Market Research and Political Ideology Stefan Schwarzkopf Copenhagen Business School Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy Seminar at EHESS Paris, May 20, 2015
Market Research and Political Ideology
Stefan SchwarzkopfCopenhagen Business School
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy
Seminar at EHESS Paris, May 20, 2015
Market and Consumer Research as Ideology
• Market and consumer research merely an efficient business response to the needs of commercial actors?
• No, …it’s (cultural) politics, stupid! • It is political ideologies that influenced the making of market/consumer research as professional and academic field
The Literature on the History of Market Research
• market and consumer research seen as provider of more and ‘better data’ on consumer preferences
• better data leading to ‘better decisions’ • reducing the many unknowns for organizations and managers• reducing reliance on often treacherous tacit and experiential
knowledge• market and consumer research as techniques to reduce opacity
of markets and reduce uncertainty
organizations ‘see better’ and make more resource‐efficient decisions based on verifiable, explicit knowledge
complexity reduction through marketing orientation
A Whig Narrative?
• ‘The marketing‐oriented company aims to discover consumer wishes, which are depicted as “external” to the firm, and does so through market research, psychological understanding, and product development systems. To achieve its goal, it ends the segregation of business functions and integrates them in a manner best able to satisfy consumer desires. For the marketing‐oriented company, it is the consideration of “external” exigencies that generates success.’
• ‘…strive for “scientific” organization and co‐ordination of product development, branding, advertising, and distribution, and replace the “entrepreneurial intuition” of small firms with the managerial objective of the marketing orientation.’
(Robert Fitzgerald, in OUP Handbook of Business History, 2008)
The Reality of Market and Consumer Research
“The customer is king!... As simple as this notion is, it is difficult to implement. The needs and desires of the people who comprise markets are not readily apparent or easily uncovered.”
William D. Wells, Consumer Behavior (1977)
Alternative Reading ‐ Performativity Paradigm
• market research as part of ‘provoking the economy’ (F Muniesa; J Lezaun, S Vikkelsø)– artificial, contained situations of research– elicitation (provoking) of consumer reactions– translation/chain of social practices into ‘market’
• But… this limits historian’s views to the inside of organizations and inside the market research industry– performativity framework fails to acknowledgeexistence of macro‐social structures (e.g. politicalideologies)
– realizes the methodological choices that marketresearchers make, but fails to explain why
Taking Politics Serious (again)• What about political‐cultural currents that takeplace outside an industry and the organization
• Are political views of market and consumerresearchers just feeble attempts at legitimizingthemselves?
• Two schools of thought within the industry as regards cultural politics of researching the consumer
• Both emerge in parallel from around 1910– ‘Free Choice’ School– ‘Consumer Enlightenment’ School
The ‘Free Choice’ School• marketplace as a ‘democracy of goods’ or a ‘consumer democracy’ in which consumer choices act as ‘votes’
• consumer sovereignty acted out through choice • First representative: Charles Coolidge Parlin
– Manager (1911 – 1940) of the Commercial Research Division of Curtis Publishing Company
– first marketing research organization in the US– used graphs, maps, charts and tabulation to visually represent large‐scale research findings
– first to conduct quasi‐ethnographic survey of a town for purposes of advertising research (1920, Sabetha in Kansas)
– begins in 1914 to talk about the ‘consumer as king’
The Consumer as King ‘And so you have the opportunity to carry this message out, in order that you may learn to cash in on it, in order that your dealers may cash in on it and do more business, and in order that you may push through the dealer out to that ultimate consumer who is king. For we may talk as long as we please about manufacturers and wholesalers and retailers; in the last analysis it is the consumer that is king. Whoever wins his confidence has won today, and whoever loses it, gentlemen, is lost.’
C C Parlin, ‘Address to the Whitman Candy Company’, 1931
“Up to the end of the Second World War economic freedom – was still largely missing. … [Economic freedom] is fuelled by, and inevitably accompanied by, the enfranchisement of people as consumers. With the freedom to choose and the power to buy comes the influence of being listened to.”
Market Research Society, 1996
Contemporary Legitimization
Methodological Consequences• this school of thought expresses itself in research
equipment• from mid‐1930s: mechanisation of the extraction of
consumer insights through laboratory‐based and home‐based measurement devices – Stanton Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer– A.C. Nielsen Audimeter
• measurement devices record what consumers (listeners, viewers, etc.) like and dislike
• audience ratings emerge for radio and TV programmes• simple equation for managerial purposes: what people
‘like’ is good, what they ‘dislike’ bad
Alternative Forms of Consumer Empowerment
• also from around 1910 emerges a school of thought in market and consumer research thatsees consumption as a route towards achievingsocial‐democratic political aims – consumer protection– consumer education – general socio‐economic equality
• 1910s‐50s’ market/consumers researchers oftenvery politically active and/or socialist leanings
• politics that mainly influences European marketresearch; by translation also US scene
The ‘Right Consumption’, not just ‘The Right to Consume’
National Consumers’ League: ‘the consumer’s control of production’ (Articles of Constitution, 1909)
– ‘That the responsibility for some of the worst evils which producers suffer rests with the consumers who seek the cheapest markets, regardless of how cheapness is brought about. That it is therefore the duty of consumers to find out under what conditions the articles they purchase are produced and distributed…’
Beatrice Webb, The Discovery of the Consumer (1928) – ‘The Co‐operative Movement of Great Britain, manifested in the
local store and the national Wholesale Society, perhaps it was genuinely of working‐class origin, achieved without intending, grew, indeed, to maturity before there was any accurate formulation of the theory on which it was based: to organise industry from the consumption end and to place it from the start upon the basis of ‘production for use’, instead of ‘production for profit’, under the control and direction not of the workers as producers, but of themselves as consumers…”
Socialist Background • Most early market researchers in Austria, Germany and UK
actually Social‐Democrats or even Marxists • Paul Lazarsfeld and his Austrian research group in Vienna
– The Marienthal Unemployed, 1931‐1933– influences leftwing Lynd couple in their research on Middletown (1937)
• Lazarsfeld emigrates and quickly adopts positivistic attitude of US mainstream research industry…
• …but his Viennese pupils remain ‘true’– Ernest Dichter a suspected communist arrested by Austrian Fascists– Marie Jahoda, ends up in UK, married to Labour Party MP– Herta Herzog, ends up in US, married to Paul Massing, CP member and
KGB informer – all spied upon by FBI and MI5
• Father of British market and consumer research, Mark Alexander Abrams, a known Labour supporter
• Head of Gallup UK, Henry Durant, a known Marxist • Robert Silvey, Head of Audience Research at BBC, a Fabian
Socialist• Founding members of UK Market Research Society (1946)
mostly come from LSE and had Fabian influences (gradual‐reformist socialist movement of British academia)
• Mark Abrams, Reith Commission of Enquiry into Advertising (1966)– ‘There is a mass of socially useful information which they could
gather, were their skills and services more fully exploited on behalf of public as well as of commercial interests. … For if market research has a social function, it is to provide for all concerned such an objective view of the problem situation as will lead to more rational and socially desirable decisions.’
Socialist Background
Methodological Consequences• alternative political outlook expresses itself in equipment, too• ‘choice apparatuses’ like Stanton‐Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer
and Nielsen TV Meters seen as problematic• depth interviews and qualitative methodology: Focus Group
– used by Lazarsfeld and Merton at Columbia University Radio Research Project for de‐briefing of test subjects
– now combined with Freudian depth analysis of individualconsumers Ernest Dichter’s Motivation Research
• totally different epistemology and cultural politics of consumption behind it– removing power barriers; freedom to let people talk and find
insights for themselves; spill‐over into ‘counter‐cultural’ grouptherapy wave of 1960s: discourse‐space free from oppression
New Contemporary Legitimization?
• In 1990s, a new school of cultural‐political thought in marketand consumer research emerged under label of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT)
• ‘Old’ left politics that favoured working class empowermentand anti‐consumerist moral politics rejected in favour of ‘new’ left cultural politics
• Consumption not any longer a wedge for common, public project of equality, but an expression of individual identity
• Hedonistic, ‘selfish’ consumer actually the best barrier againstcorporate and political manipulation
• Individual opinion and individual choice seen as the last, untouchable, ‘innocent’ basis of human existence – per se good
Political Romanticism• CCT a kind of postmodern synthesis of the two school mentioned
above– smoothing the moral messiness of consumer decisions by synthesizing
the discrepancies between 1970s‐80s normative‐moral notions of hedonism (‘indulgence is good’) with 2000s social realities that hedonistic consumption is costing the lives of disenfranchised poor
• Reflecting a romanticist ethics, where the individual is the last possible point of reference, and therefore per se above criticism
• Schlegel: ‘Was man mit Enthusiasmus, also mit Liebe will, das ist auch von Gott gewollt und geboten.‘
• Fulfils the definition that Carl Schmitt gave of ‘Political Romanticism’ in 1919– for CCT, like for political romanticists, political action is based on
negotiation over aesthetics, not on notions of good and evil, justice and injustice
– the political romantic is tied not to positions, but to aesthetics