Digitalizing Consumption

How devices shape consumer culture

Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, Magdalena McIntyre, Niklas Sörum, Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, Magdalena McIntyre, Niklas Sörum, Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, Magdalena Petersson McIntyre, Niklas Sörum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317299349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Contemporary consumer society is increasingly saturated by digital technology, and the devices that deliver this are increasingly transforming consumption patterns. Social media, smartphones, mobile apps and digital retailing merge with traditional consumption spheres, supported by digital devices which further encourage consumers to communicate and influence other consumers to consume.

Through a wide range of empirical studies which analyse the impact of digital devices, this volume explores the digitization of consumption and shows how consumer culture and consumption practices are fundamentally intertwined and mediated by digital devices. Exploring the development of new consumer cultures, leading international scholars from sociology, marketing and ethnology examine the effects on practices of consumption and marketing, through topics including big data, digital traces, streaming services, wearables, and social media's impact on ethical consumption.

Digitalizing Consumption makes an important contribution to practice-based approaches to consumption, particularly the use of market devices in consumers' everyday consumer life, and will be of interest to scholars of marketing, cultural studies, consumer research, organization and management.

1 Digitalizing consumption

Introduction

Franck Cochoy, Johan Hagberg, Magdalena Petersson McIntyre and Niklas Sörum

Contemporary consumer society is increasingly saturated by the digital. Despite this there has been, until recently, a relative paucity of studies concerning the intersection of digitalization and consumption (Lehdonvirta, 2012). Social media, mobile Internet, smartphones, QR codes, tablets, mobile apps, virtual fashion and digital shopping windows replace and merge with previous consumption spheres. Consumer activities such as purchasing, comparing and examining goods are increasingly handled through the Internet and mobile digital devices; consumers organize and disseminate service and product information on social media sites, blogs and forums; and money is spent increasingly on digital items. Furthermore, product searches, decision making and the relationships with physical stores are becoming more intimately dependent on smartphones, tablets and other digital devices. Growing numbers of available recommendation systems and online review platforms have also assumed a prominent role in consumption practices (Mellet et al., 2014). In their use and co-production of such recommendation systems for books, movies, restaurants, wines, music, electronics, musical instruments and clothes, consumers are relying increasingly on algorithms and artificial intelligence. Taken together, these examples are manifestations of the contemporary ongoing digitalization of consumption that results in the development of new cultures of consumption.

From the introduction of PCs in many homes several decades ago, through their subsequent connection to the Internet and the proliferation of laptops, tablets and smartphones, the digital has become increasingly intertwined in everyday life. “Digital” has become a prefix to so many aspects of consumption that the present time is commonly referred to as the digital age. Digitalization now impacts all parts of society, spanning large-scale calculations by mainframe computers to mobile digital devices in the hands of ordinary consumers. There is a budding delegation of everyday consumer practices to digital technology, and it is clear that consumption has been altered, enhanced and sometimes even lost by advances in digital technology; for instance, previous forms of expertise and advice recommendation systems are increasingly becoming replaced with a reliance on combinations of big data.

By using the term digitalization, rather than the digital, we aim to focus on the processes through which consumption becomes ever more digital. What interests us particularly is not so much the present state of the digital, but the processes in which the digital is performed, tried out, stabilized or destabilized, how users are enrolled and practices disrupted, and the ways in which digital technologies are integrated into markets and consumer practices. We approach digitalization as “integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization of everything that can be digitized” (Businessdictionary.com, 22 October 2014; see also Hagberg et al., 2016, p. 707). We want to draw attention to the transformation of consumption that follows digitalization, as well as to how the relationship between consumption and production is challenged through such processes.

Thus, although a focus on the digitalization of consumption is what the different chapters in this volume have in common, only some have consumers as their topic of study. We see consumption as a phenomenon that involves many actors – such as marketers, producers, data scientists or even novelists – and encompasses a way to describe how various digital entities, together with consumers, pragmatically enact and format consumer actions, shape consumer culture and stage consumer dispositions. In that sense, the consumer and consumer culture are defined as “made up of human bodies but also prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc.” (Callon, 2005, p. 4). Digital devices help produce particular versions (or images) of consumer subjects; they may work to enable new ways of being a consumer in the 21st century; they may even challenge the gender constructions inscribed in more conventional shopping practices, and may work as disciplinary and governing devices that encourage certain forms of consumption and discourage other forms.

Several contributions in this book explore the mundane market(ing) and consumer uses of digital devices in marketing processes and communication systems, and offer different vantage points on the digitalization of consumer society. The transformative potential of such devices challenges our conceptions of consumer choice, consumer insight, consumer practices, consumer subjectivities and communities, as well as market ideologies, marketing practices and innovation. Thus, the aim of this book is to examine how digital technologies interact with consumer society in a broad range of processes that can be termed the digitalization of consumption. This volume is not the first collective attempt aimed at accounting for the digitalization of the consumption sphere; see, for example, the edited volumes of Molesworth and Denegri-Knott (2012) and Belk and Llamas (2013). However, the effort is to complement and contribute to this literature in several ways.

Previous research on digitalization and consumption has focused mainly on the consumption of digital tools with questions concerning Internet access, smartphone ownership, mobile phone frequency or mobile application users. As several researchers have noted, incorporation of digital tools in mundane consumer activities also affects the way we consume other services or goods. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches (see Moats and McFall, 2016) and other digital devices are increasingly intertwined in everyday activities in numerous settings (at work, at home, on the move, etc.), and in various aspects of consumption. Thus, digital market devices are not only consumed in their own right, but are also used increasingly by consumers as part of other consumption practices, such as payment tools, information providers and virtual shops. As such, these devices contribute to shaping new consumer identities and raise issues about gender, ethics and power. The development, marketing and adoption of digital tools interact with consumption and sometimes promote and trigger change within more or less ordered practices and institutions.

Another important aspect of the digitalization of consumption is the hybridization of the Internet and everyday life, as spectacularly illustrated by, for example, the recent craze for the “augmented reality” game Pokémon Go. After two decades of relative separation between the Internet (based on desktop home searches) and the marketplace (favouring physical behaviour), contemporary market settings rather favour the hybridization of the two and the associated dimensions of interactivity, mobility, portability and ubiquity connected to real, ordinary practices. We thus join Ruppert, Law and Savage (2013, p. 2), who argue that digital devices and digitalization are “simultaneously shaped by the social world, and can in turn become agents that shape that world”. The chapters in this book provide support for such a view by engaging with the specificities of digital devices in order to understand the transformations revealed through the digital.

Focusing on the digitalization of consumption also means focusing on both demand and supply in an effort to get a more complete picture. Whereas consumption studies, including those that attend to digitalized forms of consumption, primarily have focused on the consumer side, this move means that we also pay attention to the role of producers in the digitalizing of consumption. We want to highlight the dynamic and transformative character of the implementation of digital devices in consumer markets, as this is a way to contribute to the current shift of market studies from “market agencements” (Callon, 2013) to “market agencing” (Callon, 2016; Cochoy et al., 2016) – for example, the process through which various materially heterogeneous agencies evolve and combine to colonize and shape consumer behaviour. In this respect, our book shares the view that consumption cannot be understood through studying consumers only, and thus calls, like other works, for studying how marketing knowledge, devices and practices shape consumer behaviour (Araujo and Kjellberg, 2010; Cochoy and Mallard, n.d., forthcoming; McFall, 2014).

We address the processes of digitalization in four main ways: 1 the implications of digitalization for society and markets; 2 how digital devices are “devising consumers”; 3 how digitalization reshapes consumer subjects and practices; 4 through astute marketing knowledge, tools and strategies. In the following, we present the chapters of this book under these different headings. We start by discussing the more general implications for society and markets and the social sciences. This is followed by an introduction of the chapters that particularly attend to the devising of consumers, i.e. the processes of entanglement of devices and consumers in everyday life. A third section focuses on the construction of consumer subjects and practices through digitalization processes. Moving on from issues of subjectivity and practices, the last section introduces three chapters that explore various forms of marketing practices and their role in digitalizing consumption, and some concluding notes concerning the digitalization of consumption.

Implications for society and markets

The opening chapters by Boullier, and by Pantzar and Lammi address the larger implications of digitalization processes for society and markets, including the social sciences, companies, consumers and citizens. As Boullier implicitly suggests, chances are great that a main contribution of the digital world to contemporary society is the amazing proliferation of a new kind of entity: digital traces. These traces invade artificial memories, computer networks and social media, as well as business talks and market intelligence, both eager to learn how to extract knowledge and value out of so-called “big data”.

Such evolutions are good reasons for the social sciences to pay attention to these new digital traces. On the one hand, social sciences are about making sense of social matters, and it is their duty to consider these new entities that colonize and transform the world. On the other hand, the growing attention of business actors for the same entities reinforces this need; not only is this attention part of the phenomenon that deserves to be studied, but responsible social scientists cannot allow business to exploit the new goldmine of digital traces alone, given the risk of a privatization and marketization of social knowledge that such monopoly would entail.

In his chapter “Big data challenge for social sciences and market research: from society and opinion to replications”, Boullier interprets the recent development of digital methods (Rogers, 2013) as the emergence of a third generation of social sciences. According to Boullier, the first generation aimed at studying “society”, based on secondary data such as official statistics produced by the state. The second generation of social sciences aimed at exploring public opinion, thanks to polling techniques. With the magic of great numbers and sampling procedures, polls helped to build the image of the social “whole” from a small set of data accessible at a reasonable cost. Now, Boullier says, big data and digital traces have made us enter a third generation of social sciences, no longer based on official records or survey samples, but on the huge flow of information collected automatically through Internet traffic and digital usage. These data are subject to instant analysis by various digital methods and algorithms. With third-generation social sciences, Boullier claims, the topic at stake is neither society nor public opinion, since most of the time traces neither reflect the big collective nor express the isolated individuals, but produce “replications”. What matters is not studying these traces to gain knowledge about the social whole they belong to, or to portray the individuals who originate them, but studying the moves, trends, issues and rhythms created by the circulation of the traces themselves (see “likes” on Facebook, “tweets” on Twitter and so on).

This emerging issue of replications is systematically explored by Pantzar and Lammi, whose chapter “Towards a rhythm-sensitive data economy” studies how the spread of digital traces and their growing interconnection renew and transform the rhythms of social life: like never before, the use of the Internet, smartphones, self-trackers and other connected objects redistributes social practices by creating a time for collective “wired” social interactions. These networked flows challenge or overlap other, more traditional moments, such as working hours or family gatherings, further reshaping social rhythms and leading towards their synchronization. Moreover, the use of the same devices and the conduct of the same interactions generate a flow of traces that document the underlying behavioural patterns of market actors. As the authors convincingly argue, this knowledge is a source of business opportunities: the successful companies of today and tomorrow are not only the ones who prove capable of addressing the price and quality challenges raised by their immediate competitors, but rather the ones who show their ability to “synchronize” their activities with their clients’ rhythms. In other words, the competitors are not only the other companies that produce the same kinds of goods and services, but also the ones that address the same moments. Economic value does not rest solely on the material characteristics of a given good, but on businesses’ ability to propose timely offers, at the right place, and with the appropriate price (see the example of Netflix, whose distinct economic advantage lies in its capacity to adapt flexibly to consumers’ changing rhythms and even social configurations, according to the number of simultaneous “screens” they need for the same subscription). As the authors note in their discussion, these evolutions call for our vigilance, given the rising control of social knowledge by companies through big data analytics, and the related capacity of businesses to “learn how to shape and manipulate rhythms” (cf. Epp et al., 2014, for a similar argument regarding brand competition).

If Boullier is interested in the life of traces per se, Pantzar and Lammi remind us that the same traces are attached to and produced by consumers, so that “big data analytics” is both an issue of social knowledge and a source of market control. However, Pantzar and Lammi join Boullier on one major point: they both argue that companies no longer necessarily need to come back to individuals. By identifying relevant rhythms, they may develop proactive and performative market segmentations that both meet and create the consumers they target. Trained in traditional social analysis and survey research, for too long marketing experts have been (and still largely are!) obsessed with the idea that they should know who the consumers are in order to answer their needs. This prejudice has ironically and, paradoxically, efficiently protected consumers from managerial control. Indeed, “real consumers” have remained elusive (Ekström and Brembeck, 2004), far from the distorted image of them produced through innumerable but often vain marketing surveys, focus groups, market ethnographies and so on. Now, digital-focused companies and new data analysts show that knowing consumers is misleading and becomes unnecessary (Cochoy and Mallard, n.d., forthcoming). What matters is knowing the traces produced through market transactions, Internet activity and Web searches, retrieving the hidden associations existing between these traces, and adjusting market offers accordingly, thus creating the consumers that meet and propagate them, along with the “replication” or “synchronization” logics well identified by the authors.

In this sense, both chapters more or less implicitly raise similar political and ethical issues. On the one hand, it is important to remember that the power of big data is greatly exaggerated, for the good reason that big data do not speak by themselves, and that most business actors either do not know what to do with them or do not make great use of them. On the other hand, it is equally important to observe that despite such difficulties, big data analytics are growing, especially in the media and marketing sectors, thanks to the development of third-party players who propose and sell “big data analytics” tools, solutions and services. This growth raises serious issues in terms of privacy ownership, data management and consumer protection (Milyaeva and Neyland, 2016).

Again, though, things are not as simple as one might think. Privacy is not only challenged, but also deeply transformed by the new practices. As Moats and McFall (2016) recently noted, it is unclear whether “our” data are still really ours anymore; these data also belong to our devices, to the technical networks and to the companies that make them exist. Latour and his colleagues go even further by observing that the modern subjects of the digital society are no longer isolated persons, but rather monads (see, for example, the “profiles” of individuals on social media). A profile published on a social media platform can be defined as a nexus that combines the subjective projection of a given spirit concealed in a particular body, as well as the information and links the profile gathers, connects and displays (Latour et al., 2012). Finally, and ironically, protecting data from business has become a business in itself, through the development of data protection companies (Milyaeva and Neyland, 2016; Neyland and Milyaeva, 2016). All in all, these issues raised by the two chapters call for a thorough study of digitalized consumption practices, and the following chapters of the present book contribute in their own way to such a programme.

Devising consumers

The processes of human and non-human entanglement in everyday consumer practices are examined critically and discussed in the chapters under the heading “Devising consumers”, in tribute to McFall’s (2014) book titled Devising Consumption, in which “devising” refers both to how consumption is practically enabled, and to how the design of particular market devices helps to do so. In this section, we examine three different empirical sites: recommendation agents, practices of digital virtual consumption, and ethical smartphone applications. Together, the chapters work as prisms for studying the digitalization of consumer culture and gaining a deeper understanding of many consequences of digitalization.

Vayre, Larnaudie and Dufresne’s chapter, titled “Serendipitous effects in digitalized markets: the case of the DataCrawler recommendation agent”, is a study of how commercial applications and systems inscribe functions designed to enact discovery and chance encounter as part of the shopping process in order to increase levels of purchase in an e-commerce website environment. They develop a case of technologically mediated and digitalized forms of serendipity. Serendipity refers to the accidental discovery of something that the consumer did not know that s/he could want. Paradoxically, in its commercial application form as an inscribed design feature, serendipity works as a funnel towards purchase that leads consumers to discover, explore and select available products or offers. The authors argue that recommendation systems or agents solve problems of the sales process. They develop a theoretically informed argument about the agency of such digital merchant devices and how they shape consumers’ purchase process through the Web shop experience and through interaction with goods recommended by the agent. Results show how a successful journey – where staged serendipity leads to purchase – through a Web shop visit is aided by an active recommendation software that effectively manages consumer dispersion and even increases the consumer’s interest in particular goods. To frame such explorative consumer behaviour, the authors provide the concept of staged serendipity to understand the agency of digital agents and their impact on consumer dispositions (curiosity, surprise and interest).

Devices not only assist and channel consumers, but also rework their dispositions, emotions and values,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1. Digitalizing consumption: Introduction
• 2. Big data challenge for social sciences and market research: From society and opinion to replications
• 3. Towards a rhythm-sensitive data economy
• 4. Serendipitous effects in digitalized markets: The case of the DataCrawler recommendation agent
• 5. Extending the mind: Digital devices and the transformation of consumer practices
• 6. Promoting ethical consumption: The construction of smartphone apps as “ethical” choice prescribers
• 7. Tracing the sex of big data (or configuring digital consumers)
• 8. “Write something”: The shaping of ethical consumption on Facebook
• 9. Digitalized music: Entangling consumption practices
• 10. Marketing and cyberspace: William Gibson’s view
• 11. Digital advertising campaigns and the branded economy
• 12. From the logs of QR code readers: A socio-log-y of digital consumption
• Index