Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory?

TLDR

Marketing and consumer research increasingly theorize consumers as producers, yet these theories overlook important facets of consumers’ productive role. This paper draws on post‑Marxist economics and post‑Maussian socioeconomics to introduce the concept of the working consumer. The working consumer is defined as a consumer who, through immaterial labour, adds cultural and affective value to market offerings, thereby increasing value beyond producers’ control and, under certain conditions, enabling companies to capture that value when it enters the market level. The concept both summarizes and extends existing consumer (co)production frameworks and challenges the service‑dominant logic that seeks to create an ethereal marketscape where consumers and producers coexist in harmony.

Abstract

In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorized as producers. However, these theorizations do not take all facets of consumers’ productive role into account. This paper mobilizes both post-Marxist economics and post-Maussian socioeconomics to develop the concept of working consumer. This concept depicts consumers who, through their immaterial labour, add cultural and affective value to market offerings. In so doing consumers increase the value of market offerings, although they usually work at the primary level of sociality (interpersonal relationships) and are therefore beyond producers’ control. However, given certain conditions, companies capture such a value when it enters the second level of sociality (the market). The concept of the working consumer summarizes and enriches extant approaches to consumer (co)production, while challenging widespread developments, such as the service-dominant (SD) logic of marketing, which try to create/construct an ethereal marketscape in which consumers and producers live in harmony.