Consumer subjectivity in the Age of Internet: the radical concept of marketing control through customer relationship management

In this paper we present a poststructuralist analysis of customer database technology. This approach allows us to regard customer databases as configurations of language that produce new and significant discursive effects. In particular, we focus on the role of the databases and related technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) in the discursive construction of both customers and customer relationships. First, we argue that organizations become the authors of customer identities, using the language of the database to configure customer representation. From this perspective, we can see the radical innovation that the customer database brings to the organizational construction of its market: the emergence of the individualized customer. The cultural novelty of the database – ignored by instrumental analyses of information technology – also requires a theoretical reconceptualization of the notion of virtual identity. Against existing positions we posit a non-essentialist theory of virtual identity where the subject is constituted outside the immediacy of consciousness and thus emerges as the result of the technological and linguistic context in which it was produced. Second, we take our analysis of the discursive construction of the customer further by proposing that the emergence of the individualized customer was the prerequisite of the social construction of customer relationship management as one-on-one affair between the customer and the organization. We suggest that this is a limited and limiting understanding of the concept of relationship especially if the one-on-one relationship is placed in a computer-mediated environment (CME). By mobilizing theories of play developed in the fields of humancomputer interaction and consumer research, we propose that organizations would benefit from opening up the current discourse on customer relationship management to include relationships between customers, customers and non-customers, and customers and the virtual organization.