Building relationships with consumers: consumer research as formative objects

ABSTRACT

How do advertising agencies consume and produce consumer research, and what role do those practices play with their clients? To answer this question, this article introduces formative objects, an analytical concept for identifying practices around the formation of exchange relationships in the knowledge economy. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research and 68 interviews conducted across three U.S. advertising agencies, the article illustrates practices around the production and transformation of consumer research as a formative object across three steps: (1) agency employees negotiate what kinds of consumers matter with their clients; (2) they produce consumer research in ways that generate particular types of aesthetic materials; and (3) they use these materials to craft representations of the consumer to serve as formative objects, facilitating the exchange of campaign ideas and money between agency and client. The article contributes to our knowledge of practices in advertising specifically and the knowledge economy generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumer research
• market research
• advertising
• relational work
• circuits of commerce
• formative objects

Acknowledgements

I thank the many individuals with whom I worked at the advertising agencies in this study for their hospitality and their generous donations of time and thought. I also thank Frederick Wherry and Tim Rosenkranz for insightful feedback on early drafts of this paper. I thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers at Culture & Organizations, whose thoughtful and provocative suggestions improved this paper significantly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am using Seawright and Collier’s (2010, 328) definition of ethnography: ‘Analysis based on sustained, direct observation of and interaction with the individuals or groups being studied, often involving participant observation.’

2 All agency names, as employee names and brand names, are pseudonyms. Some product categories have been changed and some job titles have been generalized also to protect participant confidentiality. My role as a researcher was disclosed to both agencies and was common knowledge among my coworkers. Before observing and participating at each agency, I signed an agency agreement for nondisclosure regarding the agency’s work.

3 CS-M and CS-P are two separate offices of the same agency that operate independently from one another, handling different accounts and run by different managing directors and creative directors. Although they share the company heritage and sometimes pool resources for major pitches, their day-to-day operations and the clients they worked on were separate.