs. No one knows any better than the individual and, thus, no one has the right either to challenge such authority or to replace them with judgements from ‘more’ authoritative sources (Keat, 1994). Whereas the notion of sovereignty allocates the role of ‘chooser’ to the consumer and creator to the producer, collaborative marketing points to a more complex set of interactions between these parties. Under the rubric of collaborative marketing consumers become co-producers, empowered participants in the process of both creation and consumption. They are no longer required to be authoritative, the principal interpreters of their needs and desires, but to be capable and willing to make new connections between the problems they face in their everyday lives and new consumption opportunities. The task of marketing is not to respond to the consumption horizon of the consumer, but to actively expand that horizon. ‘You (the producer) will collaborate by helping a particular customer shape what he wants from your firm, often by helping him design his own product or service package . . . so you can help them solve their problems and meet their needs and so they can help you sell them things’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 67, emphasis in the original). Using the metaphor of the ‘volume dial’, Peppers and Rogers argue that consumers can be encouraged to expand their range of purchases within a producer–consumer relationship: ‘Consumers can and do turn the volume up or down on the various products and services they purchase over a lifetime’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 31). The shift from adversarial to collaborative marketing redefines the moral basis of marketing. Rather than recognizing and upholding consumers as sovereign choosers, marketing is now concerned to engage consumers as empowered coproducers. Interestingly, Peppers and Rogers’ moral vision of marketing is strikingly similar to that offered by Firat and Dholakia in their discussion of postmodern marketing (2006: 150): ‘[M]arketing would (in a post-modern mode) need to collaborate, as a partner, with post-consumer communities in constructing their modes of life. Marketing’s role would be facilitating and co-ordinating the efforts of the community’s members. This is a co-performer, not a provider role’. This understanding of the consumer as an active participant in production and consumption is linked to an epistemological understanding of the consumer through the notion of needs and the relevance of those needs to the producer. The key to successful collaborative marketing, the expansion of the consumption horizon, rests on the understanding and development of consumers’ needs. ‘You can only maximize the value your firm creates by maximizing your Return on Customer. But to increase overall return generated by a customer . . . you must change the customer’s behavior, creating more value than was otherwise expected’ (Peppers and Rogers, 2005: 27, our emphasis). The task of RM is to identify the future ‘value’ of individual consumers and to alter that potential value through the expansion of their consumption horizon. ‘It is the expected change in a customer’s LTV (Life Time Value) that should drive your business decisions’ (Peppers and



Rogers, 2005: 66, emphases in the original). Peppers and Rogers make a connection between the needs of the consumer to maximize their well-being through greater consumption, and the needs of the producer to maximize the long-term value of the consumer through the expansion of the consumption horizon. These seemingly diverse ends are reconciled through the notion of collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing empowers consumers as they participate in the marketing process. The implication of that empowerment is that it reshapes the very nature of what it means to be a ‘consumer’. Passive recipients of massproduced goods are transformed into active, engaged consumers. This transformation of consumers is happening, claim Peppers and Rogers, as consumers demand greater interaction with producers in the solving of their needs and to be recognized as individuals. Their thesis is that this demand for greater interaction, for collaboration, is to be welcomed, as through active participation in the marketing process the ‘needs’ of consumers can be developed, their volume dials turned up. Collaboration leads to new marketing opportunities and greater loyalty. If, however, consumers are to be reshaped as active participants in the marketing process, the mentality of collaborative marketing must be translated into a set of technologies and techniques.

The technologies of CRM For mentalities to govern they must be translated into durable materials, techniques, methodologies and technologies which ‘enrol’ individuals and mobilize individual persons in the pursuit of their goals. Power, rather than explaining the formation of technologies of government, should be viewed as an outcome of such technologies (Latour, 1987). Powerful authorities are those able to translate the mentality of government through an array of technologies into the day-to-day lives of individuals. Central to this translation is the rendering of the domain to be governed into a knowable form that can be analysed, evaluated, classified and worked upon (Rose, 1996). Marketing has long classified consumers, using market segmentation techniques for example (Smith, 1956). The emergence and widespread use of a range of elements including information communication technology, databases and software, loyalty cards and e-mail has resulted in a CRM ‘assemblage’ or network, capable of far greater levels of individual identification and classification than was hitherto possible (Zwick and Dholakia, 2004a, 2004b). A key theme of Peppers and Rogers’ work, and one that becomes increasingly prominent, is the classification of the consumer on the basis of their value to the producer. Classifying consumers in this way only becomes possible when the identity of an individual consumer can be connected to their purchasing activity. What such a connection requires is the enrolling of the consumer into a network of technologies through which their purchases can be tracked and identified, supermarket loyalty cards being an obvious example. These technologies establish a population of individuals whose value can be identified and governed.



In managing the value of a consumer Peppers and Rogers (2005) focused on what they term the ‘Return on Customer’ (RoC) which attempts to measure the long-term value of an individual consumer to a producer. RoC, they argue, takes into account the two ways a consumer creates value for a firm; increasing the current period cash flows and by increasing future potential cash flows. ‘To maximise your Return on Customer, you must balance both the current profit from a customer and the long-term change in a customer’s value’ (Peppers and Rogers, 2005: 26). The consistent message across Peppers and Rogers’ work is that maximizing RoC requires not only the identification of and response to consumers’ current needs but the development of those needs. ‘When we do a good job of taking the customer’s perspective, we might even know what the customer wants before the customer has to tell us’ (Peppers and Rogers, 2005: 56). They go on to identify three ways in which the producer might anticipate the needs of the consumer: memory, editorial inference and comparisons with other shoppers. Memory involves recalling consumers’ past choices and using that information to shape future interactions, such as reminding the consumer of their spouses’ birthday and the type of flowers they sent the previous year. Editorial inferences combine memory with some sense of context ‘If a customer buys Italian suits, they might be interested in Italian loafers’ (Peppers and Rogers, 2005: 57). Anticipating consumers’ needs by comparing their experience with other similar shoppers involves constructing norms of behaviour for consumers. How this is achieved emerges in some detail from the experiences of Tesco. Clubcard, a loyalty card used by Tesco customers, provides Tesco with a detailed breakdown of all the products purchased by an individual customer. On the basis of that data, Tesco is able to ‘develop’ consumers’ needs in a number of ways. First, from the data it is possible to identify those areas of the store not ‘shopped’ by an individual consumer, or ‘gaps in the basket’. Consumers are then incentivized to fill those ‘gaps’ and to ‘shop the shop’. Second, once an individual’s consumption pattern is recorded then it can be classified and compared to others in the same classification. This process establishes a norm against which the individual is compared. The function of the CRM practices is to ‘normalize’ the individual, to tie them to that norm, expanding their patterns of consumption and boosting the profitability of Tesco. This is achieved by incentivizing the consumer to try these products with the hope that trial leads to repeat purchase. The probability of success is greatly increased by the process of comparison with other similar consumers. Finally, through identification of products the consumer currently enjoys, Tesco makes suggestions for other products that the consumer might enjoy by extrapolating their consumption patterns into new areas. Peppers and Rogers (1997) refer to this locating of an individual consumer within a context of similar consumers as ‘community knowledge’. Using community knowledge it becomes possible ‘to lead a customer to a product or service that the enterprise knows the customer is likely to need, even though the customer may be totally unaware of this need’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1997: 242, emphasis in the original). These strategies rely on having recorded and classified consumer buying patterns, they establish learning relationships in which



the producer learns about the consumer and uses that learning to tailor what Peppers and Rogers (2004) term their ‘customer collaboration strategy’. Collaboration here means that the consumer comes to recognize new ‘needs’ that emerge in their everyday lives and to solve those ‘needs’ through acts of consumption. In this way the consumer is transformed from passive recipient to active participant, responding to the suggestions and recommendations of producers, and the mentality of collaborative marketing is enacted into existence.

Practices of self-formation In the preceding discussion, we examined how the technologies of government translated a mentality of government into existence. One of the defining features of Foucault’s work, however, is his evolving understanding of power, where power is not externally imposed, but is exercised internally as individuals governs themselves in the knowledge of mentalities of government. Working through individuals’ capacity for reflexive thought, the mentalities of government seek to shape the desires, needs and aspirations of individuals so that they come to frame their understanding of themselves and the issues they face in their everyday lives in a manner consistent with that mentality. Practices of self-formation relate to ways in which the individual attempts to develop and transform themselves, ‘to attain a certain mode of being’ (Foucault, 2003: 26). That mode of being or identity is formed or framed within a mentality of government and such identities establish ‘right’ ways of understanding and responding to particular problems – what Foucault (1980) termed a ‘regime of truth’. So in the case of the unemployed, the creation of the identity of job seeker reframes how the individual is expected to interpret and respond to their lack of a job. Job seekers are called upon to recognize their responsibility to retrain and reskill in order to find work. In exploring the practices of self-formation, the objective here is to articulate how these practices frame a reflexive, collaborative consumer identity and the responses which such consumers enact. The discussion is structured around three questions: what do the practices of CRM seek to govern; how is the individual governed; and what form of subject does the individual become (Foucault, 1985, 1986)?

What do the practices of CRM seek to govern? At one level the answer to this question is self-evident; it is of course the consumption behaviour of individuals. Framed, however, in terms of the mentality of collaboration, the practices of CRM seek to govern consumers’ disposition toward collaborative engagement with producers. Thus, Peppers and Rogers (2004: 161–2) state ‘in a relationship the customer learns . . . about becoming a more proficient consumer . . .’ and elsewhere ‘To be effective, a frequency-marketing programme has to be based on an overall share-of-customer strategy that promotes collaboration and participation on the part of each individual customer’



(Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 59). What the practices of CRM seek to govern is consumers’ readiness to come to understand themselves as active, empowered participants in the marketing process. Engagement in marketing practices such as loyalty card schemes reframes the consumer from passive recipient of products and services to active co-creator.

How is the individual governed? If the disposition of the consumer toward collaboration is the end sought by CRM, dialogue is the means by which it is achieved. Dialogue has assumed an increasingly important role in discussions of RM and CRM (Ballantyne, 2004; Gronroos, 2000, 2004; Varey, 2003). Dialogue can be ‘understood as an interactive process of learning together’ where ‘interaction means becoming more aware of your routine but hidden thought patterns (mental models, logics, cognitive constructs, gestalts or schemas’ (Ballantyne, 2004: 117, emphasis in the original). Internalization and sharing of values is central to notions of dialogue in which dialogue between parties builds ‘shared insights and common meanings’ (Gronroos, 2000: 6–7, emphasis in the original). Peppers and Rogers argue that dialogue and its connection to learning is fundamental to the operation of RM and their definition of dialogue and its function provides an insight into the reflexive nature of RM. For example, they state ‘[C]onducting a dialogue with a customer is, in a sense, having an exchange of thoughts. It is a form of mental collaboration’ (1993: 212), and ‘your dialogue with an individual customer will change your behaviour toward that single individual, and change that individual’s behaviour towards you’ (1993: 215, emphasis in the original). The creative potential of dialogue ‘lies in the way new perspectives on problems and opportunities are offered and considered by the parties involved and fed back into further dialogue’ (Ballantyne, 2004: 120). As the parties to the relationship communicate, so consumers are encouraged to reflect on their consumption patterns, to recognize new consumption opportunities and to channel their consumption through certain trading relationships. Through dialogue, the consumers’ understanding of the value of their trading relationships is formed and developed and a learning relationship established within which new knowledge is created (Gronroos, 2000; Peppers and Rogers, 1993). Tesco’s Clubcard evidences the subtle connection between dialogue, collaborative marketing and reflexivity. In creating an RM strategy, Tesco has sought not only to use the considerable amounts of data they possess on consumers’ purchasing patterns, but also to engage consumers in dialogue. That dialogue is focused around two types of publication; specialist magazines which support ‘clubs’ that focus on a particular area of their customers lives; Mother and Baby Club, Healthy Living Club, Wine Club and the more general Tesco Magazine. These publications identify key issues which Tesco customers are likely to find of interest; preparing for Mother’s day, organizing a dinner party, preparing healthy meals, coping with children’s teething problems. Using an expert they explore solutions to these problems, making explicit connections to products in Tesco’s stores as they do so. The selection of areas on which to focus draws heavily on the dialogue Tesco has



with its customers. Using their detailed holdings of information on every customer, Tesco is able to identify those customers most likely to respond to a particular article in one of the magazines. If, for example, Tesco Magazine decided to run an article on childhood obesity, it is possible for Tesco to identify which customers have children, if they currently buy five fruits and vegetables, if they buy high fat and salt products, if they have responded to health initiatives in the past, if they are price sensitive, and so on. Through the use of that information a selection of vouchers are personalized for individual customers that on the one hand support the broad issue of healthy eating for children and on the other, the particular dispositions of that customer. In combination, the vouchers and expert advice seek to engage the customers’ reflexivity, to encourage them to think about their current patterns of purchase and in the light of that reflection to change those patterns of consumption. What emerges is a recursive process in which Tesco continually update their knowledge of the consumer and use that knowledge to create new connections between their products and the problems consumers face in their everyday lives; be those organizing a child’s Halloween party, eating healthily or choosing wine for a dinner party. To summarize, what the Tesco example highlights is how the connections between consumption and need are formed through a process of dialogue and reflexivity. Dialogue seeks to encourage consumers to reflect on their current patterns of consumption and to reframe their needs in terms of the consumption opportunities suggested by producers. They come to a common understanding of what the problem is and how it could be solved. A new regime of truth is coproduced in which the consumer assumes an active role in interpreting and applying the suggestions of producers into their lives.

Subjectification of the individual The final dimension of the practices of self-government is the mode of subjectification, or the type of person the consumer becomes when they engage in reflexive thought. At issue here is the nature of the consumer as they engage with the practices of CRM; what capacities and qualities do the practices of CRM bring into existence? Peppers and Rogers do not explicitly define the nature of the consumer as they interact with producers. It is possible, however, to catch a sense of the attributes of successful consumers in their discussions of dialogue and collaborative marketing. Successful consumers are the mirror image of successful producers; they are those able to engage in dialogue and collaborative marketing. The practices of CRM aim to remake the customer as an active entrepreneur of the self, open to new connections between their lives and consumption opportunities. Tesco refers to these as ‘savvy’ customers; they are enterprising, looking for new ways to solve the problems they face in their everyday lives: ‘they are clever, they can link the ideas we provide through our (Tesco) publications with their own lives’ (Hunt, 2004). The notion of the savvy consumer underpins Tesco’s thinking of the consumer; they are willing to rethink their existing patterns of con-



sumption, they use the ideas and materials Tesco provides to solve the problems they face in their lives, they are enterprising. In reflexively scrutinizing their consumption behaviour the consumer assumes the identity of what Peppers and Rogers (1993) term the liberated consumer. Liberated consumers are empowered through their reflexive capacity to become more successful consumers, solving the problems they face in everyday life through savvy, expert consumption.

Society at light speed In the final chapter of their 1993 text, entitled ‘Society at Light Speed’, Peppers and Rogers set out their vision of a society dominated by information technology and one in which 1:1 marketing plays a central role. For them ‘It is impossible to grasp fully the implications of 1:1 marketing without understanding something about its broader, social context’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 351). What they articulate here are the utopian goals of RM and CRM practices, a sense of the better world which these practices form. The 1:1 marketing future will lead to ‘an empowerment of small businesses, of consumers, and of individual effort’ (Pepper and Rogers, 1993: 352). For them it would be ‘hard to overstate the potential implications of individual empowerment’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 353). In this new world, the discipline of the market will provide genuinely equal opportunities for everyone, regardless of race or gender, religion, age, etc. ‘Anyone will be free to establish a “store” to sell individual creative or intellectual services . . . (W)e will (they claim) all be liberated’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 356–7). Progress is ‘inevitable’, but success for the individual depends on their flexibility, their enterprising zeal: ‘the advantages (of the information age) accrue to those who have a good imagination and can make a contribution through the facilities and icons of the computer age, what happens to those who cannot? Or to those with passive natures and limited energies . . . ’ (Peppers and Rogers, 1993: 358). What lies at the heart of this vision is a sense of active participation. Individuals are actively engaging with other parties to maximize their lifestyles through consumption. In this context, to be ‘enterprising’ is to engage in reflexive consumption and the qualities of reflexive consumption become a central organizing principle of human existence. Firat and Dholakia (2006) capture this nicely when they state, ‘Marketing becomes everyone’s activity, and the post-consumer is a marketer, constantly involved in the imagination, creation and performance of desires to be experienced as modes of living’ (Firat and Dholakia, 2006: 151). Peppers and Rogers’ vision of society is one which eschews the traditional dichotomization of consumer as a ‘dupe’ seduced by the pleasures of consumption (Marcuse, 1964) or as authoritative sovereign (Keat, 1994) and, instead, offers a vision in which producer and consumer are conjoined. In a society of reflexive consumption, collaborative marketing comes to saturate consumers’ lives.



Conclusion What emerges from our analysis of Peppers and Rogers’ work is the central role of reflexivity within the discourse of RM. The mentality of collaboration, through its translation via the technologies of CRM, reframes producer–consumer relationships and the very notion of the nature and function of marketing. Those transformations are centred on the identity of the reflexive consumer and the implications for consumer agency which this identity carries. In traditional conceptions of marketing the consumer is afforded sovereign authority (Keat, 1994), and the role of marketing is to respond to consumers’ needs. If, however, the consumer is viewed as an active participant in the production process and one who does not necessarily ‘know’ their needs, nor how they might be satisfied, the role of marketing is to help them meet those needs to solve their everyday problems through informed consumption. Enhancing the lifestyle of consumers through greater consumption appears incongruous if consumer agency is framed in terms of the sovereign chooser, but coherent and appropriate within the framework of the consumer as reflexive collaborator. The identity of the reflexive consumer gives rise to a number of possible empirical research directions. First and perhaps most importantly it raises questions as to the nature of the engagement with producers by consumers; what makes consumers engage in reflexive consumption? The experience of Tesco suggests that consumers are willing to engage in such a manner, but empirically the extent and nature of that engagement remains untested. Further empirical work is needed across a number of different types of consumers at different sites, to explore how the identity of the reflexive consumer is unfolded within the lives of consumers. Important questions are raised regarding the notion of resistance and consumption; if consumers are no longer sovereign but co-producers, how do they resist the demands of reflexive consumption? Much of what Tesco does is based on getting the consumer to think Why Not? Why would a father not want to make healthy packed lunches for his children or a hostess not be a wine expert? What happens to those who lack the energy, imagination or education to become reflexive consumers? Are those unwilling to maximize their lifestyle through consumption ignored or disciplined? In parallel to this consumer oriented research, further empirical work is required to explore how producers have mobilized the notion of reflexive consumption. Research is needed to explore in more detail how the technologies of CRM ‘call’ or incite the consumer to engage in reflexive consumption. The success of the Tesco Clubcard suggests that successful CRM technologies engage the consumer as both object and subject. Understanding how the consumer is engaged as a reflexive subject may offer managerial insights into why some CRM implementations succeed and others fail. Tracing out in detail the technologies and practices of RM and CRM will help to illuminate how the notions of reflexive consumptions are worked into diverse sites by producers. Finally, further research is required to explore the interaction between habitual and reflexive consumption. Recent work in the sociology of consumption



(Gronow and Warde, 2001) explores the role of habit in determining consumption and at issue here is the boundary between habitual and reflexive consumption. How and why does the consumer switch between these modes of engagement? Arguably, much advertising seeks to encourage reflexive engagement with habituated patterns of consumption to encourage adoption of products or brands or to expand consumers’ ‘needs’. The notion of reflexive consumption offers new ways of interrogating marketing practices such as advertising and marketing communications generally, in terms of how such practices seek to engage the reflexive capacities of the consumer. To conclude, one might offer two caricaturized interpretations of Peppers and Rogers’ vision of marketing and society. One interpretation is that reflexive consumption and collaborative marketing extend choice and thus freedom; consumers are free to consume in new and rewarding ways. Those unable to consume reflexively will be left behind, but for most consumers the opportunities for a better life are significant. Choice and freedom are the mechanisms through which society as a whole is improved and this argument is made eloquently by Peppers and Rogers in the final chapter of their 1993 text. An alternative interpretation argues that reflexive engagement, far from freeing the consumer, redefines the relations of power which bind them to producers. What emerges from collaborative marketing is not a hyper-confident, empowered consumer but one susceptible to the suggestions and incitements of producers. Barber (2007) uses the analogy of ‘infantalized’ to describe modern consumers. Children are both easily excited and worried and the analogy of the infantile consumer captures the sense of excitable desire and the need for social approbation that lies at the heart of the modern consumer. Collaborative marketing operates across these axes, exciting and worrying consumers in equal measure. Peppers and Rogers’ ‘society at light speed’ foreshadows a world of infantile consumers, whose passions and fears are relentlessly amplified and whose self-restraint is eroded through their active engagement in the marketing process. Tesco’s slogan ‘Why Not?’ captures the moral imperative which animates this vision of society. Why would one deny oneself the pleasures, identities and status afforded by consumption? Why not improve one’s life through active engagement with producers? To resist, to refuse, the opportunity of collaborative marketing, is to willingly choose not to want to maximize your and your families’ opportunities, and who would want to do that? For some, collaborative marketing may give rise to active and playful engagement with marketing resources. For others, empowerment in the form of collaborative marketing is no route to greater ‘freedom’ or liberation, but the basis of new relations of power, which bind the consumer and producer ever more tightly.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the editor and the anonymous referees on earlier versions of the paper.



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Antony Beckett is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy at the Bristol Business School, University West of England. His research interests focus on a range of issues associated with notions of practice including consumption, identity, reflexivity, innovation, marketing and strategy. Antony has published in the Organization and the Services Industries Journal. Address: Bristol Business School, UWE, Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, BS16 1QY. [email: [email protected]] Ajit Nayak is a Lecturer in Strategy at the School of Management, University of Bath. His research interests are relational and practice approaches to marketing, strategy, entrepreneurship, organization and self-identity. He is currently working on three projects 1) Indian business elites, 2) Entrepreneurship in a media culture: evidence from the Dragons’ Den, and 3) Innovation, technology and consumption. Ajit has previously published in Organization Studies, Organization and Long Range Planning. Address: School of Management, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY. [email: [email protected]]
