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Manufacturing Customers

The database as new means of production

York University, Toronto, Canada, dzwick{at}schulich.yorku.ca

Janice Denegri Knott

Bournemouth Media School, Poole, UK, JDKnott{at}bournemouth.ac.uk

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life.We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production—consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site of flexible accumulation processes in information capitalism.The result of our undertaking is a model of customer databases that foregrounds the far-reaching effect of potent simulational capabilities intersecting with constantly increasing computational power to transform the database into the factory of the 21st century.

Key Words: analytics • Deleuze • Foucault • marketing • post-Fordism • surveillance

Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2, 221-247 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1469540509104375


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