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ORG0010.1177/1350508414566805OrganizationCova et al.
Article
Organization
2015, Vol. 22(5) 682701
The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1350508414566805
org.sagepub.com
Per Skln
Abstract
Consumers have entered the world of contemporary organizations. They are even being
reconsidered as workers. This article contributes to the body of literature on this theme by
focusing on collaborative marketing, which is the organization of marketing work conducted jointly
by marketing professionals and consumers. This article draws on the ethnographic study of a
collaborative marketing programme organized by the carmaker Alfa Romeo that engaged Alfisti,
the enthusiastic consumers of the Alfa Romeo brand. Previous research has analysed work carried
out by consumers. This article instead analyses the organization of consumer work and what
marketing professionals do to integrate consumer work into their marketing work. This article
concludes that marketing professionals control working consumers as if they were wage labourers,
which most consumers do not appreciate. Conversely, working consumers compel marketers to
engage in social and emotional labour, which marketers are not accustomed to and try to limit.
Keywords
Brand community, collaborative marketing, marketing workers, prosumption, working
consumer
Introduction
Dear Alfisti, I am delighted to welcome you and officially launch this Blog, the first step towards building
the international community of Alfisti.com. Alfisti.com is a veritable workshop, somewhere you can drop
Corresponding author:
Stefano Pace, Kedge Business School, Rue Antoine Bourdelle, Domaine de Luminy BP 921, 13 288 Marseille Cedex 9,
France.
Email: stefano.pace@kedgebs.com
Cova et al.
683
in, exchange ideas and work together on two very important projects: the future Alfisti community and
celebrating the Alfa Romeo centenary. (The Alfa Romeo Directors online address on 24 June 2009)
The Director of Alfa Romeo thereby summoned Alfisti1enthusiastic consumers of the Alfa Romeo
brandto work. Since normally companies produce and consumers consume, this call to work was
rather unusual (Wiertz and De Ruyter, 2007). However, organizational, marketing and consumer
research has questioned the traditional distinction between producers and consumers (Firat and
Venkatesh, 1995; Gabriel and Lang, 2008; Korczynski, 2002). Indeed, some researchers make a direct
link between work and consumption: Consumption is also workit requires patient or breathless
searches through high-streets, shopping malls or internet sites; it involves minuscule comparisons and
painstaking choices; it demands continuous updating and vigilance (Gabriel and Lang, 2008: 326
27). This has led researchers to focus on the work undertaken by consumers; the term working consumer was coined to denote this phenomenon (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Rieder and Vo, 2010).
In this article, we focus on collaborative marketing, an approach to the organization of marketing work jointly undertaken by companies and consumers to achieve certain marketing goals in
relation to products, services and especially brands (Hatch and Schultz, 2010). As brands increasingly function as a medium between producers and consumers (Kornberger, 2010), collaborative
marketing programmes are easier to develop when a brand community of enthusiastic consumers
exists around the brand (Muiz and OGuinn, 2001). However, studies are scarce on how companies actually organize collaborative marketing programmes with brand communities to put consumers to work. In addition, prior research does not focus on what marketing professionals do to
integrate consumer work into their marketing work.
This article aims to study how marketing professionals organize consumer work and how they
integrate the work of consumers with their own marketing work. To achieve this, we conducted an
ethnographic study of the collaborative marketing programme organized by Alfa Romeo to engage
Alfisti. The objective of this programme was to build a common brand community to unite Alfisti
and to jointly prepare the centenary celebration of the Alfa Romeo brand. The article contributes
by shifting the locus of the analysis from the work carried out by consumers to how that work is
organized and integrated with professional marketing work.
The article is organized as follows. The theoretical background reviews the research on interactive service work, the blurring boundaries of consumption and work, marketing work and collaborative marketing. Thereafter, the ethnographic method and the findings in relation to the Alfa
RomeoAlfisti collaborative marketing programme are presented. The implications of the findings
are then discussed in relation to the reviewed research, and conclusions are presented.
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Organization 22(5)
Service work as other forms of work is defined as a goal-oriented activity and a social relationship that creates value for another party (Taylor, 2004). To undertake service work, not only
technical skills based on formal education are needed but also social and emotional skills. Social
skill is defined as the ability to interact with different types of people. Examples of social skills
include openness, flexibility and the ability to co-operate and communicate (Belt etal., 2002;
Korczynski, 2002). Social labour denotes the type or aspects of work that demand social skills.
Hochschild (2003) defined emotional labour as the the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display (p. 7). Emotional labour/skills and social labour/skills
partly overlap, but the former focus particularly on the ability to display emotions that maximize
customer satisfaction in the customer interface and is a key aspect of service work (Coupland,
2014; Korczynski, 2003). Research suggests that interactive service work is associated with
emotional exhaustion, disenchantment, alienation and feelings of exploitation due to the fact that
many organizations are organized as customer-oriented bureaucracies characterized by rationalization combined with customer orientation. To ease the tensions that exist between these two
organizing principles, managers promote what has been referred to as the enchanting myth of
customer sovereignty. This concept refers to the phenomenon that customers are intended to
experience sovereignty, but in reality the consumption process is rationalized according to internal demands (Korczynski, 2002, 2013).
This rationalization of the consumption process in combination with corporate strategies and
the societal changes galvanized by the emergence of the Internet (Ritzer etal., 2012) has increased
firmconsumer interactions. In the managerial literature, this phenomenon is understood in terms
of mutually beneficial value co-creation (see, for example, Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Prahalad and
Ramaswamy, 2000). The critical literature reviewed here approaches firmconsumer interactions
from the work perspective, coining such notions as consumer work and customer work.
Rieder and Vo (2010) argue that interactive service work is carried out by working customers
who move between production and consumption, thus engaging in prosumption and producing part
of what they consume (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Media studies (Arvidsson, 2005; Jenkins,
2006) have introduced the notion of productive consumption or consumption work, a concept
that builds on Lazzaratos (1997) theory of immaterial labour. Accordingly, it is argued that consumers are involved in the practices that produce either the immaterial content of commodities in
the form of social or emotional labour or the social context of the production itself. Consumption
work is emphasized in the current brand society (Kornberger, 2010) as consumers contribute to
the production of the immaterial contentor informational value (Arvidsson, 2013) of branded
commodities through social media (Nakassis, 2013). However,
if consumption is to be considered a form of labour, that is, an activity that produces value, it is obvious
that both its place and its phenomenology are radically different from the factory work that we are used to
thinking of as the paradigmatic example of labour. (Arvidsson, 2005: 239)
The blurring of boundaries between production and consumption has also been discussed by
consumer researchers who argue that consumers are no longer the final link in the production
chain; they are the very heart of consumption and production processes (Firat and Dholakia, 2006).
Consumer researchers thus recognize a productive role to consumers (Arnould and Thompson,
2005). They argue that consumers engage in many types of productive activities including generating new product ideas, word-of-mouth marketing, defining brand meaning and staging experiences
for other customers. In line with Rieder and Vo (2010), Cova and Dalli (2009) contend that work
offers the best description of consumer activities and that their immaterial labour is best described
as linking valuethe value of the brand in constructing, developing or maintaining social links.
Cova et al.
685
The work that consumers undertake becomes a source of surplus value extraction for the company (Willmott, 2010). This extraction presupposes the management of consumer work, namely,
consumers can be considered as workers that companies will try to control (Zwick etal., 2008) in
order to co-optand even exploittheir social and emotional skills. However, how marketers
organize and integrate consumer work with their own work has not been previously studied. We do
not know how marketers do this in the new generation of marketing approaches labelled as collaborative and described next (Antorini etal., 2012).
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Organization 22(5)
writing, marketing managers are usually in meetings, discussing the texts they have written.
Marketing work also emerges as a highly contested realm embedded in company politics (Zwick
and Cayla, 2011). Fellesson (2011) describes marketers as boundary workers bridging the gap
between the company and the customer.
We add to existing research on marketing work by studying the work that marketers jointly
undertake with customers in collaborative marketing programmes. We also extend existing research
on contemporary work by investigating the way managersand not the workforceinteract with
consumers (cf. Korczynski, 2013). Since work within collaborative marketing programmes is
interactive, it is likely to include social and emotional labour.
687
Cova et al.
Table 1. Summary of the empirical material.
Method
Amount/duration
Written material
Participant observation
to the marketing team
meetings
2years11 meetings
2years of ongoing
interactions+postprogramme retrospective
interviews (4years later)
Observational
netnography on Alfisti.
com
Background
The Fiat group, which owns Alfa Romeo, prior to initiating the Alfisti.com programme, had already
used a collaborative marketing programme to launch the Fiat 500 in 20062007. The programme
was considered a success, and Fiat decided to use a similar approach to invigorate the Alfa Romeo
brand. A survey carried out by the company in early 2008 identified the presence of many selforganized Alfa owners clubs around the world that regularly organized car gatherings.
The Alfa Romeo management team, backed by the Fiat management and its new CEO, Sergio
Marchionne, decided in June 2008 to launch a branding project intended to leverage on existing
owners clubs and to invest in the term Alfistienthusiastic consumers of the Alfa Romeo brand.
The aim was to create a virtual space in which Alfisti could transmit their passion to other potential customers, as stated by an Alfa Romeo representative. This project specifically involved three
marketing managersall with an engineering backgroundof the Alfa Romeo marketing department who constituted the projects marketing team. These were the Customer Relations Program
Manager who used to run the Alfisti Owners website (a Customer Relationship Marketingbased
platform), the Marketing Services Manager for the brand and the Director of Marketing (who
became Director of Alfa Romeo in early 2009). The project was an additional task for the marketing team who while running the project continued its usual relationship-based marketing work. In
September 2008, the marketing team had the ambition of
encouraging and facilitating all kinds of networking opportunities (real, virtual or imaginary) between
Alfisti of the entire world. The expected outcome is a reinforcement of the sense of belonging among
Alfisti to the Alfa tribe with all the associated commercial benefits. (Internal presentation, IP hereafter)
The members of the marketing team asked themselves the following question: What is the
common goal or cause that could unite Alfisti? (IP, September 2008). After a brainstorming
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session, they decided that the most suitable collective challenge would be to invite Alfisti to plan
the biggest event in the history of the automobile celebrating the 100th anniversary of the brand.
This would encourage Alfisti to collaborate (IP, October 2008). The 100th year anniversary of the
brand was on 24 June 2010, a year and a half away at that point in time.
In November 2008, the marketing team set the goal of capitalizing on the shared passion for
Alfa Romeo to convert car-owners (of new vehicles), collectors of classic cars and all the fans into
ambassadors for the brand (IP, November 2008). The marketing team was aware that this was not
just about targeting individual Alfisti but also well-structured clubs that needed to be brought into
the process: Every planet [group of Alfisti] will contribute and will be a protagonist. Every
planet will be activated on a specific task (IP, November 2008).
In January 2009, the marketing team received permission from the Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne
to start the project based on the following goals: (1) develop a new marketing approach that would
be cheaper for the company based on word-of-mouth; (2) increase customer loyalty; (3) transform
fans of the brand into marketing capital (IP). The marketing team made contact with some of the
biggest Alfa owners clubs and asked them to co-operate. This was an entirely new working experience for the managers.
By May 2009, the collaborative marketing programme took its final form as stated in an internal
document:
[To create] the biggest community in the automobile world; a centre of attraction for all the Alfa enthusiast
planets [Alfa groups]; an international web platform; five languages (Italian, English, French, Swedish,
German); a launch date: 24 June 2009 (365days before the centenary celebrations).
The marketing teams last key idea was that the community platform should be organized in
collaboration with the global Alfisti community: A real community is built with members, as one
of them said. Achieving this required working with Alfisti within a collaborative marketing programme. As it would have been impossible to approach all 500,000 club members, the marketing
team proposed an online laboratory (Alfisti.com) to organize the collaborative marketing programme whereby a limited group of invited Alfisti would work together with the company for
1year. As concerned the involvement of clubs, the marketing team understood the potential difficulty for an Alfa enthusiast to be both a member of his or her original club and a member of the
global community of Alfa devotees. To resolve this difficulty, clubs were given special attention by
reserving them prominent positions in the Alfisti.com online lab. The marketing team outsourced
the everyday web management of the Alfisti.com lab to an Italian agency (the editorial team hereafter) and worked with a British web agency for the architecture of the future online global Alfisti
community.
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The announcement of the launch of the collaborative marketing programme was made at a
2-day workshop organized by the marketing team on 24 and 25 June 2009 at the prestigious
Balocco test track, between Milan and Turin. Various management teams from Alfa Romeo (design,
engines, R&D, automotive derived products, etc.) attended the workshop, together with 80 Alfisti
representing the biggest owners clubs in the world.
Alfa Romeos Director also attended the seminar and gave a speech, which was then posted on
the Alfisti.com website as the opening speech:
Dear Alfisti,
The tools we plan to use are your ideas and suggestions, as we strive to create a concrete project
revolving around teamwork; a project I personally, together with the Alfa Romeo team, will be involved
with from day one. Being an Alfa enthusiast is an affair of the heart, declared engineer Orazio Satta Puliga
Today the history shaped by him and other great men is in our hands and it is our task to continue
writing it, each of us playing our own role yet working together All those given a preview of the site are
today ambassadors for Alfisti globally: it is your job to gather their ideas and suggestions and voice these
through the Community, which through its staff will give you constant feedback on your work, for a
fruitful and concrete exchange of ideas. It only remains for me to wish you well in this task and to ask you
to participate enthusiastically in this stimulating challenge, the success of which crucially depends on our
ability to work as a team.
The speech makes several specific references to the work requested of Alfisti. In addition, the
workshop itself was organized as a working meeting. The speech inferred emotional labour as the
club representatives were expected to manage their feelings in a particular waythey were
expected to work enthusiastically. The marketing team divided the 80 invited Alfisti into working
groups to respond to questions relating to the goals of the brands centennial celebration: (1) suggestions for and organization of the centennial celebration, (2) competencies that local clubs could
make available to the organization of the main event, (3) connections between the main event and
local events and (4) international visibility of the event. The ideas from each working group were
discussed during the plenary session.
The outcome of the Balocco workshop in June 2009 was a 12-page report in which the marketing team summarized the main ideas and comments of the Alfisti. Box 1 refers to examples of
Alfistis ideas on meetings and gatherings at the centennial. Generating ideas for such events
required knowing how Alfisti usually interact. It was thus dependent on the social skills of the club
representatives and constituted a form of social labour. The Alfisti subsequently voted for the proposed ideas (Figure 1).
Box 1. Excerpts of Alfisti ideas on the centenary event.
Getting together at the RIAR Arese Monument, Monza, Milan historic centre. This is good. Important
to have a lot of things to do. Music, show new car, etc.
ThursdayGathering at the Duomo for the 100 best cars for the reception of the guests on the 1st day
with musical performance and fashion show around some of the cars and the unveiling of the monument of Alfa Romeo in Milan
Gathering in Monza for all participants with the parade of cars and demonstrations of historic Alfa
Romeos with 2 historic races and laps for all participating cars
Meeting other Alfisti on the way to Milan convoy; setting meeting places and times where all the
Alfisti can join the convoy
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The marketing team convinced some top managers (from design, engines, merchandising,
etc.) and the CEO to participate in the Balocco workshop to enable real dialogue between Alfisti
and Alfa Romeos top management as one of the marketing managers put it. The marketing team
prepared the speeches that the top managers delivered. The team also decided to reward the
Alfisti for having taken 2days off from their work with a test drive of vintage Alfa Romeo cars
on the Balocco circuit, which was more valuable to them than any monetary reward. Another
type of reward was the gala dinner organized by an event agency in which the marketing team
participated.
The 80 Alfisti taking part in the meeting were also asked, in their role as club representatives, to
work to encourage other members in their clubs to partake in the Alfisti.com initiative. In this
sense, the club representatives were called on to use their social skills, in particular their ability to
co-operate and communicate with the club members to convince them to engage in the Alfisti.com
platform.
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workshop) and independent Alfisti who did not belong to any clubs. These Alfa enthusiasts found
the website to be a means of interacting with other enthusiasts.
The launch also sparked criticisms among others who wondered why they were supposed to
contribute to a corporate venture that according to them would produce positive outcomes only for
the company. We should recall that while Alfisti adore the Alfa Romeo brand, many do not like
Fiat, which is perceived as the company that stole the true spirit of the Alfa Romeo brand. To some
Alfisti, only Alfa Romeo cars produced prior to the Fiat takeover of Alfa Romeo in 1984 count as
genuine.
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Box 2. (Continued)
made of thousands of users feared that Alfisti would stop attending their forums and interact in Alfisti.
com. This remained a core issue for the development of the future global online community and was
discussed by addressing the following questions:
-How to engage extant communities (to which most of the Alfisti belong) without threatening their
existence?
-What content/benefits/tools to provide to users so that Alfisti.com would be a different place
compared to extant communities?
-How can Alfisti.com provide tools/content to extant communities to make them part of the project?
-What do we have to learn from someone who has led an Alfisti community for the last 10years?
The participants answered these questions by underlining the differences between the extant communities and Alfisti.com.
If Alfa really wants to listen to the Alfistis suggestions, I think that this is the right place to pull out a
group of really passionate users to revitalize the brand. But is Alfa ready to think things over?
Does the management have the willingness and the capability to revitalize the brand?
This community is the first step in the right direction or will it remain only a nice project to celebrate
the centenary of Alfa Romeo? (Maxs)
The community summary suggests that Alfisti undertook social and emotional labour within
Alfisti.com. They contributed social labour by sharing their knowledge on how Alfisti communicate and interact and how the new global community needed to be designed in relation to this. They
contributed emotional labour by suggesting what type of emotionality was considered appropriate
to take part in Alfisti.com, that is, pull out a group of really passionate users
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Box 3. (Continued)
Alfa has to bear in mind that it cant rely any longer on just Alfisti that forgive its goofs, but instead has
to aim to make new Alfisti among still-unemotional car drivers. And this doesnt imply denying its
history, changing its nature, but must be done striking on the elements that made it possible.
This is not a matter of technology to adopt (please no more lengthy battles on De Dion and double
wishbone!) but of compliance to its image Alfa must have something that no other car has. Its a long
shot in the modern markets, as scale economies are crucial, but on the other side its not enough to
appear: the brand image has to be matched by solid hardware! So, no more rebrandings the 155
experience was painful enough, wasnt it? Then beauty and fascination: an Alfa makes you turn your
head when it passes by. Nothing else to say. Finally as a substrate, an Alfa has to be at least as good as
the main competitors on those aspects called implicit expectations. So reliability, comfort, finish,
customizations and so on Those elements wont make Alfa sell more cars in the first instance, but
will be crucial for customer retention. You buy with the heart, you sell with the brain Also,
management has to be aligned with this, supporting the range throughout its life injecting vitality in
order to keep the value high. And here I reckon theres a lot of work to do as well (chizoid@159oc)
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Box 4. (Continued)
Personal meeting between the Alfista Biscione67 and the director of the museum.
Reaction of the Community
LoricI can just say thanks
Biscione67THE MUSEUM FOREVER IN ARESE!
Falconero79 I agree LONG LIVE THE MUSEUM OF ARESE!!!
AnfortasThanks with all my heart!!!!
TeneroneA very big Thanks to All of You of the Historical Automobile Club who devote yourselves
every day with humility and passion to our brand
The marketing team learnt that the interactions with Alfisti developed in unexpected ways (i.e.
addressing concerns, answering questions) that implied interactive service work and using social
and emotional skills. The marketers indeed had few, if any, previous experiences of such interactions with enthusiast consumers. These were new tasks for the marketing team, and they were not
prepared for them.
At the halfway point in December 2009, the marketing team assessed the experience of the first
6months and presented an internal memo with the following key issues in managing the consumer
activity within Alfisti.com:
Managing criticisms. A period of adjustment was required before moving on to productive
dialogue. This could be described as a purging phase during which frustrations that had
built up were expressed. After the initial enthusiasm of Alfisti, they started to voice their
complaints and criticisms against the company on Alfisti.com. See above for an example on
the criticism about the possible relocation of the museum. The marketing team attempted to
address these concerns with new communication tools embedded in the platform (video
interviews, video chats, etc.) that better enabled undertaking the social and emotional work
needed to deal with the criticisms.
Managing non-controlled voices. Some Alfisti used the platform to spread rumours about
some supposed company actions that in fact were not real. For example, one Alfista feared
that a new model, the Giulietta, could be marketed in yellow, which is considered an embarrassment with respect to the traditional red colour of Alfa. The marketing team had to reassure the Alfisti in order to restrain these non-controlled voices. They thus tried to control the
Alfisti to work on the topics of the collaborative marketing programme.
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It was difficult for the marketing team to react to these two issues without affecting the corporate image. Indeed, before reacting to specific issues, the marketing team had to consult the
companys CEO and the public relations (PR) function. Once the response strategy was outlined, the marketing team had to work out the best way to share it with the Alfisti in order to
avoid negative emotional reactions. Under pressure from the Alfisti, the marketing team came
up with novel communication practices on the forum to stimulate discussions between Alfisti
and company representatives. Working with these enthusiastic consumers subsequently led to
an evolution in the marketing practices to deal with the emotions of the Alfisti. However, the
marketing team did not appreciate this kind of work as they considered it was not in line with
their positions.
The marketing team had the feeling that not many useful ideas emerged from the Alfisti.
com lab. However, this was not a major concern for the marketing team: the key value of
Alfisti.com for the marketing team did not lie in the substantive contributions of the Alfisti but
in engaging them in a community marketing initiative. The marketing team expected Alfisti to
foster word-of-mouth and become evangelists of the brand rather than engaging in a real cocreative work.
The lack of very innovative ideas was partly due to the low level of participation; during its year
of existence, Alfisti.com only engaged with 10% of invited Alfisti. For the marketing team, the
very idea of opening the blog and the forum was a clear signal of openness and desire for dialogue.
Certain Alfisti, however, felt that there was no genuine dialogue because the company was not
really playing an active role. In addition, the themes imposed by the company were not those that
the Alfisti wanted to discuss. Finally, the Alfisti wanted to know more about what use the company
made of the knowledge generated on the website. The marketing team did not manage to rid itself
of the traditional market research reflex according to which a company probes and observes
consumers.
In January 2010, the programme was shaken by a major change in the Alfa Romeo organization:
the CEO who had personally been involved in the programme was replaced. The new CEO came
from Maserati, another brand of the Fiat Group, and favoured a Customer Relationship Marketing
inspired marketing approach. He asked the marketing team to present and defend the Alfisti.com
project. In their report, the marketing team emphasized that Alfisti.com had made brand community management possible. However, brand community management was not part of the new
CEOs vision, and he decided to discontinue the project in the Spring of 2010 and to no longer
invest in the online global community platform. The marketing team members were reassigned to
divisions of the Fiat group before the centennial celebrations took place.
The centennial celebrations were nevertheless organized on 26 June 2010 in Milan, where over
5,000 Alfisti convened. The participants had the opportunity to meet and share their passion,
exhibit their beloved cars and visit an exhibition on the history of Alfa Romeo. The main event was
held in the centre of Milan and organized by an event agency hired by the marketing team. Looking
at the proposals the event agency presented to the marketing team in December 2009, it is clear that
the agency had not really taken the ideas offered by Alfisti into account.
Discussion
The ethnography of the Alfa Romeo marketing teamcomplemented by the netnography of the
Alfisti.com online platformenables us to discuss how companies organize the collective work of
consumer brand communities in collaborative marketing programmes and how marketing professionals integrate consumer work into their marketing work.
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agencies and other marketing service companies to facilitate and coordinate the efforts of the community members (Firat and Dholakia, 2006).
Collaborative marketing approaches extend the role of the consumer in the organization. It is
not just a matter of interaction between the workforce and consumers. These new approaches
require managers and even top managers to directly interact with consumers. The reason behind
this is the alleged benefit of these approaches on crowded end-consumer markets. Managers frame
these collaborative marketing initiatives as managerial modes that will enable them to harness
value from the market without considerable efforts. Thus, these initiatives change their working
habits and integrate the consumer more deeply into the life of the organization. While managers
aim to develop a marketing model loosely coupled to consumer actions, they discover that consumers really work and this changes marketing work in unforeseen ways.
Conclusion
Consumer work (Rieder and Vo, 2010) is currently a hot topic in social science debates (Dujarier,
2014) and has been the subject of critical marketing discourse (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Zwick etal.,
2008). This study contributes to this stream by suggesting that collaborative marketing programmes
imply service work, namely, social and emotional labour, from both consumers and marketing
professionals that neither are ready to conduct. Consumers prefer to contribute technical skills,
while marketing professionals do not value spending a great deal of effort on social and emotional
labour with consumers but become compelled to do so by the consumers they engage in collaborative marketing programs. It is likely that collaborative marketing will always require social and
emotional skills since it presupposes interactive service work to build the brand and thus downplaying technical skills. As a result, collaborative marketing programmes are likely to induce in
both marketing professionals and working consumers emotional exhaustion, disenchantment,
alienation and feelings of exploitation that previous research has concluded is the case for some
regular interactive service work. An additional reason for this expected outcome is that collaborative marketing programmes, according to this study, are organized in keeping with the enchanting
myth of customer sovereignty (Korczynski, 2002, 2013). Thus, the customer involvement they
encourage, contrary to what the promoters of collaborative marketing argue (Lusch and Vargo,
2006), remains at a superficial level.
The fact that this study is a single case study is a clear limitation. Future research needs to study
collaborative marketing programmes in other contexts using both qualitative and quantitative
designs. In particular, the type of social and emotional work that collaborative marketing programmes compel marketing professionals to engage in requires further elaboration as do the critical implications of this. Our research, by extending the role of consumers beyond interaction with
the front-line workforce, opens up new avenues for research on the role of the working consumer
across the entire organization.
Note
1.
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Author biographies
Bernard Cova is Professor of Marketing at Kedge Business School Marseille/Bordeaux (France) and
Visiting Professor at Universit Bocconi, Milan. A pioneer in the field of collective consumption since the
early 1990s, his internationally influential research has paved the way to brand community approaches.
He is also known for his research in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, especially in the field of solution marketing.
Stefano Pace, PhD, is Associate Professor in Consumer Behaviour and Marketing at Kedge Business School
(France). His research interests include brand communities, consumer tribes and digital culture. He obtained
his PhD at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy) where he has been director of the Master in Marketing and
Communication. His work has been published in a number of journals including Journal of Business Ethics,
Marketing Theory, International Marketing Review, European Journal of Marketing, Marketing Letters,
Journal of Brand Management and Group Decision and Negotiation.
Cova et al.
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Per Skln is a Professor of Business Administration at the Service Research Center, Karlstad University,
Sweden and a Visiting Professor at the Lillehammer University College, Norway. He is currently working
within the domains of transformative service research, brand community, critical marketing, and with applying practice theory to marketing research. His work has appeared in several journals including Marketing
Theory, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Public
Policy & Marketing, Organization and Journal of Service Research.