consumer fetish

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Consumer Fetish: Commercial Ethnography and the Sovereign Consumer

Eric J. ArnouldUniversity of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Julien CaylaNanyang Technological University, Singapore and Kedge Business School, France

AbstractWhat is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizational fetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasi-magical fascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about. We offer several contributions. First, we demonstrate the pertinence of (primarily anthropological) theories of the fetish to organizational sensemaking. Second, we describe a distinctive process of organizational market sensemaking that is sensuous, magical, and analogical. Third, we offer a subtle critique of commercial ethnography, a popular research practice that aims to bring ‘real’ consumers to life inside the firm.

Keywordsconsumers, ethnography, fetishism, market research, organizational culture, sensemaking

Organizational life is replete with theories, discussions and images of consuming subjects, and the figure of the ‘sovereign consumer’ has become an important anchor to which organizations tie their activities (Fellesson, 2011; du Gay, 2000; Korczynski & Ott, 2004; Nordgren 2008). Some argue that the ‘sovereign consumer’ has (or should) become the ‘moral centre of the enterprising uni-verse’ (du Gay & Salaman, 1992, p. 632; Kohli & Jaworski, 1990; Narver & Slater, 1990).

Simultaneously, economic forms and activities have become ‘increasingly abstracted from the social contexts and relationships in which transactions occur’ (Carrier, 1998, p. 26; Baudrillard, 1981/1972; Miller, 1998). In organization studies, Alvesson and colleagues (1990; Alvesson, Kärreman, Sturdy, & Handley, 2009) have pointed out that firms increasingly create and manage

Corresponding author:Eric J. Arnould, Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing and Management, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, Odense 5000 C, Denmark.Email: [email protected]

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2 Organization Studies

images rather than substances both within and outside the firm. The economic value of iconic brands that derives from their mythic sign value is a compelling example (Holt, 2003). The virtual realities such abstractions produce are in equal parts managerially useful and baleful in departing ‘from the uncertainty of the real world, with its unanticipated influences and unknowable future’ (Carrier, 1998, p. 7). Nonetheless, idealized economic abstractions are increasingly constitutive of economic life (Leyshon, French, Thrift, Crewe, & Webb, 2005; Mackenzie, 2006; Miller, 1998). Here we suggest that the consumer is also such an abstraction and ask: how is the virtual, sovereign consumer produced?

We demonstrate that consumers operate as organizational fetishes, no less abstract for being material (Flatschart, 2012), that assume magical powers as they circulate into and within firms. Images and avatars of consumers somehow make the market appear as if it were an objective and manageable feature of the organizational environment, simultaneously obscuring their discursive origins just as the commodity fetish’s origins in human labour are obscured (Flatschart, 2012; Latour, 2010; Marx, 1884/1976; Pels, 1998; Schiermer, 2011). Analysing the abstraction of the market into consumer-fetishes, we argue, provides some new insight into organizational market sensemaking.

Sociologists and management scholars have shown enduring interest in the commodity fetish (Dant, 1996; Flatschart, 2012). Gabriel and Lang alluded to the current obsession with consumers in firms, government and academia, stating that ‘the consumer has become a cultural fetish, some-thing that people get obsessed about to the point at which it can dominate their lives’ (Gabriel & Lang, 2006, p. 187), thus inviting examination of the fetishization process. Our data analysis surfaced similarities between the processes of representing consumers in commercial ethnography and fetishization as described in previous theory (Latour, 2010; Pels, 1998; Pietz, 1985, 1987). Our work adds empirical texture to Gabriel and Lang’s suggestion, showing how people are constructed as ‘sovereign consumers’ in organizations.

The rest of our paper is organized as follows. First, we establish the theoretical foundations of our work in organizational and anthropological theory. Second, we present our fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Third, we explain our findings by invoking anthropological theories of the fetish, and highlight the implications of our work for organizational theories of sensemaking. We end our paper with suggestions for further research and concluding remarks on the nature of modern organizations.

Theoretical Foundations

The cult of the sovereign consumer

The ‘cult[ure] of the consumer’ (du Gay & Salaman, 1992, p. 1) has had a profound impact on organi-zations, to the extent that organizational members are now expected to become ‘providers of consumer satisfaction … in the name of profitability’ (du Gay & Salaman, 1992, p. 632; Fellesson, 2011; Hyken, 2009). The consumer has become ‘a god-like figure, before whom markets and politicians alike bow’ (Gabriel & Lang, 2006, p. 1), a sort of disciplinary device complementing other systems of organiza-tional control (Leidner, 1993). Research spanning critical marketing (Cayla & Peñaloza, 2011; Zwick & Cayla, 2011), anthropology (Applbaum, 1998), marketing history (Schwarzkopf, 2011), sociology (Ariztia, 2013; Dávila, 2012; Grandclément & Gaglio, 2011), cultural studies (Nixon, 2009) and organizational studies (Fellesson, 2011; Gabriel & Lang, 2006; Nordgren, 2008) have highlighted the ubiquity and impact of consumer sovereignty on organizational life.

The idea that organizations should be shaped according to consumer needs and requirements brings the consumer into the heart of organizational practice. In this abstraction, the consumer is



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framed not only as a knowledgeable, even rational actor in the organization’s environment, but also as a provider of a rationale for organizational action (Aitken, Ballantyne, Osborne, & Williams, 2006; Hyken, 2009; Schwarzkopf, 2011). The capacities ascribed to consumers make knowledge of them a key organizational asset (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990; Narver & Slater, 1990), as the organi-zation needs to know what the ‘king’ wants from it, and whether he is pleased with its performance. As vividly illustrated in the recent vogue for neuroscience in mainstream marketing (Schneider & Woolgar, 2012), the orthodox myth is that the ‘deeper’ the knowledge and the better able the organization is to adapt to it, the better will be the organization’s chances of profiting from the sovereign’s approval (Fellesson, 2011; Narver & Slater, 1990; Slater & Narver, 1995).

Once managers cloak abstractions from research data in concrete raiment as a consumer fetish, they become enmeshed in vocabularies, organizational arrangements, organizational routines and patterns of action (d’Adderio, 2008; Fellesson, 2011; Nordgren, 2008). Objectified manifestations of particular consumers, the target markets of classical marketing management, then confront other aspects of organizational life (Fellesson, 2011, p. 232). The ‘consumer’ becomes a central figure of organizational discourse that organizational actors invoke to justify organizational structure (du Gay & Salaman, 1992), decision-making (Grandclément & Gaglio, 2011) and global strategy (Cayla & Peñaloza, 2011).

Past studies analyse the emergence of consumer sovereignty historically (Cohen, 2003; Trentmann, 2006) and consider the consequences of the consumer’s power on organizational rela-tions (du Gay & Salaman, 1992) and society at large (Alvesson, 2013). However, past scholarship does not detail the sensemaking practices, technologies and artefacts through which the figure of the ‘sovereign consumer’ is produced. Thus, our research addresses a limit of past scholarship on the consumer sovereignty: it rarely maps the sociomaterial apparatus through which persons are transformed into a sovereign consumer, that is, a figure of power.

Organizational sensemaking

Since Weick’s seminal work (1979, 1988), scholars have detailed how organizational members enact market environments (Christensen, 1997; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2005). Organizational theorists now take it for granted that organizational members ‘construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many ‘objective’ features of their surroundings’ (Weick, 1979, p. 165) so that the environment is not exogenous to organizational sensemaking but instead a part and an outcome of it. Our research contributes to two underdeveloped areas of sensemaking research. First, while work on enactment and organizational sensemaking has considered how firms construct markets and their positions in markets (Santos & Eisenhardt, 2005), one limitation is that the figure of the consumer is largely assumed, at least in Euro-American contexts. This may be due to a certain tendency towards natu-ralizing or universalizing the consumer subject (cf. Kjellberg, 2008). Recent exceptions emanate from literature on market formation, in which talking about and imagining consumers are central sensemaking activities (Oswick & Robertson, 2009). In a Chilean context, Ariztia (2013) shows how advertising agents simultaneously create and qualify consumers discursively, in particular by linking them to clients’ products. Similarly, Dávila (2012) has shown the centrality of consumer representations in producing the North American Latino market. Finally, Cayla and Peñaloza (2012) show how South Asian advertising executives discursively produce the ‘Indian consumer’ from an amalgam of MNC organizational requirements and presumptions about the nature of consumers.

Although neglected in the sensemaking literature, persona-fication has become a feature of corporate activity in recent years (Guðjónsdóttir, 2010; Portigal, 2008). It has become a popular way to describe consumers holistically. In Latin the word persona refers to the mask an actor dons to play




a character. In literary theory, personification refers to the narrative trope through which abstractions are given personalities (e.g. in the way Homer calls fire by the name of Hephaestus; see Paxson, 1994, p. 6). Marketers have employed personification to represent target segments (Dutta-Bergman & Wells, 2002; Reynolds, Crask, & Wells, 1977), and in the world of user-centred design, personas become ‘fictitious, specific, concrete representations of target users’ (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006, p. 11). Persona-fication has become popular in the software industry as an easy way to reference the putative needs of end-users (Cooper, 1999 Guðjónsdóttir, 2010). The enriched theoretical consideration of persona-fication developed here can enrich the sensemaking literature.

Second, Weick’s conceptualization of sensemaking as ‘an issue of language, talk, and commu-nication’ (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld., 2005, p. 409) identifies sensemaking as a purely linguistic and cognitive activity. We consider this a second limitation that an emerging stream of research has begun to rectify by exploring embodied and material dimensions of sensemaking (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012). For instance, Stigliani and Ravasi (2012) show how practices such as visual referencing and artefacts such as sketches facilitate collective sensemaking of design teams and their clients. More specifically, both building on and departing from the classic Weickian approach, we seek to examine sensemaking as a sensuous sociomaterial practice (Orlikowski, 2007) underpinned by specific technologies and artefacts, of which the fetish is especially evocative. We extend recent work on material ways of knowing by conjuring the sensuous, spiritual and magical dimensions of such practices.

The anthropology of organizations

There is a rich tradition in organization studies of borrowing from cultural anthropology to study the ‘idiosyncrasies embedded within human organizations’ and more broadly to advance our ‘social scientific understanding of how managers manage, how organizational change comes about, how micro-politics operate, and how employment relationships are shaped and maintained’ (Luthans et al., 2013, p. 95; see also Wright, 2004, for a review).

Building from this tradition, recent work points out that constructs useful in analysing pre-modern societies such as gift giving (Alter, 2009; Faldetta, 2011), ghosts (Orr, 2014), myth-making (Holt & Cameron, 2010; Nolan, 2011), ritual (Malefyt & Morais, 2010; Smith & Stewart, 2011), totemism (Cayla, 2013), Jungian astrological archetypes (Case & Phillipson, 2004) and spiritualism (Salamon, 2002) play a significant, sometimes strategic, role in organizational life. For instance, it is now well recognized that organizational rituals serve as communication and learning systems helping to channel the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of organizational members into pro-organizational pathways (Malefyt & Morais, 2010; Smith & Stewart, 2011). They are also under-stood as ordering devices, producing status and prestige hierarchies (cf. Patterson, Cavazos, & Washington, 2014) and constituting (or ‘resulting in’) cultural templates for subsequent action and interpretation of behaviours.

Fetishization

Our research extends this work on the magical and spiritual dimensions of organizational life supposedly banished in modernity (Weber, 2003/1904–05) by demonstrating that the fetishization of consumers is a byproduct of market sensemaking through ritualized forms of commercial ethnography.

Previous theory argues that the fetish mediates incommensurate worlds (Pietz, 1985, 1987), whether between humans and a particular transcendent environment (Descola, 2010; Pels, 1998), between the sphere of market and morality (Meyer, 1999; Pietz, 1985, 1987), between labour and



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capital (Marx, 1976; Flatschart, 2012), conscious and unconscious (Freud, 1927), or even scientific theory and scientific practice (Latour, 2010). Common to these uses is the idea of singular, material objects that are animated, are not under human control, and which can ‘deflect the course of human traffic’ (Pels, 1998, p. 95).

We will show that consumer fetishes exhibit these qualities. And we suggest that such fetishization in organizations is related to the virtualization of economic life evoked in our introduction. Specifically, the gulf between the producing firm and the consuming public that characterizes the mass-market economy (Carrier, 1998) justifies investing in corporate ethnography as a mechanism for reducing the distance by materializing the ‘unknown’ consumer (Lien, 2004). Thus, just as the sixteenth-century Portuguese feitiço was a device for making sense of alien trading practices on the Guinea Coast of West Africa (Pietz, 1985, 1987), so too, we argue, is consumer fetish a sensemaking device. Following Latour’s (2010) discussion, we show how fetishization turns everyday people into virtual beings with significant ontological weight for contemporary firms.

Methodology

Our insights on the production of the ‘sovereign consumer’ come from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography, a research approach which is gaining currency as a way to better understand markets (Cayla & Arnould, 2013; Denny & Sunderland, 2014).

Empirical setting

Our fieldwork focuses on ethnographic projects undertaken by commercial organizations. Such projects rely on field research with informants in naturalistic settings to gain a detailed and intimate understanding of consumers’ everyday lives. This is applied research for pecuniary ends rather than basic research conducted for theoretical purposes (Mariampolski, 2006). Market research is the main channel through which knowledge of consumers enters the firm (Moorman, Zaltman, & Deshpandé, 1992) and ethnography has become a key approach to develop this type of market knowledge (Cayla & Arnould, 2013).

Ethnography has become increasingly visible in the business world through the practice of prominent companies such as IBM, Intel, Harley Davidson and Microsoft, and evidenced by recent books (Denny & Sunderland, 2014; Cefkin, 2010; Mariampolski, 2006; Sunderland & Denny, 2007). Conducting commercial ethnography may be driven not merely by the desire to understand its markets, but also to demonstrate to the firm and other stakeholders a commitment to the sovereign consumer, the consumer-centricity required of contemporary organizations (Cefkin, 2010; Fellesson, 2011; du Gay & Salaman, 1992).

Data collection

Our project is not primarily ethnographic. Data come primarily from long interviews with corporate ethnographers and their clients (Spradley, 1979). We interviewed a total of 35 executives working in various types of roles and industries in various locations, a sample diverse enough to capture a high degree of variance in dimensions of interest (Griffin & Hauser, 1993). We recruited inform-ants through snowball sampling relying on referrals and existing contacts within the community of corporate ethnographers (Biernacki & Waldorf, 1981). We conducted interviews in several global cities, with a primary focus on North America. We interviewed where we could negotiate access to ethnographers and their clients, but these cities also constitute major markets for commercial ethnography (see profiles in Table 1). Some organizations we studied operate in the information




technology sector (Barnett, 2005; Phelan, 2013), but our sample also includes advertising agencies, fast-moving consumer products firms and financial services institutions, demonstrating the range of industries that employ ethnographers. Overall, our sample broadly spans commercial ethnography.

Gaining access to freelance ethnographers or those working for research and consulting companies was relatively easy, but we had more difficulty accessing client firms. Organizations are reluctant to share information about their consumer research; often they fear this will be used by competitors or attract negative publicity. Nevertheless, several organizations availed themselves for interviews.

Table 1. Research Participants.

Name Company Position Location

Janet* Upstate Care Senior Research Manager American MidwestEileen* Advertising Agency Global Director of Planning ChicagoRhonda* Upstate Research Company Ethnographer ChicagoLinda* Upstate Consulting VP of Research ChicagoGrace** American Bank Consumer Insights Manager San FranciscoCoby** American Bank Senior User researcher San FranciscoPamela** American Bank User Research Manager San FranciscoAmy** American Bank VP for Mobile Banking San FranciscoPaul** Innovation Consulting Company Principal San FranciscoDiana Software Company Manager User Experience BoulderRay Office Automation User Experience Researcher Silicon ValleySteve Office Automation User Experience Researcher Silicon ValleyKelly White Goods Innovation Manager MichiganSabrina Telecommunications Company User Interaction Researcher BoulderPatti Telecommunications Company User Interaction Researcher BoulderMike Innovation Consulting Firm Founder BoulderJacqui Consumer Electronics Senior Anthropologist ChicagoArtie Consumer Electronics Director of Learning ChicagoPaula Consulting Educator and Consultant ChicagoRajiv Advertising Agency Regional Planning Director ShanghaiAdrian Innovation Consultancy Designer San FranciscoRupert Market Research Company Principal New YorkMalcolm Advertising Agency Vice President New YorkFelicia Upstate Research Company Ethnographer New YorkSteve Upstate Research Company Ethnographer New YorkCaroline Ethnographic Research Company Ethnographer ParisPierre Ethnographic Research Company Ethnographer ParisJacob Ethnographic Research Company Ethnographer ParisDiya Ethnographic Research Company Ethnographer MumbaiPaula Innovation Consulting Company Associate Strategist TorontoPascal Ethnographic Research Company Videographer TorontoMatthew Market Research Company Vice President TorontoJanet British Spirits Consumer Planner SydneyRick Ethnographic Research Company Ethnographer SydneyPeter Ethnographic Research Company Ethnographer Sydney

*Research participants working on Upstate Care ethnographic projects.**Research participants working on American Bank ethnographic projects.



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Where possible, we did multiple interviews within the same firm, and interviewed consultants and researchers who worked on projects together. In contrast to the classic image of the solitary anthro-pologist, commercial ethnographers often work collaboratively with clients, innovation consultants, videographers and recruitment agencies.

Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and 3 hours, with an average length of approximately 90 minutes. The broad themes and questions we discussed with informants are: (1) how is ethnog-raphy being used to inform business decisions; (2) what is the scope of its application to business problems; (3) what are the promises and benefits of ethnography; and (4) what are the challenges, including the ethical challenges, of carrying out ethnographic projects? Consumer fetish was not a focus of our data collection.

As fieldwork progressed, we became more involved in the community of corporate ethnogra-phers, especially through the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. Interviews, secondary research, conference proceedings and online discussions gave us access to ethnographers’ own interpretations of what they do, thereby deepening our understanding of ethnography as practised in the corporate world. Engagement enhanced our ‘participatory sense’ (Van Maanen, 1988), to better understand the vocabulary, methods and objectives of corporate ethnographers. We finished data collection when we felt we had reached theoretical saturation and were able to describe the spectrum of ethnographic projects conducted in the corporate world. All interviews were fully transcribed and, when added to our fieldnotes, yielded more than 1,000 pages of analytic material.

Data analysis

We employed well-known techniques to extract emic themes from our data corpus. This involved the usual identification of key concepts and native categories (open coding) in our data, then domain-specific metaphors and other semantic relationships (axial coding) developed through a combination of inductive and deductive thinking. Eventually, through further selective coding, this produced the processual model adopted in our findings section and the catalogues of examples also excerpted in the findings section (Charmaz, 2006; Lofland & Lofland, 1994; Spradley, 1979).

After the first iteration of data analysis, we found that commercial ethnography was similar to academic ethnography in that it is structured as narrative (Cayla & Arnould, 2013). However, while storytelling was useful to explain what ethnography does for corporations, puzzling elements of our empirical material not explained by narrative theory remained. For example, we were surprised by the ubiquity and focus on video in commercial ethnography, given the predominantly textual modes of representation in academic ethnographic projects; by recurring references to video’s ability to bring ‘consumers to life’ and produce ‘real consumers’; by the descriptions of ethnographic videos of consumers as quasi-magical and powerful; and, the spectral quality of commercial personas haunting meetings and shaping organizational activity (Orr, 2014).

We treated these puzzling aspects of our data as ‘breakdowns’ (Alvesson &d Kärreman, 2007, p. 1266) that existing theories such as narrative theory could not adequately explain. Iterative data analysis became a kind of puzzle-solving in which we enlisted new theory to resolve these break-downs. Consistent with Alvesson and Kärreman’s suggestion, we enlisted various streams of organizational and social theory attending to the power of artefacts, in our case video and persona. As we iterated between our data and theoretical frames, the importance that our informants attached to bringing consumers to life started to resonate with anthropological scholarship on the fetish, (Dant, 1996; Ellen, 1988; Latour, 2010; Meyer, 1999; Pels, 1998; Pietz, 1985, 1987; Schiermer, 2011). As we analysed the parallels between the fetish in anthropological theory and the organiza-tional process of fetishizing consumers, the fetish proved a useful heuristic framework to resolve the breakdowns cited above. In the end, our analysis brought together the theory of the fetish as a kind of boundary object, and fetishization as a type of sensuous sensemaking activity, that is, a




mode of transforming research data into market knowledge, reflecting organizational processes not previously accounted for in the literatures on sensemaking or market research.

Findings: The Fetishization of Consumers

Based on our fieldwork, we suggest four main sensemaking processes involved in consumer fetishization: (1) capturing consumers through the staging of encounters with selected research informants; (2) materializing consumers through various technologies and devices; (3) animating consumer-fetishes with the help of narrative techniques; and (4) losing of control where the locus of power shifts between organizational members and the consumer-fetish.

Capturing consumers

The commercial ethnographer as shaman. In the way that tribal shamans mediate between different planes of reality and are described as world makers (Overing, 1990; Schechner, 2011), commercial ethnographers are seen by their clients as providing unique, even magical, access to the world of consumption (Phelan, 2013). An anthropologist working in an advertising agency in New York described how he had become a guide and teacher for a client trying to understand the world of food consumption:

Typically they [clients] like going out. They are very happy, they are excited about it. I am called back often. Our client, a food company, has just multiplied their projects with us. And you become a little like a guru – and it’s kind of fun. They call me Dr. Malcolm, you know. [Laughs] We go out, do things together. (Malcom, VP Advertising Agency)

In this instance the ethnographer’s position as a ‘guru’ comes from his domain-specific knowledge and his PhD (‘They call me Dr. Malcolm’), but also his numerous field trips where he guides executives within the world of everyday people, accompanying them to their homes and helping decipher their consumption behaviour. From such deciphering, commercial ethnographers are meant to produce what informants almost uniformly call ‘consumer insights’, using a visual metaphor to describe the work of ethnographic market sensemaking.

Even as organizational members tried to ‘see’ consumers, at times, the confrontation with con-sumers in the flesh seemed to trigger surprising anxieties. In one of the organizations we studied, the distance between firm and consumer was perceived to be so great, and the world of consumers so mythologized, that it induced awe, wonder and fear. An anthropologist working for this American telecommunications company talked about not being allowed to actually meet any consumers, despite having been hired to develop a fine-grained analysis of the telecommunications market:

So I put together a proposal to actually talk to the consumers who were using the cell phones. And what was interesting about that is that I was absolutely not allowed to talk to any consumers in person. They freaked out at the fact that I would actually talk to real people. They were worried about lawsuits; they were worried about all kinds of things. And it just wasn’t in their model. (Patti, User Interaction Researcher, Telecommunications Company)

Here we are reminded of both the anthropological insight that fetishization originally came out of the fear and disgust provoked by conflict between the incommensurate Portuguese and West African religious systems (Latour, 2010; Pels, 1998;) and the psychoanalytical insight that indi-vidual fetishization comes from the fear of dealing with the unknown (Lacan & Granoff, 2003). In the context of commercial ethnography, the ethnographer is called upon to deal with the malaise



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invoked by the unmanageable consumer (Gabriel & Lang, 2006), as the example above illustrates. In the face of unease and fear of the uncontrollable, unpredictable consumer, commercial ethnog-raphers play a shamanic, mediating role.

The consumer as exotic being. The motivation behind ethnographic work and the justification for the role of the ethnographer as shaman both arise from the belief that consumers are different and that their lives are difficult to imagine from the perspective of the firm, implicitly the seat of rational, fact-based action (Alvesson, 1990, 2013; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). In the following quote, a user experience manager working at American Bank talked about remembering that she is ‘not the typical consumer’:

You need to remember that you are not the typical consumer … I need to realize and remember I am not the typical consumer. I am not the person who I am developing this solution for. (Coby, Senior User Researcher, American Bank)

If consumers are fundamentally different from managers like Coby, the stage is set to watch those differences at work. So the term ‘consumer safari’ often appears in the promotional write-ups of market research companies selling ethnographic services, as if ethnographers were about to meet wild animals. On a website advertising ethnographic services, a consumer safari is described in the following terms:

A week after these ‘in-home’ interviews, the client was personally introduced to his target market during a ‘meet & greet’ session. This informal meeting served as an ice-breaker between client and consumer, enabling them to more easily interact over the following days’ activities. (http://www.g-i-m.ch/en/case-studies/on-safari-with-your-consumer.html)

Hence ethnography involves a distinctive kind of performance (meet and greet; ice-breaker; con-sumption talk and activities) that recasts the people commercial ethnographers and their clients recruit as ‘consumers’. A commercial ethnographer mentioned an extreme case of such safaris:

The last one was for a CEO who was supposed to go shopping with a consumer. And it’s funny because these guys they haven’t done their own shopping in a long time. So you recruit a consumer. And then there are all those people working with him [the CEO] who argue about the right kind of consumer, they are afraid of what that person might say to the CEO, that it may go against their own interests. (Felicia, Ethnographer, Upstate Research Company)

Notice again the element of fear in the encounter with the ‘wild’ consumer. We also witness in the quote above the staging of the encounter in a scene (the supermarket) and a backstage area where various executives prepare the encounter (Goffman, 1959). Our findings on such staging here resonate with Callon’s remarks that marketing transforms people into consumers by pushing them ‘onto a clearly demarcated “stage” which has been specially prepared and fitted out’ (Callon, 1998, p. 253).

In sum, ethnographic work brings back reports of the strange and exotic world of consumers, and ethnographers oscillate between an exotic framing (e.g. the marketing of consumer safaris) and the argument that consumers are ‘not weird’; between the construction of an otherness made salient through the organizational member’s gaze that the screen facilitates (‘these people are weird’) and the effort to create a sense of intimacy with the consumer by having organizational members try to see the world from the consumer’s perspective. This all suggests that the ‘consumer’ is produced as a mediator between the inside of the firm and the firm’s raw external environment.


http://www.g-i-m.ch/en/case-studies/on-safari-with-your-consumer.html

http://www.g-i-m.ch/en/case-studies/on-safari-with-your-consumer.html



The materialization of consumers

Various technologies and objects (video, PowerPoint presentations, cardboard cut-outs, posters) allow organizations to bring the consumer materially into the corporation, what we call the materi-alization of consumers. The visualization and the personification of consumers we describe below are specific techniques of materialization, part of a socio-technical apparatus of market sensemaking. These techniques are similar to what Latour calls the prosthesis of the laboratory that transforms something made by human hands into an apparently autonomous material fact (Latour, 2010, p. 19).

Visualization. Consistent with previous research (Sunderland & Denny, 2007, p. 36) we found visual techniques to be ubiquitous across our data on commercial ethnographic projects. For instance, an executive working for a household care company talked about her team ritualistically videotaping every consumer encounter:

When I say we videotape everything, we video tape e-ve-ry-thing [emphasis in the original]. Whenever we’re talking to a consumer, whether it’s in their home or in the grocery store, if we get permission from a store to do consumer work, we’re videotaping … I purchased a video camera for our team, because we videotape everything now. (Janet, Senior Research Manager, Upstate Care)

Similarly, the urge to capture and stock the consumer asset as a reassuring artefact is vividly expressed in the excerpt below:

I mean there is always this aspiration, that they’re gonna watch the videos … and you know over the course of study they already spend more time than they can possibly do, on top of their regular work. But they feel like if they’ve got those videos then you know after our engagement’s done with them, they’re kind of safe. It’s more an artefact of reality than audio would be. That’s what I think they think. (Paul, Principal, Innovation Consulting Company)

Thus, the systematic filming and viewing of consumer encounters becomes a material memory in facilitating future sensemaking exercises (see Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012). In addition, the sense that something real is being performed emerges in the collection of these artefacts. In the same way that the fetish reassures the subject (‘they’re kind of safe’) who does not want to deal with the full impact of a harsh reality (Žižek, 2003, p. 14), video traces of consumers seem to comfort organi-zational members.

As we already outlined, these consumer encounters are heavily framed, and videography operates with its own set of rules to stage consumer encounters. Hence, the majority of corporate ethnographic films are shot to enact a specific type of consumer who is there to ‘give quotes’:

Recently we went into people’s homes for some research and we filmed everything from where they kept the product to what kind of glasses they served it in. We filmed them giving us quotes and the purpose of that is really to bring the consumer to life when we come back into the Brand team. (Janet, Consumer Planner, British Spirits)

And because consumer talk is an essential artefact of the research process, the ethnographic project is designed from the start to enrol extroverted and outgoing consumers:

And some people, actually respondents that are more extrovert and outgoing – you know this better – and so, you almost have to recruit that type. Because respondents who are typically very introverted are not at ease – it’s more difficult to get them to loosen up … At times we have made sort of high-end film deliverables. (Linda, VP of Research, Upstate Consulting)



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Capturing not merely the demographics or images but the voice of the consumer has become a required sensory resource for sensemaking (Coulter & Zaltman, 1995). But as Pels (1998, p. 94) tellingly observes, the fetish is supposed to speak and act, and this speaking is evidence of its autonomous material presence; so too the consumer fetish?

Excerpting interviews and fieldwork. Consumer quotes are valued insofar as they fit in specific organ-izational systems of knowledge creation (Kaplan, 2011; Schoeneborn, 2013). Thus, one executive talked about PowerPoint as a ritualized delivery mechanism:

And at that time, the really big thing within our company was in reporting anything, it had to be PowerPoint. The medium had to be PowerPoint. And the other thing was that you had to break everything down, into little bullet points with quotes from consumers that would illustrate points. (Sabrina, User Interaction Researcher, Telecommunications Company)

As artefacts of reality that can be inserted in a PowerPoint presentation, amalgamated video clips of exemplary consumers become ubiquitous features of finished ethnographic projects. These snip-pets, like the wood, bits of string, nails, mirrors, fabric and liquids that materially compose African fetishes, are essential rhetorical elements that establish the validity of the ethnographic insights:

So the output was a PowerPoint presentation plus evidence video. What I mean by a trace evidence video is little clips – little individual clips which in and of themselves provide some sort of compelling evidence for the client. (Rick, Ethnographer, Ethnographic Research Company)

Overall, video and consumer quotes help materialize the consumer within the walls of the corpora-tion by operating as sensuous forms of market figuration. The artefacts, images and recordings make the consumer real, and become indisputable evidence of the truth of the insights delivered by the ethnographic shaman. The fact that they fit the sensemaking technology of the corporation via the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation seems to underline the skill of the ethnographer.

Persona-fication. Persona-fication has become a feature of corporate sensemaking in recent years (Portigal, 2008). We found persona a ubiquitous product of consumer ethnography. A user experience manual outlines how personas can guide work because they help ‘keep the users in mind’:

Collecting all sorts of data about your users can be incredibly valuable, but sometimes you can lose sight of the real people behind all the statistics … By putting a face and a name on the disconnected bits of data from your user research and segmentation work, personas can help ensure that you keep the users in mind during the design process. (Garrett, 2010, p. 54)

As stated in the above quote, persona-fication consists in ‘putting a face and a name on discon-nected bits of data’. Personas are named; detailed fictional narratives describe their lives, their likes and dislikes. These details are then inscribed in booklets and posters that adorn company walls. Consider a report on the use of personas at Microsoft (Paul, 2010):

Meet Chris Green and Colin Wilcox. They’re typical IT folks working in small and midsize businesses. … Bill Laing, Microsoft corporate vice president, Windows Server and Solutions Division, explains: “Microsoft needs to be clear on ‘who are we building this for’ and ‘how are we meeting the needs of these people?’ Personas offer ‘a way to focus the conversation … almost as if the consumer were in the room.’”

See a ‘picture’ of persona Chris Green in Figure 1.




Ford also used personas in the design of the Ford Verve (Patton, 2009):

‘Antonella is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties. She is also completely imaginary. Ford is using characters like Antonella to bring a human element to the dry statistical research drawn from polls and interviews. … They are also like avatars, those invented characters used in online games and forums to symbolize a participant’s personality.’

Notice the use of the term ‘avatar,’ which denotes an active agent, not merely a passive representation. A picture of this persona is shown in Figure 2. In the original image the colour scheme of the car is identical to the colour scheme associated with the persona: greys and pink tones predominate. It is as if artefact and image constitute the hybrid persona.

In the following quote, an ethnographer recounts how she became involved in a ritualized persona-fication project for a high-tech company as part of the company’s drive to be ‘consumer-centred’:

So a VP comes in and says, ‘yeah, we need to be consumer focused, consumer-centred, and we need to use personas because they’re really awesome’. … In my mind, some of the research has become … it’s kind of gone the way of focus groups, where everybody is like, ‘Oh you need to do a focus group’, but nobody really knows why you need to do it, or exactly how to do it or what you are actually supposed take from it. (Patti, User Interaction Researcher, Telecommunications Company)

In sum, ethnographic data is used ritualistically to build personas enriched with imagistic and narrative detail. As we can see from our data, personas are unique compositions of heterogeneous elements, and as materialized in text, photos, video, pamphlets and cut-outs, irreducibly material. Overall, we find that these artefacts and technologies all help sustain the work of materialization, i.e. the material externalization that structures sensemaking. Personas breathe life into abstract market data, just as the Dogon artist breathes life into his statues (Leloup, 2011) and shamans breathe life into the fetish.

Animation

The etymology of animation (from the Latin animare) refers to a process of transformation, of endowing an object with life. In the same way ethnographers and their clients strikingly suggest that ethnography’s goal is to animate and enliven:

Figure 1. A Microsoft Persona.Photo used with permission.




[Ethnography] brings their consumers to life for them. (Felicia, Ethnographer, Upstate Research Company)

When the research company came back to present the findings they had a PowerPoint presentation but embedded in the PowerPoint presentation was quotes to bring to life what the consumer had said. (Grace, Consumer Insights Manager, American Bank)

Ethnography is central in helping executives develop layers of narrative that bring ‘consumers to life.’ No effort is spared in the quest to animate the persona with narrative detail:

Then the baton passes to us and we say ‘we’re going to go deep on these segments now’. So we will go out to maybe five countries and we’ll spend a day and a half with each person who represents that segment. We’ll do a two-hour-long introductory interview and then we’ll come back and spend a whole day with them, sometimes from 7 a.m. to 10 o’clock at night. So we collect this very rich contextual data and we bring it back to the office. (Diana, Manager of User Experience, emphasis added)

The language executives used to talk about the benefits of ethnography is telling. It is the spoken word of the consumer that simulates the market and brings life to the persona, and video plays a central role in this process in making the ‘quote come alive’:

So, I think that video is often like the quote come alive. It’s like the consumer come alive. So that’s one reason. It has a verity kind of quality about it that really works. (Rhonda, Ethnographer, Upstate Research Company, emphasis added)

It is as if the words consumers speak represent a kind of contagious magic (Fernandez & Lastovicka, 2011); once uttered and attached to the marketers’ simulation, the word confers the qualities of the original on the persona:

To me, just like a picture says a thousand words, having someone say it on video really brings it alive in people’s minds where they can relate better to it and therefore it is just a better communication tool. (Janet, Senior Research Manager, Upstate Care, emphasis added)

Figure 2. A Hybridized Image of Car and Persona.Photo used with permission.




Similarly in the following quote, Linda, an innovation consultant, talks about a project where her company was asked to bring ‘a segment to life’. She mentions the selective recruitment of exemplars and the careful staging employed to craft personas, especially when the end product is to be circulated widely within a firm (‘show it to all their sales staff’):

If the objective is really about sort of bringing a segment to life we are going to be very picky about who we talk to, sort of find the exemplary person. On a few occasions, when clients explicitly state that they want a high-end deliverable that they want to show it to all their sales staff, or to all their executive team, we’ll rent specialized equipment, we’ll work with a videographer, we’ll stage it much more. (Linda, VP of Research, Upstate Consulting, emphasis added)

Notice here intimations that the persona is intended to circulate within the firm, as we discuss further below.

Some ethnographers recognize how the imperative to characterize the persona can lead to caricature, but they endure:

I mean when I see what people do with personas they do use cutsie names like Harriet the housewife. They use stock photography … It’s so easy to use fake unreal data to instantiate this caricature that you end up. It’s just too easy to make something that removes context. It’s a lot harder to sort of create a natural portrait of somebody. (Paul, Principal, Innovation Consulting Company)

From our findings so far emerges the picture of market representations that take on a life of their own, avatars that mobilize organizational resources in their creation and circulation (‘to show it to all their sales staff, or to all their executive team’).

Ambiguity of control

Past research identifies loss of unilateral control as the final stage of fetishization (Ellen, 1988). Ambiguity of control refers to the ambiguous power relations between the person and the fetish whereby the fetish is progressively endowed with agency. Indeed, once personas are ‘given life’, i.e., animated within the firm, they literally take on a life of their own. They become boundary objects that circulate in discourse (Fellesson, 2011) and in practice. Thus, Sabrina talked about personas, produced as part of a project, ‘floating’ in the corporation:

Somebody had started the persona project a few years ago, so they were kind of floating but nobody really knows what to do with them. (Sabrina, User Interaction Researcher, Telecommunications Company)

In the same way that PowerPoint enables the ‘travel of facts’ (Kaplan, 2011), personas and other forms of market representations become floating signifiers without particular meanings, other than the articulation of consumer-centricity:

If you just think about in terms of my consumers some of these things like the personas that they have to be like erected and created and so that they take on a life. So that they live. (Rhonda, Ethnographer, Upstate Research Company)

Personas also become like other organizational ghosts (Orr, 2014) haunting the corporation. In the following quote Coby talks about the bank’s personas ‘sitting’ with other executives:

But basically, like the designers sit down with the personas and the lines of business and us. And we kind of walk through what they’re thinking about and look at it from the different personas. (Coby, Senior User Researcher, American Bank)




Hence personas become organizational actors, sitting with other organizational members. They operate as embodied, circulating objects directing strategic action.

Importantly, the visualization of the sovereign consumer through personification or other forms of visual representation trigger ‘belief’ that may trump other forms of knowledge about markets:

I have always tried as my deliverable to include video clips that help express the insight. And a part of that, it’s important reasons for the client to believe as well. Because you can argue with what the words on the page say but you can’t argue with the video. (Matthew, Vice President, Market Research Company)

Here we are reminded that a visual mode of knowing develops rhetorical power through the qualities of immediacy and vividness of words and images. Thus, as Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary and Van Leeuwen (2013) argue, the ‘facticity of visuals is further enhanced by the fact that argumentation disappears. Predication too, is no longer explicit, eliminating the call for a response of either agree-ment or disagreement’ (p. 496). The visual simply is.

Once consumer-fetishes begin to circulate as boundary objects through companies (recall the quote evoking the sales force above) they start exerting influence (‘being used’ to ‘anchor’ experiential reality):

Our business partners and people outside of the groups know Philippe and Jane and Harry and Sue. And so it’s a – I guess – I mean they are, I think, being used in the way that they’re supposed to, which is like, you know, they’re the experience anchors. (Grace, Consumer Insights Manager, American Bank)

Thus consumer fetish begins to ‘anchor’ the action of ‘partners and people outside of the groups’ that created it. Diana, a user experience manager at a software company, explained how personas had become ‘really powerful’ in her company:

Personas are really powerful in our company. You take a consumer segment, and you give them a name and a face and you make that person come alive. For engineering teams this is really powerful, we have something like 10,000 engineers in our engineering team and we want to make sure that everyone understands the consumer. (Diana, Manager of User Experience, Software Company)

Hence at Diana’s firm, the persona has come to stand for ‘the consumer’ and to direct product development teams.

Consumer-fetishes in the shape of personas provide power both relative to other members of a marketing team and over the market that the persona represents in the company. Malcolm describes how organizational members start taking ownership of persona as boundary objects and how the fetish’s power starts impacting various firm actors:

When we show the film, the client says [lowered voice] ‘Oh, I went to that ethnography, that’s my person. That’s my person, and I was there.’ So there’s a real strong sense of identification – they are excited, and they buy into it, and they believe it even more. So, somehow the truth they have experienced it, they have seen it again and then they have the power – the client – to tell their other people about it, and validate it. (Malcolm, VP of Planning, Advertising Agency)

Thus, managers buy into and believe in the persona as an object of firm action, but then this image becomes a ‘power’ that may be exerted. Once materialized and animated, the fetish becomes part of a mutual entanglement with organizational members, where the vitality and power of the fetish passes along to organizational members who feel ‘excited’ and use the power of the fetish to ‘tell their other people about it’.




As evidence of this power, in one of the companies we studied, a telecommunications company involved in selling IT equipment to other companies, one of the personas, ‘Mitch’, had become a prevailing driver of the firm’s strategic organization. In the following quote, Sabrina, one of the ethnographic consultants working for the company, describes how she asked clients whether Mitch corresponded to any of the existing buyers of IT equipment:

And so, we start talking to these guys, trying to say, ‘Well do you know anybody like Mitch in your company?’, describing this guy, and they’d say, ‘Well, we’d never let anyone that junior actually touch any of that stuff – are you kidding?’ But nobody wanted to hear this because they had several groups who were designing products for Mitch. And when we told them [that Mitch did not fit], you know, one of those senior people came right out and said, ‘Well you know, you’d have to cut out several groups if that’s true.’ (Sabrina, User Interaction Researcher, Telecommunications Company)

Hence in this firm the consumer fetish Mitch has become a powerful object circulating within the firm, structuring organizational work and influencing organizational dynamics, even if no one at this company could ever find a real ‘Mitch’. As shown in Figure 3, personas literally sit with managers as they work, and inform decisions.

In the organization pictured above, personas take the form of cardboard representations. Notice how the personified character appears to watch over the employee as an embodiment of the ‘sovereign consumer’. In sum, once personas are animated through narrative construction and materialization; once personas are endowed with needs, likes and dislikes; and once they have come to represent the market within the walls of the corporation, they become agentic boundary objects. These materialized representations, these personas, become ‘consumer fetishes’, personi-fied embodiments of the consumer that facilitate and structure market sensemaking.

Discussion

Our discussion is organized to highlight our main contributions. First, rather than reference the fetish tangentially, we foreground the fetish construct in organizational life and the processes through which consumer-fetishes are produced. Second, we suggest that fetishization constitutes a

Figure 3. Photo of Persona Developed in a Corporate Setting with permission from Rósa Guojónsdóttir.Photo used with permission from Rósa Guojónsdóttir.




distinctive type of organizational sensemaking, and is not a pre-modern anachronism. Rather, the consumer fetishization that is central organizational market sensemaking is one of several ante-modern ‘shadowy realities’ (O’Doherty, de Cock, Rehn, & Ashcraft, 2013, p. 1427) that ironically lie at the heart of organizational technologies such as videography. Third, we discuss logical exten-sions of this research based on its contributions and limitations.

Extending theories of the fetish to organizational contexts

Our findings detail several moments in the process of consumer fetishization, helping explain how the sovereign consumer comes to be endowed with power. Consulting theories of the fetish in anthropology (Ellen, 1988; Meyer, 1999; Pietz, 1985, 1987; Pels, 1998), we find similarities between the fetishization of consumers and the fetishization of inanimate objects. Specifically, we depict four moments in the fetishization of consumers: (1) the consumer-fetish as a boundary object mediating between the organization and an imagined market; (2) the fetish as a material embodiment of the market; (3) the animation of consumer-fetishes into sensuous enlivened objects; 4) the agentic dimension of consumer-fetishes as they come to influence organizational members.

First is the point that historically the fetish surfaces in the process of translation between incom-mensurate cultural worlds (Latour, 2010; Pietz, 1985, 1987; Pels, 1998). In the Age of Discovery, early modern Europeans invoked the ‘fetish’ to make sense of the behaviour of an exotic ‘other’. Similarly, commercial ethnography shamanistically mediates between worlds (Overing, 1990): the world of the corporate client and the exotic world of living consumers. Consumer-fetish emerges out of the imagined boundary between the organization and the market, from the virtualism previewed above, which casts the individual consumer as an exotic being ready for commercial ethnography to discover and capture. What is paradoxical here is that even as executives try to make ‘consumers come alive’ inside the walls of the corporation, they create a new form of distance, the ‘different’ consumer that exists on the other side of the video screen (Lien, 2004).

Second, fetishization happens through the reconstitution of people as consumer persona in material form. Under the imperative of the ‘real’, ethnographic researchers ‘bring back’ heteroge-neous source material that is crafted into material figurations. These hybrid, material figurations are formed of video excerpts, PowerPoint presentations, artefactual evidence, recontextualized interview excerpts, pamphlets, advertisements and even cardboard cut-outs. The material nature of the fetish is important, as consumer fetishization represents a distinctive, material form of market sensemaking. As brought to life inside the firm, personas are similar to ‘sham objects’ (Baudrillard, 1998/1970, p. 31) or ‘quasi-objects’ (Schiermer, 2011), i.e., objects that offer an abundance of signs that they are real but are not. Thus, they are not dissimilar from pseudo-events and pseudo-structures (Alvesson, 1990). Such concatenations of signs also induce a state of happiness for, like miraculous medical treatments, they symbolize success (Frank, 2000), success of the research enterprise, of effective segmentation and targeting.

Third, animation involves ‘projecting animate characteristics onto objects’ (Fernandez & Lastovicka, 2011, p 279). Animation refers to the process of imparting life and vitality to the material embodiments described above. Traditional Dogon sculptors display their expertise when they ‘give life’ to the image, endowing it with some kind of vitality (Leloup, 2011). In the same way, ‘consumer fetishes’ – i.e. the manifestation of consumers in the form of personas – incarnate markets for organizations (Pietz, 1985, p. 7). From this perspective, manifestations of consumers are border objects, liminal between the organization and the market. As our findings illustrated, they are also transformed within organizational settings into objects of desire and value, a value which at times seems somehow inordinate or at least surprising to the outside observer. Personas are hybrids, mixing organizational beliefs, in the way personas incarnate beliefs about ideal consumers, and physical properties, in the way that personas are presented materially as an external projection of who the sovereign consumer is.




Finally, (Ellen, 1988) refers to the ambiguous power relationship that arises between the maker and the fetish that we also observed in corporate settings. The fetishization of consumers starts with the desire of organizational members to exert control and power over an unpredictable element of the environment: their consumers (cf. Gabriel & Lang, 2006). Yet as the fetish circulates between departments within organizations, it becomes endowed with the power to ‘deflect the course of’ organizational dynamics (Pels, 1998, p. 95).

We show how through the immediacy and the vividness of the images projected on a screen, the consumer-fetish provides evidence of the sovereign consumer’s alterity and also its ‘facticity’ (Meyer et al., 2013, p. 496). In turn, the facticity of consumer-fetishes presented as visual artefacts have rhe-torical and performative power. Indeed, once animated, personas begin to exert power at a distance, not only in the crafting of consumer ‘solutions’, but also in influencing how subsequent research is moulded to confirm and deepen knowledge of the fetish, and in circulating through firms and across departments to ‘anchor’ the behaviour of managers and employees in service to the consumer-fetish. We describe the presence of the consumer-fetish, sitting with organizational members, floating within the corporation. Thus, we suggest that the consumer-fetish produces a form of ‘non-intentional capacity’ (Borgerson, 2005, p. 440) that shapes organizational dynamics and sensemaking.

Particularly surprising in our fieldwork was the quasi-magical power of consumer-fetishes that seemed to trump other forms of discourse, and the fascination that seemed to take hold of execu-tives when faced with consumer-fetishes in video format. To make sense of these complex and at times contradictory organizational behaviours, we are reminded that the fetish ‘enables the subject to live without fear’ (Böhm & Batta, 2010, p. 350; Lacan & Granoff, 2003), insights affirmed in consumer contexts (Meyer, 1999).

Similarly, the fetishization of consumers alleviates organizational fears and anxieties over an object constructed as ‘other’, fickle, and exotic (Gabriel & Lang, 2006; Lien, 2004), which needs to be tamed with the help of modern-day shamans. Consumer fetishization allows the organiza-tional subject to live with the illusion of control. In the same way as the commodity fetish conceals the alienated origin of things, the consumer-fetish conceals the alienated origin of the ‘consumer’ as commercial research object, by instead foregrounding the discourse of ethnography as naturalis-tic inquiry with ‘real’ consumers in native habitats (see Marx, 1976/1884, pp. 171–2). Our empirical findings contrast markedly with previous conceptions of market orientation asserting the integration of consumers into strategy as a relatively rational process (Narver & Slater, 1990; Slater & Narver, 1995).

Fetishization as organizational sensemaking

In line with Weick’s insights on organizational sensemaking, we show that through the practice of simulating the market visually, audibly and materially, the consumer as ‘other’ becomes part of an enacted environment (Weick, 1988), that is, an environment that is made rather than simply expe-rienced. In other words, the four moments of fetishization are also four moments of the process through which organizations make sense of their markets, transforming people into virtual con-sumer persona. However, our findings also extend Weick’s analysis of sensemaking as a cognitive process, to show that sensemaking, as featured in our findings on consumer fetishization, is also material, magical and analogical.

Material and magical. Commercial ethnography produces material embodiments of virtual ‘con-sumers’. Our work details how sociomaterial enactment happens through a series of sub-processes – capturing, excerpting, visualizing, materializing, personifying, animating and losing control over persona – that produces the consumer-fetish. Previous research has already highlighted the




material dimension of sensemaking, in the way that artefacts such as the prototype rooms of imagined consumers (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012) or technologies such as PowerPoint (Kaplan, 2011) shape sensemaking. We extend this stream of research in two main ways.

First, our research highlights that the materialization of the sovereign consumer has specific rhetorical qualities that are tied to the objects and technologies used in the process of market sense-making. For instance, consumer visits and video representations have an emotional intensity, imme-diacy and vividness that contrast with the flat linearity of textual narration or analytics (see Gabriel, 2004; Meyer et al., 2013; Styhre, 2004). Consumer videos, sometimes of those actually visited (‘my consumer’) evoke bodily and emotional experience, circumventing intellectual understanding. Persona-fication as a mode of knowing is not solely a mode of external outsourcing of consumer knowledge (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012, p. 1251), but rather a sensuous, experiential form of knowing that organizational members develop in the presence of shamanic consumer ethnographers. Hanging out in a ‘teenager’s room’ decorated with ‘posters of Avril Lavigne’ and ‘paint on the wall’ (Stigliani &Ravasi, 2012, p. 1242) reflects a mode of knowing that is best approached in terms of aesthetics, that is, by considering the ‘material process of mediation of knowledge through the senses’ (Pels, 1998, p. 100). Here we are reminded of Marx’s conceptualization of fetishism as the ‘religion of sensuous desire’ (cited in Pels, 1998, p. 101), in the way the fetish imposes its sensuousness onto the human subject, evoking passion, fancy and greed. Our findings highlight a form of material sense-making not previously theorized in organizational theory or critical marketing studies.

Second, our findings on the qualities of the ‘consumer’ show that this is an ambiguous quasi-object (Schiermer, 2011; Slater, 2014). It is one which, from a post-hoc perspective, we show can be validly interpreted as an objective product of the research process. However, it becomes such as it is both constructed and ‘stabilized’ through the material cues from which it is assembled. But the persona also appears as an instantiation of a mythical idea, the sovereign consumer to which con-temporary firms are exhorted to commit. The object constructed to control the environment, the consumer-fetish, gains power and reverses the original relationship between subject and object; it becomes a virtual boundary object with ‘enough identity and stability to keep its shape across different situations and practices’ (Slater, 2014, p. 100), as exemplified by the ‘Mitch’ persona. The erasure of the subject–object dichotomy and the passage from an obvious construction to an obdurate corporate reality makes the consumer-fetish an example of what Latour (2010) calls the ‘factish’. This is precisely the ambiguity from which the classical fetish drew its power.

Finally, all this shows that organizational sensemaking through material forms is not reducible to the cognitive work of information integration (Kaplan, 2011; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012), but is also a magical process. In the spirit of Latour’s (2010) ‘symmetrical anthropology’ that critiques the claims of modernity which contemporary organizations assert, recent work points out that constructs useful in explaining phenomena associated with pre-modern societies can clarify processes that play a significant, sometimes strategic, role in organizational life (Case & Phillipson, 2004; Malefyt & Morais, 2010; Salamon, 2002). Our research extends this work on the magical and spiritual dimensions of organizational life into the realm of market sensemaking.

Analogical. If consumer quasi-objects – personas – are fetishes or factishes, our analysis leads to a reflection on the nature of the knowledge firms develop when they produce such objects. Drawing from writing about the fetish (Latour, 2010; Meyer, 1999; Pels, 1998; Pietz 1985, 1987) and people–object relations in anthropology (Descola, 2005, 2010), we argue that consumer fetishiza-tion represents an ontological strategy that organizational members and ethnographers adopt in thinking about and constructing markets that differs from the essentially representational strategies enshrined in traditional positivist or ‘Romantic’ modes of inquiry (Alvesson, 2003; Styhre, 2004; Van Maanen, 1988).




In his discussion of four modes of human figuration, that is, subject–object relationships, Descola (2010) describes one system he calls ‘analogical figuration’. To make order, to create continuity within a myriad of interwoven differences, apparently diverse material and visual elements are drawn together into a whole. Notable for our purposes is the assertion that analogical figuration brings together and gives disparate elements coherence primarily through narrative. In analogical thinking the narrative principle that presides over the assemblage takes precedence over the apparent diversity of elements that compose it. In other words, analogical figuration assembles; it does not represent. The point here is that analogical thinking is the foundation of the fetish as theorized in anthropological thought (Ellen, 1988; Pels, 1998; Pietz, 1985, 1987; Schiermer, 2011). The fact that persona are named, portrayed and even given biographies shows that this practice extends to organizational market sensemaking.

We suggest that the fetish construct adds to understanding the nature of knowledge in organi-zations as it cuts out a definable category of figurative, analogical knowledge from ‘the residual category of tacit knowledge’ (Styhre, 2004, pp. 178, 183; Werr & Stjernberg, 2003). Thus, the consumer-fetish as analogical knowledge becomes part of the recognizable distributed organiza-tional resources that comprise corporate knowledge, a form particularly appropriate to the virtual organization.

Limitations and future research

Our presentation is troubled by the absence of participant observation data that would have allowed us to trace in more granular detail the emergence and circulation of consumer-fetishes within firms and the twists and turns of their guiding influence on strategy and product development. Here is where future research compiling the confessional tales of some among the scores of corporate ethnographers and designers working with personas could prove enlightening. Such research might inquire into how exactly executives negotiate the final persona within the firm, how that persona moulds downstream marketing practice, and how these quasi-objects cross and at the same time reaffirm boundaries between communities of practice within firms. Ethnographers are already talking about the personification of Big Data (Bell, 2011) and about a renewed interest in mixed-methods approaches combining ethnography, data mining (Rattenbury, Anderson, Nafus, & Aipperspach, 2009) and ethnographic analytics (Maxwell, 2012). Perhaps this is indicative of a salutary union between big data analytics and consumer ethnography, two modes of knowledge production which may in fact share an analogical mode of figuration.

Future research might examine such collaborations with this perspective in mind. One paper has also proposed that brand characters operate like totems within firms (Cayla, 2013). In Descola’s system the totem is symptomatic of a mode of figuration, totemism, in which disparate physical agents are deemed to share psychic qualities. Examination of the interplay between naturalism (in which patterns of symbols such as images, words and numbers are taken to represent an immaterial reality), totemism (in which species of animals and groups of humans are taken to share an immaterial reality) and analogism (in which the material and immaterial are animated by narrative; Descola 2005, 2010) as both discrete and hybrid forms could contribute substantially to our under-standing of market knowledge, continuing to correct an overly rationalist image of the firm that no longer stands scrutiny.

ConclusionPerhaps there will one day be fossilized vestiges of the real, as there are of past geological ages? A clandestine cult of real objects, venerated as fetishes, which will take on mythic value? Already old objects




seem like real ones by contrast with objects from the industrial age, but this merely prefiguring of the days when the tiniest tangible object will be as precious as an Egyptian relic. (Baudrillard, 1996, p. 43)

Our work resonates with Baudrillard’s prediction of a ‘clandestine cult of real objects’ and demonstrates its applicability to organizational contexts. Our work offers new insights into magical power of the ‘sovereign consumer’, venerated as a fetish, taking on mythical value inside organizations.

We describe how various processes of othering, materialization, personification and animation bring the sovereign consumer to life inside the firm. And we show that, once constructed from heterogeneous parts and then animated, the sovereign consumer takes on a life of its own. It becomes a ‘consumer-fetish’, floating within the corporation, inspiring awe and admiration, exerting power over organizational members and structuring organizational action. Our work illus-trates an irony Weick identifies, that ‘organisations have to build their environments before they can have the luxury of controlling them. The ways in which they construct them … will have strong effects on their actual actions of control’ (Weick, 2001, p. 183). The consumer-fetish is produced through ethnographic research dedicated to describing ‘real’ human lifeworlds naturalis-tically. But once idealized and fetishized as consumer persona, there is little scope for recognizing the actual lifeworlds from whence these images are synthesized. As Tsoukas (1997) suggests, in a society of increased communication, visualization and virtualization, the ability to distinguish between the real and the simulacrum, between consumers and their fetishes, becomes diminished. Reality is weakened.

Our insights extend previous analyses of organizational sensemaking to consider the material and magical dimensions of such sensemaking. We further demonstrate that this type of sensemaking based on a creative material and sensuous process may be described as a form of analogical figuration different from naturalistic and Romantic modes of representation. Moreover, our work identifying the consumer-fetish joins a recent stream of work that questions the modernist pretensions of organizational life. This research stream shows that concepts and processes that we may employ in the analysis of pre-modern societies are useful in understanding modern organizational behaviours as well.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the generous financial support of the Marketing Science Foundation, Cambridge, Massachusetts and the University of New South Wales which made this research possible.

Funding

The authors received funding from the Marketing Science Institute and the University of New South Wales.

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Author biographies

Eric J. Arnould has been Professor of Marketing at Southern Denmark University since February 2014, having held appointments at several US and British universities and lectured at others since the 1990s. He received his MA and PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Arizona. Before entering academia he worked on problems of economic development in many West African countries; his interest in African history and culture continues. He has published over 90 scholarly papers and book chapters on consumer culture theory, services marketing, economic development and sustainable business practice, and has consulted for a number of public and private sector entities.

Julien Cayla is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Nanyang Business School, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian Consumer Insight (Singapore) and a Visiting Professor at Kedge Business School (Paris, France). In his research, he applies anthropological theories and methodologies to the study of marketing in the global marketplace. His work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Marketing Management and Journal of International Marketing. He also co-edited Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently involved in a research programme on the culture of service interactions.



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