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Marketing empowerment and exclusion in the information age

Michael Saren
School of Management, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to look back at Michael Thomas 1999 thesis regarding the impact on marketing of the information age. In his view, the information revolution of e-commerce and computer-mediated markets removes distance as a barrier between buyer and sellers, which could empower or exclude consumers. This paper re-considers Thomas assessment and explores how the IT revolution has transformed, or not, relations between consumers and other actors in the marketplace. Design/methodology/approach This is conceptual paper that draws on literature and secondary sources to explore and evaluate the topic. Findings The dynamic and intertwined effects of any technology are notoriously difcult to determine and therefore the goal of this paper is to identify the empowering or exclusionary effects of IT on marketing is shown to be an ambitious one. On the basis of this review, we can conclude however that Thomas was correct in anticipating in 1999 that more and more of marketing interactions would become computer-based. Its precise effects however are less clear. On the one hand, there are both elements of empowerment as well as exclusionary effects that have followed, but on the other hand, neither the direction of the trend, nor the precise nature of the effects, is clear as yet. Research limitations/implications One implication relates to research on internet communications which has highlighted the potential freedom of access and social anonymity that the internet provides. For example, some researchers have emphasised potential of cyberspace and identity-play as escape routes from the physical, social and cultural constrictions of gender. However, other research indicates that, as with other technologies, the internet is embedded in social structures and cultural processes that can never be neutral. Originality/value This paper provides a review of relevant literature and empirical research. It identies and evaluates four types of effects that IT has on marketing and consumers and considers the extent to which these have been empowering or exclusionary. Keywords Communication technologies, Electronic commerce, Consumer behaviour, Marketing, Empowerment Paper type Viewpoint

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The information age opens up great potential for solving our problems, both economic and political. But its dynamism and creativity can be destructive in the Hayekian sense, and potentially very exclusionary more exclusionary than the industrial societies of the 20th century. Post-industrial society is built on knowledge (by knowledge workers), on information, on the technology of management and management of technology. If our work is based on the computer, if much of our play is computer based, can it be long before much of our consumer behaviour is computer-based? [. . .]. Will this empower the consumer at the expense of the producer and the orthodox distribution channel? (Thomas, 1999).

These were the opening words of the keynote presentation on The Information Age by Michael Thomas in the marketing track of the 1st Critical Management Studies conference in Manchester in 1999. When I invited him to be the keynote speaker, I was not sure whether he would accept. After all, critical marketing was embryonic at that time and was potentially regarded by mainstream marketers as the last redoubt of those

Marketing Intelligence & Planning Vol. 29 No. 1, 2011 pp. 39-48 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0263-4503 DOI 10.1108/02634501111102733

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academic troublemakers for whom postmodern marketing had proved too comfortable. But, of course, Michael Thomas was not a mainstream marketer. Yes, more than most professional marketers, he had all the establishment credentials of an academic researcher, but as the above quote illustrates, he was always looking to the future; and critically to both positive and negative outcomes of the futures that he foresaw. Looking back, what could have been a more percipient and salient apercu than to equate the information age with the twenty-rst century and to contrast this with the industrial epoch of the preceding century? Also note, the choice of the term exclusionary, repeated in the same sentence, to describe the information age. This is long before the term social exclusion topped the political agenda and nearly a decade before the notion of long waves of creative destruction was resurrected through the lens of Kondratiev (1925) or Schumpeter (1950) to explain the boom then bust of the credit crunch. On the other hand, the potential impact of the computer and the internet on work and society was topical in 1999, but Thomas immediately identied the key questions for marketing at the outset of his talk. His thesis was that the coming information revolution of e-commerce and computer-mediated markets is built on a technology that essentially removes distance as a barrier between buyer and seller. The implications for marketing follow from this. In his view, the important effects would be on consumer behaviour, traditional channels, marketing relationships and negotiation all of which could empower, or exclude, consumers. And the consequences of information technology (IT) for consumer empowerment or exclusion raise a set of research questions that the discipline is still struggling with, unresolved today. Looking back at Michael Thomas thesis regarding the impact on marketing of the information age, the rst question is to examine how the IT revolution has transformed, or not, relations between consumers and other actors in the marketplace. That is, between buyers and sellers, between customers and other customers, between consumers and their object of consumption and between consumers and the market itself. So in this review, I will briey examine four types of effects that IT has had on marketing and consumers and consider the extent to which these have been empowering or exclusionary. 1. The impact of IT on markets and marketing Websters (1992) seminal Journal of Marketing article on the changing role of marketing notes that technical competencies including IT will become the central issues for conducting integrated marketing operations:
The core rm will be dened by its end-use market and its knowledge base, as well as its technical competence, not by its factories and its ofce buildings. Customer focus, market segmentation, targeting and positioning, assisted by information technology, will be the exible bonds that hold the whole thing together (Webster, 1992, p. 15, italics added).

Today, the effects of IT are felt throughout marketing practice, in all organisations impacting on all the core operations areas including market analysis and decision making, monitoring and control, communications, distribution channels, product development, service management and delivery, etc. Although modern marketing practice requires that marketers have a clear understanding and ability to use IT, the technical capabilities of IT has been far outstripped most marketers knowledge and capability to utilise it, both academics and practitioners.

IT effects are felt throughout marketing practice, impacting on such diverse areas as analysis and decision making, monitoring and control, communications, distribution channels, product development, service provision and promotion. Even a basic list of operations, which are enabled and improved through IT, illustrates the range and iniquitousness of their effect on marketing. For example: . electronic data processing; . marketing information systems; . interactive decision support systems; . executive information systems; . expert systems; . strategic information systems; . intra-rm and global internetworking; . customer relationship management (CRM) resource planning; and . web site analytics. IT is not only a set of techniques or applications, however. When considering its effects on marketing, Brady et al. (2002) view it from four distinct perspectives as follows: (1) IT as a social construction; (2) IT as an information provider; (3) IT infrastructure hardware and software; and (4) IT as business processes and systems. Also, the manner and rate at which IT is assimilated in the organisation over time will affect the benets that will accrue. A basic stage-theory taxonomy was proposed by Zuboff (1988) which distinguished the levels at which IT can have an impact on the operations, thinking and culture of the organisation. He classied three levels as: rst, the basic automation of systems; second, the provision of better information; and third, the transformation of operations. In the case of marketing, this would mean at the most advance level that the marketing function itself is transformed through the assimilation and application of IT. So, one research question which follows from Michael Thomas original speculation about the impact of the IT revolution is to identify the extent and level at which marketing is experiencing radical and dynamic IT-driven changes, and thereby discover the level of transformation in the marketing function as a result of IT (Ford and Saren, 2001). Despite all the gadgetry coverage of IT-based applications in the popular press, however, marketing in many companies is still at the embryonic stage of IT assimilation. By no means, all marketing practitioners have an up-to-date understanding of the IT applications and an ability to exploit these applications. Many marketing personnel do not have this ability. For example, the extent to which the use of information and communication technologies in contemporary marketing practice has progressed from simply automating existing marketing systems to using IT to transform their marketing capabilities varies enormously between companies, countries and industries (Brady et al., 2008).

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One topical example which illustrates the potentially transformative effects of IT on marketing is the value-added opportunities that can be created and delivered in the developing mobile economy. The current mobile market is developing rapidly as the availability and choice of mobile application services are offered to customers independently of the network supporting these services. This IT-based business model has a huge potential for realising richer communication, information and entertainment services, anywhere and anytime in a kind and scale that was even never imagined hitherto. The shape and characteristics of the mobile IT future will depend on the behaviour and interaction of four key actors: service providers, customers, competitors and regulatory bodies. The potential for customer empowerment offered by the mobile economy is based on the customers role in the value chain process. Traditionally, much of the control of the process has remained with the seller, which has been a top-down approach based upon some long-term service subscription. However, the customer is now able to control the conguration for network access so the degree of customer empowerment is greater. If the information devices function is determined, the customer neither the equipment vendor nor the customers service provider controls the conguration of the machine and neither intentionally limit the end-users ability to upgrade or customise the device. The specication of the devices function is set by the user or by software acting on the users behalf. Users, through their customised intelligent mobile terminals will interact with numerous networks in search of various services at prices acceptable to them. Broadly speaking, the more vertically integrated the mobile service, the easier it is to use but the less exibility it provides to users. Multiple business models can co-exist to serve groups of consumers differentiated by the relative weighting of these two attributes (ease of use vs exibility). However, the more disaggregated the business model, the stronger the innovation engine of the mobile economy. In other words, there is a fundamental tension between truly xed functionality and the user-customised approach for diversity and constant change. So the implications for marketing in this single example are, using Zuboffs (1988) terminology, potentially transformational for the marketing function in many types of organisations beyond the mobile service industry. Furthermore, it is as yet unclear what will be the impact on the customer. How will consumers respond when faced with much more choice? What are the key dimensions inuencing customer behaviour technology, knowledge, use, functionality, etc.? Many basic questions such as these remain unanswered today, over ten years after Michael Thomas paper on critical management studies, including how customer empowerment itself should be conceptualised in the new mobile economy and how it can it be achieved? 2. The effect of IT on consumer information and choice
In our society, individual freedom is constituted as, rst and foremost, freedom of the consumer (Bauman, 1988, p. 23).

For Bauman, freedom itself is now dened as consumer choice. Since the nineteenth century, the Marshallian ideal of economic competition, a perfect market, where consumer choice decides which companies survive and which fail, has dominated Western economic thinking.

The normative assumption in modern society is that more choice is always better, and that the consumer will see this as such. A customer can choose from a range of product features, augmented product offers, warranties, channels of delivery and so forth. It is presumed that more choice will enable customer needs to be matched more accurately through the operation of complex free markets with goods and service offerings by producers, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction. Free economies are thus structured to encourage competitive behaviour through consumer choice and the model of a rational decision-making consumer freely pursuing their choices in the marketplace has been central the marketing concept (Brownlie and Saren, 1997). But reality is somewhat different. One of the cultural contradictions of capitalism is that rational production processes exist alongside irrational, hedonistic consumption. It has long been recognised by consumer researchers that people put their creative energies into consumption, and that they frequently buy for feelings, fantasies and fun (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982; Firat and Dholakia, 1998). Rather than ensuring that they get the best quality at the best prices, as a rational decision-making model presumes, a purchase may be dictated by an individuals mood, which may precede cognition and even the information gathering stag of the buying process. Where this is the case, it raises yet more questions regarding the supposed empowering role of IT in enabling consumer information search activities to be conducted much more quickly, cheaply and widely (Nelson, 2002). The phrase often employed to represent the customer as the chooser, the one in control, is the term the customer is king. Smith (1961), described the consumer as sovereign in the marketplace. This royal metaphor goes back a long way and it is deeply rooted in ideas of exchange, customer service and free market choice. On the other hand, consider the language used in many marketing texts to describe and prescribe how market segments are targeted for penetration and market share must be fought for and won. Customers must be locked-in lest they defect to the opposition. Thus, consumers are worked upon until they are captive, although unaware of this captivity and marketing now has such a powerful control apparatus (technologies of governance) of the free market that results in consumers becoming more and more dependent on the knowledge of experts, technologies and systems (Du Gay and Salaman, 1992). Maclaran et al. (2007) argue that marketers create the choice context and its parameters in the rst instance, consumer control in practice the Foucauldian notion of control being exercised through the management of freedom. Nowhere is this control more apparent than in the enormous amount of recent attention in marketing practice and literature to customer retention, loyalty programmes, CRM and consumer lifetime value , i.e. not value for the customer themselves, but for the rm. If consumers freedom is limited to their exercising choice in this manner as captives of information and technological control systems, then the customer is not king, on the contrary, they are more like Hegels (1977) bondsman subject to the lordship of a marketing control apparatus which is further enabled, aided and abetted by the IT revolution. From his extensive studies of the poor and the wider culture of poverty, in which they are said to exist, Hill (2002) concludes that the problems faced by poor consumers go far beyond the resource scarcity and meagre consumption opportunities. Information plays a key role in exacerbating this culture of poverty. For example, the role of the media all too effectively communicates the standards and opportunities for material

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accumulation in society through television, movie and music demonstrating the vivid contrast between their culture of poverty and the consumer abundance that surrounds them. So not only are poor consumers materially deprived but they are also unable to fully participate in what Fisk in the 1980s called the semiotic democracy which is provided by television and other mass communications. We could now add even more strongly to Fiskes (1987) suggestion the potentially exclusionary role that Michael Thomas warned of regarding role of IT in the information democracy. 3. The role of IT in information overload and over-consumption There are several supply issues in marketing that can be problematized, many of which can lead one to various forms of saturation for the consumer. For marketing to provide consumer choice (which as we have seen is one of its core values), it must deliver lots of supplies and products onto the market and therefore the implicit assumption is that more choice is always better, i.e. more is valorised per se. Thus, consumer marketing values do not just lead to more choice, they also arguably lead to abundance and excess and the necessary provision of more than consumers need or want. Battaille (1988) argues that all human systems lead to excess and waste. Thus, in this respect, consumption is merely reecting the human condition, which always creates more than is needed and therefore produces waste. Thus, consumers are necessarily incomplete in the sense that they can never consume all, not materially, nor the surplus of meaning and symbols (Baudlillard, 1981). Excessive consumption of many attractive and satisfying consumer products, such as food, drink and tobacco, can lead to overeating, alcohol or nicotine abuse, drug addiction and consequences that are bad for a consumers health. To have too much choice in these areas may actually be disempowering, as it merely leads to greater temptation to indulge in over-consumption with a concomitant need for greater self-control. Feelings of regret and even self-disgust may be strong whenever consumers do not exercise sufcient self-control and experience a bad outcome from their excessive consumption. The ambivalence experienced by consumers in relation to their consumption of products is manifested in their oscillating between indulgence and abstinence; self-loathing and self-control (ODonohoe, 2002). The phenomenon of compulsive and addictive consumption (Eccles et al., 1999). Too many choices can also necessitate a huge amount of information gathering, as consumers evaluate the many and various options on offer. This has led to Informationally Imperfect Consumer Markets (Maynes, 2003). The resulting tyranny of choice (Schwartz, 2004), means that consumers can no longer exercise their choice efciently, and furthermore they can also experience confusion. Too much variety in a retail setting has been shown to have dysfunctional consequences (Malhotra, 1984) such that consumers experience information overload and they may panic and leave that particular environment altogether. Furthermore, post-purchase cognitive dissonance is a well-recognised phenomenon that can occur when a decision, which has involved two or more close alternatives, results in making a consumer feel insecure rather than content. So the more choice that is offered, the more opportunity there is for feelings of regret and self-doubt about other options that were rejected. 4. The inuence of IT on the construction of consumer identity One of the most important strands of consumer research attempts to understand the co-constitutive, co-productive ways in which consumers, working with

market-generated materials, forge a coherent, if diversied and often fragmented sense of self (Arnould and Thompson, 2005, p. 13). Within this branch of research, consumers are viewed as identity seekers and makers and the market is regarded as the primary source of mythic and symbolic resources through which people construct narratives of identity. Belk (1988) employs the term extended self to encompass the role of possessions in the consumers identity. He argues that knowingly or unknowingly we regard our possessions as part of ourselves in other words, we are what we have, in order to demonstrate that possessions play a powerful and complex role and are an important component of sense of self (Belk, 1988, p. 139). Consumer goods are used to signify social status as demonstrated through the choice of a particular selection of goods that classies the consumer according to various socio-economic hierarchies such as their wealth, knowledge, social position, taste and renement. It is not simply the display of the material possessions themselves that is important, nor simply economic capability or the price paid. According to Bourdieu (1984), modern consumption is primarily concerned with the establishment and maintenance of distinction or difference between social classes and status groups. The maintenance of difference thus not only implies a competitive relationship between consumers who perceive themselves to inhabit different groups and identities, but also has the effect of bonding consumers more closely within these consumer sub-cultures, social communities or tribes (Maffesoli, 1996). In aligning themselves with certain group norms, consumers share with the others in the group their consumption ambitions and adopt similar behaviours and lifestyles. As identities are produced, consumed and regulated within culture, they create meanings through symbolic systems of representation. One of the many ways in which IT can inuence this formation of consumer identity is by the varied effects of IT-mediated interaction based on gender, race, class and other social characteristics. For example, much of the research on internet communications has highlighted the potential freedom of access and social anonymity that the internet provides. Many commentators hoped that this relatively anonymous text-based medium would result in a lessening of communication inequalities based on gender, race, class and other social cues. Similarly, research perspectives have emphasised the abstract concepts of cyberspace and identity-play as escape routes from the physicality of biological sex and from the concomitant social and cultural constrictions of gender. However, research indicates that, as with other technologies, the internet is embedded in social structures and cultural processes that can never be neutral (Maclaran et al., 2003). Final words We can conclude that Professor Thomas was certainly correct in anticipating that more and more of our marketing interaction would become computer-based. Its precise effects however are less clear. Yes, there are both elements of empowerment as well as exclusionary effects that have followed, but neither the direction of the trend, nor the precise nature of the effects, are clear yet. The dynamic and intertwined effects of any technology are notoriously difcult to determine (Heidegger, 1977; Czarniawska and Berward, 1998); therefore, to say the least, identifying the impact of IT on marketing is always going to be a moving target.

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As George Steiner (1961, p. 31) reminds us we live inside the act of discourse and today our thinking and communication remains essentially verbal in character. The question that has yet to be answered is whether and how IT-mediation will change the character of the discourse of marketing and consumers and its empowering and exclusionary consequences.
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Maclaran, P., Hogg, M., Catterall, M. and Kozinets, R. (2003), Gender, technology and computer-mediated communications in consumption-related online communities, in Ekstrom, K.M. and Brembeck, H. (Eds), Elusive Consumption, Berg, Oxford, pp. 145-71. Maclaran, P., Saren, M., Catterall, M. and Stevens, L. (2007), Consumer royale? Exploring the myth of consumer sovereignty, paper presented at the 36th European Marketing Academy Conference, University of Reykjavik, Reykjavik. Maffesoli, M. (1996), The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, Sage, London. Malhotra, N. (1984), Information and sensory overload, Psychology and Marketing, Vol. 1 Nos 3/4, pp. 9-21. Maynes, E.S. (2003), Marketing one consumer disaster, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 196-207. Nelson, W. (2002), All power to the consumer? Complexity and choice in consumers lives, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 185-95. ODonohoe, S. (2002), Living with ambivalence: attitudes to advertising in postmodern times, Marketing Theory, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 91-108. Schumpeter, J. (1950), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed., Harper Torchbooks, New York, NY. Schwartz, B. (2004), The tyranny of choice, Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 January. Smith, A. (1961), in Cannan, E. (Ed.), The Wealth of Nations, Methuen, London. Steiner, G. (1961), The Retreat from the Word, Faber and Faber, London. Thomas, M.J. (1999), The information age and the death of distance, keynote presentation in the Marketing Track of the 1st Critical Management Studies (CMS) Conference, UMIST, Manchester. Webster, F.E. (1992), The changing role of marketing in the corporation, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 56, October, pp. 1-17. Zuboff, S. (1988), In the Age of the Smart Machine, Heinemann Professional, Oxford.

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Further reading Baudlillard, J. (1998), The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Sage, London. Bloom, M. (1973), The Anxiety of Inuence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Brodie, R., Coviello, N., Brooks, R. and Little, V. (1997), Towards a paradigm shift in marketing? an examination of current marketing practices, Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 13, pp. 383-406. Brown, S. (2001), Marketing and literature: the anxiety of academic inuence, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 63, pp. 1-15. Deleuze, G. (1995), Postscript on control societies, Negotiations 1972-1990, Columbia University Press, New York, NY (translated by Joughin M.). Foucault, M. (1980) in Gordon, C (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Pantheon Books, New York, NY. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media, Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York, NY. Marcuse, H. (1964), One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

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Sirgy, M.J. and Lee, D.-J. (2006), Macro measures of consumer well-being (CWB): a critical analysis, Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 27-44. Stern, B. (1990), Literary criticism and the history of marketing thought: a new perspective on reading marketing theory, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 329-36. Corresponding author Michael Saren can be contacted at: majs1@le.ac.uk

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