Sei sulla pagina 1di 20

566805

research-article2015

ORG0010.1177/1350508414566805OrganizationCova et al.

Article

Marketing with working


consumers: The case of a carmaker
and its brand community

Organization
2015, Vol. 22(5) 682701
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1350508414566805
org.sagepub.com

Bernard Cova and Stefano Pace


Kedge Business School, France

Per Skln

Karlstad University, Sweden

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.

The blurring boundaries between work and consumption


The theory and practice of organization and work has changed with the transformation from industrial to service-dominated economies. In particular, the role of the customer has changed. Leidner
(1999) argues that in service economies the power dynamic of the workplace shifts from a
tug-of-war between workers and management to a three-way contest for control between workers,
management, and service recipients (p. 91). Much work today is interactive service work characterized by frequent and intense customer interactions (Korczynski, 2002). Compared to manufacturing work, service work is not primarily organized through technical controlwhich involves
planning the workflow by designing the production processor bureaucratic controlwhich
implies imposing company rules and policies upon workers (Edwards, 1979) but through normative control (Callaghan and Thompson, 2001) focused on aligning the values and norms of the
workforce with the goals and ethos of the company.

684

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).

Collaborative marketing, consumer work and marketing work


Collaborative marketing is a managerial discourse proposing a new approach to marketing
(Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000) that operates with blurred boundaries between the producer and
the consumer by considering the consumer as a partner and co-creator of value. Collaborative
marketing denotes a change from marketing to consumers to marketing with consumers (Lusch
and Vargo, 2006), thus substituting relationship and experiential marketing approaches (Cova and
Cova, 2012). Relationship marketing has its roots in services marketing that from the early 1980s
argued for integrating the value created by service providers and customers with firm processes.
Relationship marketing advises organizations to build, develop and maintain close relations with
customers (Grnroos, 1990). Experiential marketing appeared in the late 1990s, and its basis is that
consumers prefer being immersed in consumption experiences rather than purchasing single products or services. For the organization, experiential marketing implies immersing consumers in
sensory and thematized contexts (Pine and Gilmore, 1999).
Collaborative marketing builds on and extends relationship and experiential marketing
approaches and has been particularly used in the car industry (Algesheimer etal., 2005). It
utilizes the technological possibilities of the Internet and other technical means to interact
with consumers. Collaborative marketing approaches invite consumers to become active players in marketing endeavours, especially in branding, and to exercise creativity and power to
co-create value. At the same time, collaborative marketing approaches advise managers to
control consumer activity in brand communities by being involved in the design of its culture,
symbols and meanings (Hatch and Schultz, 2010; Muiz and Schau, 2011). Collaborative
marketing approaches are aimed at developing the brand from every angle (e.g. services,
meanings, images, strategy). A key rationale of collaborative marketing programmes is to
transform brand community practices (Schau etal., 2009) into brand value, with such value
subsequently monetized by the firm through brand valuation methods (Willmott, 2010). From
a critical perspective, we may thus argue that consumers within collaborative marketing programmes undertake work (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Rieder and Vo, 2010). Collaborative marketing programmes are thus a good context to study the issues focused upon here, namely, how
companies organize consumer work and how marketing professionals integrate consumer
work with their own marketing work.
Marketing work, the work that marketing professionals undertake, is a rather underdeveloped
realm of research. Marketing textbooks commonly describe marketing work as rational and standardized consisting of a predefined set of approaches, tools and goals organized by the marketing
department. The scarce studies that exist on the work conducted by marketing managers suggest
that the textbook version is a simplification (Zwick and Cayla, 2011). From interviews with marketing managers, Ardley (2005) found that they use metaphors to organize their work that have no
relation to marketing work as described in textbooks. Lien (1997), through ethnographic research,
found that marketing professionals work with writing. They write reports, strategy documents,
marketing research briefs, presentations, sales analyses, emails and sales pitches. When not

686

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.

An ethnography of the Alfa Romeo collaborative marketing


programme
The empirical context of the study is the collaborative marketing programme created by the
Italian carmaker Alfa Romeo (part of the Fiat group, now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) to conduct marketing work with its most devoted consumers (Alfisti). Marketing work is based on
practices and implicit knowledge. Ethnography is therefore the preferred methodology to study
marketing work (Cayla and Pealoza, 2012). The Alfa Romeo marketing workers tried to make
sense of the work of consumers in order to integrate it with their own work. Participant observation allowed us to observe the marketing workers in their ongoing sense-making process (Cayla
and Arnould, 2013).
Participant observation is a research method in which the researchers join the group being
studied and participate in and observe its activities (Van Maanen, 2011). We followed a group
of three Alfa Romeo managers in charge of organizing the collaborative marketing programme.
The first two researchers of the article conducted the fieldwork, participating in the work meetings of the Alfa Romeo marketing team between June 2008 and June 2010. These meetings
lasting from 1 to 2dayswere run as discussion seminars on how to steer and adjust the
programme. Most of the meetings were held at one of the companys test circuits in Northern
Italy. Participant observation also included extensive email exchanges and telephone
interviews. We had access to all the documentation of the project and carried out 12 lengthy
interviews with the marketing team members during and after the project (Table 1). After the
initial launch of the project in the Balocco workshop, the collaborative marketing initiative also
took a virtual form with the opening of the online platform Alfisti.com. This called for an additional method, namely, netnography (Kozinets, 2010), to accompany and complement the ethnography. We analysed and coded (Spiggle, 1994) the entire set of discussions generated on the
Alfisti.com website.
A strength of organizational ethnography is positioning individuals in their specific work setting. In our case, we studied the marketing managers in the context in which their actions took
place and accounted for their unfolding actions for the duration of the collaborative marketing
project under study. The core of our ethnographic representation is thus the chronological account
of the collaborative project with emphasis on the following questions (Van Maanen, 2011): How
do they live? What do they do? How do they get by? We framed the text in order to produce an
accessible, contextualized and grounded account of how things work in marketing organization
and management when marketers have to deal with the integration of consumers. The chronological order of the account of what particular managers, in a particular situation and at a particular
time, did is interpreted through the theoretical lens of work: the organization of consumer work,
the nature of consumer work, the nature of marketing work and the integration of consumer work
into marketing work.

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

Exchanges with the


marketing team
members

2years of ongoing
interactions+postprogramme retrospective
interviews (4years later)

Observational
netnography on Alfisti.
com

954 posts in the blog section


and 1384 comments in the
forum section

More than 800 slides corresponding to


internal presentations of the Alfa Romeo
Project Team
82 pages of notes relating to the
participant observation of the Alfa Rome
Project Team meetings
152 pages of notes relating to personal
exchanges (emails, phone calls) with the
three members of the Alfa Rome Project
Team
37 pages of notes relating to interviews
190,000 words from comments and posts

Alfisti.com: the story


In this section, we present the chronological narrative of the collaborative marketing programme
from its beginning to its closing.

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

688

Organization 22(5)

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.

The inaugural workshop in Balocco


On 24 June 2009, 1year before the centenary celebrations, the Alfa Romeo management team
announced the launch of the online collaborative marketing laboratory, Alfisti.com. Recruitment to
the collaborative marketing programme was deliberately restricted to the first 6,000 Alfisti who
responded to the 100,000 invitations sent out. In addition, 700 members from Alfa Romeo owners
clubs worldwide were personally enlisted to join the website. The collaborative programme had
two stated objectives: (1) to develop the structure for the future online global brand community and
(2) to prepare the centenary celebrations of the brand in Milan. Alfisti.com included a blog that the
marketing team used to ask specific questions and receive responses from Alfisti on specific themes
in addition to a more unrestricted discussion forum.

Cova et al.

689

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

690

Organization 22(5)

Figure 1. Votes on the ideas concerning the centenary event.

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.

The launch of the Alfisti.com online platform


The opening of the Alfisti.com laboratory with the text of the CEOs speech delivered at Balocco
motivated many Alfisti to contribute to the collaborative marketing programme.
The enthusiastic comments were mostly found on the Alfisti.com forum:
Great news! Now, we have a platform to move forward. (Breramart)
Things are really taking shape. Cant wait for the centenary celebrations. (araknd)
Alfa wants to bring us together and link up all the Alfa owners clubs. I think that its a
really good idea. (alfaman).
These Alfisti considered that the company had the right to organize a collaborative initiative.
They were impatient to get on the website and start working (several hundred did so in the first
week). These were members of clubs that the company had won over (mostly due to the Balocco

Cova et al.

691

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.

The task-oriented blog


When the actual work started on Alfisti.com, the marketing team used the blog section of the website to divide the online work into specific tasks:
The marketing team selected about 20 discussion themes that concerned the development of
the future community and the organization of the centenary celebrations. Examples of
themes are the boundary or outer edges of the community (me, Alfista), the diversity
within the community (different ways of being Alfista) and how the community should
work (participation, video and photo sharing, etc.).
The themes were organized in a calendar (June 2009May 2010) which constituted the
management plan for the project.
The themes were published on a weekly basis on the website.
The Alfisti were invited to answer questions on the theme of the week and to open discussions on it.
At the end of the week, the editorial team and the marketing team analysed the discussions
and summarized the Alfisti ideas and contributions.
The editorial team published the summary and its conclusions. They omitted the many suggestions of Alfisti that did not relate to the themes such as suggestions on technology and
new car models.
Each week, the editorial team produced a community summary of the topic discussed during
the week, which was delivered to the marketing team. These summaries were based on the
responses to the topic question and ensuing Alfisti comments. Box 2 shows the summary produced
following topic question 2: To whom is the Community addressed?
Box 2. Summary of topic question no. 2, To whom is the Community addressed?
[] According to you, who is the main user of Alfisti.com?
Alfisti.com should be a community open to anyone and without intermediation, where one can defend
something different, something more with respect to extant communities.
According to me, the community is for anyone who feels Alfisti and wants to participate in the
centenary. And it is the wealth of Alfisti.com to be composed of many Alfisti from a lot of countries,
who participate or not in clubs or forums, who have an old Alfa or new one (Conni)
However, in the discussion, the extant communities expressed some concern of being encapsulated in
Alfisti.com. Community managers who had worked hard during their free time to build communities
(Continued)

692

Organization 22(5)

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

The free discussion forum


During the entire project, Alfisti generated free discussions on several topics in the forum section of
the Alfisti.com laboratory. Most of these topics were on the future of the brand, the company strategy,
the range of models and so forth. Box 3 shows the contribution of an Alfista to a thread on the most
important issues for Alfisti. As in many other posts, this Alfista expressed the type of emotional work
Alfisti were ready to engage in (buy with the heart). However, at the same time, the post shows the
refined capability of Alfisti to engage in technical/strategic work (scale economies are crucial).
Box 3. Excerpt of a post by an Alfista on The most important issues for Alfisti.
To understand what is important for an Alfista, we need to define what Alfa Romeo is. I was once
guided on a visit of the never forgotten Centro Stile [Design Center] by Wolfgang Egger in person and
we stopped for a few minutes at the entrance of the upper floor, in front of a frame on the wall reporting
a sentence by Orazio Satta (not 100% sure, but anyway one of the big names of Alfas history) that
perfectly defined what Alfa is. Alfa is emotion and performance, nothing to do with transport.
But the point is how to apply this in our age. Of course, in the 60s70s when the technology was still
in its early stages, the winner was the one who first achieved a further step of power or could go faster
into corners and this regardless of the rusty bodywork or that lockers wouldnt close without a good
kick. Not anymore.
(Continued)

Cova et al.

693

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)

The integration of consumer work into marketing work


The marketing team integrated the Alfisti contributions on the platform along two lines:
Weekly updates in the form of a community summary provided by the editorial team. Every
week the marketing team screened the report for insights.
The British web agency, which was in the process of creating the architecture of the future online
community, presented many suggestions that the marketing team compared to the community
summaries and forum discussions. The marketing team used the Alfisti contributions mainly as
features in the architecture of the future online platform such as access rules, guidelines, type of
content and so on. However, most of the key features of the architecture were defined by the
marketing team and the web agency without taking into account the Alfistis input.
In the minds of the marketing team members, the Alfisti contributions were used to fine-tune the
phases of the predefined project whenever a doubt arose on alternative solutions to apply. The
marketing teams intention was to collect ideas from Alfisti and then independently decide whether
and how to apply these without discussing them with the Alfisti. The marketing team had envisaged a straight and even road consisting of opening dialogue with the Alfisti in three steps: asking
for ideas, collecting responses and implementing ideas. The reality was slightly different: a mountain road as emphasized by one of the members of the marketing team. The marketing team discovered that it could not simply request and obtain ideas without first giving. You must be ready
to give and not just take said one of the marketing managers. They were pressured by Alfisti to
provide insights of Alfa Romeos marketing strategy to inform the dialogue. Box 4 shows an example of the need for this kind of exchange.
Box 4. Excerpts of the exchanges between the marketing team and the Alfisti regarding the Arese
Museum (Arese is a town where the historical Alfa Romeo factory is located).
Biscione67In the November issue of Ruoteclassiche (Classic Wheels magazine) there is a page that
claims that there will be only one single museum of the 3 brands (Fiat, Lancia, Alfa Romeo) and that
the museum will not be located in Arese
Alfa Romeos Reply
Video interview of the director of the Museum to reassure the Alfisti worried by the information.
(Continued)

694

Organization 22(5)

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.

Cova et al.

695

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.

696

Organization 22(5)

Working consumers controlled as wage labourers


Our study of the Alfisti.com project builds on previous critical research (Arvidsson, 2005; Cova
and Dalli, 2009; Jenkins, 2006; Rieder and Vo, 2010) to suggest that consumers within collaborative marketing programmes can be considered interactive service workers contributing
social and emotional skills. The technical skills the Alfisti wished to mobilize were not taken
into consideration by the marketing team. Our study further shows that the marketers organized
the collective marketing work of the Alfisti consumer communities in a way that resembles
control of wage labourers. The marketing team organized the Balocco workshop along key topics to be discussed. These topics were chosen without the promised real dialogue between
Alfa Romeo managers and Alfisti. The marketing team used the blog to divide the work processes into tasks to be undertaken by Alfisti. This resembles what Edwards (1979) calls technical control, that is, planning the flow of work through designing the production process. The
control advocated by Alfa Romeo also has commonalities with what Edwards (1979) calls
bureaucratic control, which implies imposing company rules and policies upon workers. Alfa
Romeos management and not the Alfisti decided what the work was about (building the community and organizing the centenary). Alfa Romeo also advocated normative control (Callaghan
and Thompson, 2001) by trying to correct those Alfisti that had diverted from the work tasks
and criticized the project and the brand.
The Alfistis decisions were, in fact, no more than pseudo-decisions (Kornberger, 2010).
Whereas many Alfisti had envisaged that their collaboration could really bring something relevant to the brand, the most important issues were excluded from the discussion. Like other brand
community members, Alfisti claim ownership of the brand (OGuinn and Muiz, 2005) and, as
a consequence, wanted to be involved in major issues and not merely in social and emotional
work. They wanted to contribute technical skills and be involved in product development, marketing, design and similar tasks. In other words, they wanted to do what could be called traditional work rather than service work. Alfisti were not necessarily ready to make their expertise
available to the Alfa marketing team and above all to the Fiat group for issues that they considered secondary.
The amount of service work the customers undertook was rather limited. The reluctance of
some Alfisti towards the Alfisti.com initiative suggests that Alfisti embraced an alternative
vision of how to organize the collaboration. This discourse was mediated by their experience as
brand community members that usually see communities as organic, social utopian, free-for-all
and self-organizing. This informal organization has been described as autonomous regulation
(Demazire etal., 2007). Accordingly, work is not tightly controlled and does not imply obeying
any rules of subordination. The idea of working under the subordination of Alfa Romeo managers is against the nature of most Alfisti, accustomed to contributing to/working for their clubs.
They therefore distanced themselves from the Alfisti.com project that was highly McDonaldized.
This project did not give rise to a re-enchantment of consumption (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995)
but rather to a disenchantment of prosumption (Denegri-Knott and Zwick, 2012). The programme resonates with Denegri-Knott and Zwicks (2012) statement: What start[s] as enjoyable and collaborative prosumption can quickly deteriorate into an individualized experience of
(re-)McDonaldized chores (p. 442). In addition, the company extracted the Alfisti from their
respective brand communities. The personal status and competences enjoyed by Alfisti in their
communities were disregarded, which made them reluctant to engage in the new working environment. While work-like practices are common and run smoothly in self-organized brand communities (Schau etal., 2009), these work practices cannot easily be exported to a collaborative
marketing programme such as Alfisti.com.

Cova et al.

697

Changing marketing work


The Alfisti.com project was an occasion for the members of the marketing team to change their
marketing practice from a relationship marketing approach based on Customer Relationship
Marketing tools (the previous Alfisti Owners website) to a collaborative marketing approach.
However, the introduction of a collaborative dimension in the project of doing marketing with the
community of Alfisti was considered from the beginning as an instrument to mobilize community
members (What is the common goal or cause that could unite Alfisti? (IP, September 2008)) and
not as a change of marketing work. The marketing team had not envisioned this collaboration as
the basis of a new marketing approach. According to our interpretation, they approached the work
in line with the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty: customers were meant to experience
sovereignty, but the plan was never to give them real influence (Korczynski, 2002, 2013).
However, the reactions of the Alfisti forced the marketing managers to adapt their work and
to partially change their approach to enable some form of collaborative interactions. As suggested by Zwick and Cayla (2011), marketing work within organizations involves politics and
conflicts with other departments and interests. This contested nature of marketing work seems to
also be true for marketing work conducted jointly by professional marketers and working consumers. Starting with the Balocco workshop and during the first 6months of the Alfisti.com
project, Alfisti compelled the marketing team to move towards a limited form of collaborative
marketing work (see Arese museum discussion), and as the project progressed, the marketing
team was also to some extent contaminated by the collaborative attitude of the Alfisti. The collaborative marketing work ended when the project was terminated by the new CEO. Although it
is clear from our ethnographic notes that a collaborative approach characterized the Alfisti.com
project, it was denied by the members of the marketing team interviewed again 4years after the
end of the venture. They returned to the previous relationship marketingtype work in their new
positions in the Fiat group and did not acknowledge that they had worked differently at the time
of the Alfisti.com project.
As argued by Lien (1997), marketers mainly work by writing internal reports and by discussing
these reports in meetings not with direct customer interaction. In our interpretation, what Alfisti
compelled the marketing team members to do was to engage in interactive service marketing work
(Korczynski, 2002, 2013). Collaborative marketing programmes thus seem to push marketing professionals to engage in immaterial labour with customers:
The marketers we studied used social skills in dealing with different types of Alfisti, with
different backgrounds and different ways of communicating. They had to be flexible and
open to be able to co-operate with the heterogeneity of Alfisti. The way they managed criticisms and uncontrolled voices is evidence of the application of such social skills.
The marketing professionals we studied were engineers working as Fiat managers without
any specific passion for the Alfa Romeo brand but had to face huge emotional reactions
from Alfisti. They put a great deal of effort into managing their own feelings in the interactions with Alfisti. They developed communication tools to convey emotionsespecially the
videos displaying the emotions of Alfa Romeo managers and the emotions spurred by the
test drive on the Balocco circuit.
The interactive service work of the collaborative marketing programme under study suggests
that the marketers engaged in a form of boundary work (Fellesson, 2011) by facilitating work processes undertaken by Alfisti. This transformed the marketing work from supplying marketing narratives for the mass of consumers and deciding, planning and buying the service from advertising

698

Organization 22(5)

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.

Alfista is the singular, Alfisti is the plural.

References
Algesheimer, R., Dholakia, U. M. and Hermann, A. (2005) The Social Influence of Brand Community:
Evidence from European Car Clubs, Journal of Marketing 69(3): 1934.
Antorini, Y. M., Muiz, A. M. Jr. and Askildsen, T. (2012) Collaborating with Customer Communities:
Lessons from the Lego Group, Sloan Management Review 53(3): 7379.

Cova et al.

699

Ardley, B. (2005) Marketing Managers and Their Life World: Explorations in Strategic Planning Using the
Phenomenological Interview, Marketing Review 5(2): 11127.
Arnould, E. J. and Thompson, C. J. (2005) Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research,
Journal of Consumer Research 31(1): 86882.
Arvidsson, A. (2005) Brands a Critical Perspective, Journal of Consumer Culture 5(2): 23558.
Arvidsson, A. (2013) The Potential of Consumer Publics, Ephemera 13(2): 36791.
Belt, V., Richardson, R. and Webster, J. (2002) Women, Social Skill and Interactive Service Work in
Telephone Call Centres, New Technology, Work and Employment 17(1): 2034.
Callaghan, G. and Thompson, P. (2001) Edwards Revisited: Technical Control and Call Centres, Economic
and Industrial Democracy 22(1): 1337.
Cayla, J. and Arnould, E. J. (2013) Ethnographic Stories for Market Learning, Journal of Marketing 77(4):
116.
Cayla, J. and Pealoza, L. (2012) Mapping the Play of Organizational Identity in Foreign Market Adaptation,
Journal of Marketing 76(6): 3654.
Coupland, C. (2014) Organizing Masculine Bodies in Rugby League Football: Groomed to Fail,
Organization. Published online before print January 7, doi:10.1177/1350508413517409.
Cova, B. and Cova, V. (2012) On the Road to Prosumption: Marketing Discourse and the Development of
Consumer Competencies, Consumption, Markets & Culture 15(2): 14968.
Cova, B. and Dalli, D. (2009) Working Consumers: The Next Step in Marketing Theory? Marketing Theory
9(3): 31539.
Demazire, D., Horn, F. and Zune, M. (2007) The Functioning of a Free Software, Science Studies 20(2):
3454.
Denegri-Knott, J. and Zwick, D. (2012) Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay: Reproduction of Desire and
the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization, American Behavioral Scientist 56(4): 43958.
Dujarier, M. A. (2014) The Three Sociological Types of Consumer Work, Journal of Consumer Culture.
Published online before print April 8, doi:10.1177/1469540514528198.
Edwards, R. (1979) Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century.
London: Heinemann.
Fellesson, M. (2011) Enacting CustomersMarketing Discourse and Organizational Practice, Scandinavian
Journal of Management 27(2): 23142.
Firat, A. F. and Dholakia, N. (2006) Theoretical and Philosophical Implications of Postmodern Debates:
Some Challenges to Modern Marketing, Marketing Theory 6(2): 12362.
Firat, A. F. and Venkatesh, A. (1995) Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption,
Journal of Consumer Research 22(3): 23967.
Gabriel, Y. and Lang, T. (2008) New Faces and New Masks of Todays Consumer, Journal of Consumer
Culture 8(3): 32140.
Grnroos, C. (1990) Service Management and Marketing. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Hatch, M. J. and Schultz, M. (2010) Toward a Theory of Brand Co-Creation with Implications for Brand
Governance, Journal of Brand Management 17(8): 590604.
Hochschild, A. R. (2003) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press.
Korczynski, M. (2002) Human Resource Management in Service Work. New York: Palgrave.
Korczynski, M. (2003) Communities of Coping: Collective Emotional Labour in Service Work, Organization
10(1): 5579.
Korczynski, M. (2013) The Customer in the Sociology of Work: Different Ways of Going beyond the
Management-Worker Dyad, Work, Employment and Society 27(6): NP1NP7.
Kornberger, M. (2010) Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle. Cambridge, UK;
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kozinets, R. V. (2010) Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. New York: Sage.
Lazzarato, M. (1997) Lavoro Immateriale, Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivit. Verona: Ombre
Corte.

700

Organization 22(5)

Leidner, R. (1999) Emotional Labor in Service Work, Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 561(1): 8195.
Lien, M. (1997) Marketing and Modernity: An Ethnography of Marketing Practice. Oxford: Berg.
Lusch, R. F. and Vargo, S. L., eds (2006) The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, and
Directions. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Muiz, A. M. Jr and OGuinn, T. C. (2001) Brand Community, Journal of Consumer Research 27:
41232.
Muiz, A. M. Jr and Schau, H. J. (2011) How to Inspire Value-Laden Collaborative Consumer-Generated
Content, Business Horizons 54(3): 20917.
Nakassis, C. V. (2013) Brands and Their Surfeits, Cultural Anthropology 28(1): 11126.
OGuinn, T. C. and Muiz, A. M. Jr (2005) Communal Consumption and the Brand, in S. Ratneshwar and
David Glenn Mick (eds) Inside Consumption: Frontiers of Research on Consumer Motives, pp. 25272.
London: Routledge.
Pine, J. B. II and Gilmore, J. H. (1999) The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a
Stage. Boston, MA: HBS Press.
Prahalad, C. K. and Ramaswamy, V. (2000) Co-Opting Customer Competence, Harvard Business Review
78(1): 7987.
Rieder, K. and Vo, G. G. (2010) The Working CustomerAn Emerging New Type of Consumer,
Psychology of Everyday Activity 3(2): 210.
Ritzer, G. and Jurgenson, N. (2010) Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the
Age of the Digital prosumer, Journal of Consumer Culture 10(1): 1336.
Ritzer, G., Dean, P. and Jurgenson, N. (2012) The Coming Age of the Prosumer, American Behavioral
Scientist 56(4): 37998.
Schau, H. J., Muiz, A. M. Jr and Arnould, E. J. (2009) How Brand Community Practices Create Value,
Journal of Marketing 73(5): 3051.
Spiggle, S. (1994) Analysis and Interpretation of Qualitative Data in Consumer Research, Journal of
Consumer Research 21(3): 491503.
Taylor, R. F. (2004) Extending Conceptual Boundaries: Work, Voluntary Work and Employment, Work,
Employment and Society 18(1): 2949.
Van Maanen, J. (2011) Ethnography as Work: Some Rules of Engagement, Journal of Management Studies
48(1): 21834.
Wiertz, C. and De Ruyter, K. (2007) Beyond the Call of Duty: Why Customers Contribute to Firm-Hosted
Commercial Online Communities, Organization Studies 28(3): 34776.
Willmott, H. (2010) Creating Value beyond the Point of Production: Branding, Financialization and Market
Capitalization, Organization 17(5): 51742.
Zwick, D., Bonsu, S. K. and Darmody, A. (2008) Putting Consumers to Work: Co-creation and New
Marketing Govern-Mentality, Journal of Consumer Culture 8(2): 16396.
Zwick, D. and Cayla, J., eds (2011) Inside Marketing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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.

701

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.

Potrebbero piacerti anche