Marketing with working consumers: The case of a carmaker and its brand community
Bernard Cova and Stefano PaceKedge Business School, France
Per SkålénKarlstad University, Sweden
AbstractConsumers 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.
KeywordsBrand community, collaborative marketing, marketing workers, prosumption, working consumer
IntroductionDear 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: [email protected]
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in, exchange ideas and work together on two very important projects: the future Alfisti community and celebrating the Alfa Romeo centenary. (The Alfa Romeo Director’s online address on 24 June 2009)
The Director of Alfa Romeo thereby summoned Alfisti1—enthusiastic consumers of the Alfa Romeo brand—to 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 work—it 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 con-sumer’ was coined to denote this phenomenon (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Rieder and Voß, 2010).
In this article, we focus on collaborative marketing, an approach to the organization of market-ing 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 increas-ingly 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 (Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001). However, studies are scarce on how compa-nies actually organize collaborative marketing programmes with brand communities to put con-sumers 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 interac-tive service work, the blurring boundaries of consumption and work, marketing work and collabo-rative marketing. Thereafter, the ethnographic method and the findings in relation to the Alfa Romeo–Alfisti 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 indus-trial 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 charac-terized by frequent and intense customer interactions (Korczynski, 2002). Compared to manufac-turing work, service work is not primarily organized through technical control—which involves planning the workflow by designing the production process—or bureaucratic control—which implies imposing company rules and policies upon workers (Edwards, 1979) —but through nor-mative control (Callaghan and Thompson, 2001) focused on aligning the values and norms of the workforce with the goals and ethos of the company.
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Service work as other forms of work is defined as a goal-oriented activity and a social rela-tionship 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 et al., 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 pub-licly 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 ration-alization 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 inter-nal 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 et al., 2012) has increased firm–consumer 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 firm–consumer interactions from the work perspective, coining such notions as consumer work and customer work.
Rieder and Voß (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 Lazzarato’s (1997) theory of immaterial labour. Accordingly, it is argued that con-sumers 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 content—or 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 generat-ing new product ideas, word-of-mouth marketing, defining brand meaning and staging experiences for other customers. In line with Rieder and Voß (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 value’—the value of the brand in constructing, developing or maintaining social links.
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The work that consumers undertake becomes a source of surplus value extraction for the com-pany (Willmott, 2010). This extraction presupposes the management of consumer work, namely, consumers can be considered as workers that companies will try to control (Zwick et al., 2008) in order to co-opt—and even exploit—their 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 col-laborative and described next (Antorini et al., 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 (Grönroos, 1990). Experiential marketing appeared in the late 1990s, and its basis is that consumers prefer being immersed in consumption experiences rather than purchasing single prod-ucts 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 et al., 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 play-ers 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; Muñiz 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 et al., 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 pro-grammes undertake work (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Rieder and Voß, 2010). Collaborative mar-keting 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 stand-ardized 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 mar-keting 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
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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 managers—and not the workforce—interact 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 con-duct 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 Peñaloza, 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 observa-tion 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 meet-ings of the Alfa Romeo marketing team between June 2008 and June 2010. These meetings—lasting from 1 to 2 days—were run as discussion seminars on how to steer and adjust the programme. Most of the meetings were held at one of the company’s 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 addi-tional method, namely, netnography (Kozinets, 2010), to accompany and complement the eth-nography. 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 set-ting. 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 chronologi-cal 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.
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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 2006–2007. 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 self-organized 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 ‘Alfisti’—enthusiastic consumers of the Alfa Romeo brand. The aim was to create ‘a virtual space in which Alfisti could transmit their passion to other poten-tial customers’, as stated by an Alfa Romeo representative. This project specifically involved three marketing managers—all with an engineering background—of the Alfa Romeo marketing depart-ment who constituted the project’s marketing team. These were the Customer Relations Program Manager who used to run the Alfisti Owners’ website (a Customer Relationship Marketing–based 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 market-ing 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
Table 1. Summary of the empirical material.
Method Amount/duration Written material
Participant observation to the marketing team meetings
2 years—11 meetings More than 800 slides corresponding to internal presentations of the Alfa Romeo Project Team82 pages of notes relating to the participant observation of the Alfa Rome Project Team meetings
Exchanges with the marketing team members
2 years of ongoing interactions + post-programme retrospective interviews (4 years later)
152 pages of notes relating to personal exchanges (emails, phone calls) with the three members of the Alfa Rome Project Team37 pages of notes relating to interviews
Observational netnography on Alfisti.com
954 posts in the blog section and 1384 comments in the forum section
190,000 words from comments and posts
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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 experi-ence 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 (365 days before the centenary celebrations).
The marketing team’s 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 pro-gramme. 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 pro-gramme whereby a limited group of invited Alfisti would work together with the company for 1 year. As concerned the involvement of clubs, the marketing team understood the potential diffi-culty 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 here-after) 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, 1 year 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.
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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 Romeo’s 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 way—they 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 brand’s centennial celebration: (1) sug-gestions 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 market-ing team summarized the main ideas and comments of the Alfisti. Box 1 refers to examples of Alfisti’s 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 pro-posed 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.’‘Thursday—Gathering 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 monu-ment 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 Romeo’s 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 2 days 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 CEO’s 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. Can’t wait for the centenary celebrations’. (araknd)•• ‘Alfa wants to bring us together and link up all the Alfa owners’ clubs. I think that it’s 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
Figure 1. Votes on the ideas concerning the centenary event.
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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.
The task-oriented blog
When the actual work started on Alfisti.com, the marketing team used the blog section of the web-site 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 2009–May 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 discus-
sions 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 sug-
gestions 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)
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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 10 years?
The participants answered these questions by underlining the differences between the extant communi-ties and Alfisti.com.
If Alfa really wants to listen to the Alfisti’s 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 communi-cate 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 Alfa’s 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 60s–70s 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 wouldn’t close without a good kick. Not anymore.
Box 2. (Continued)
(Continued)
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Alfa has to bear in mind that it can’t 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 doesn’t 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. It’s a long shot in the modern markets, as scale economies are crucial, but on the other side it’s not enough to ‘appear’: the brand image has to be matched by solid hardware! So, no more rebrandings … the 155 experience was painful enough, wasn’t 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 won’t 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 there’s 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 Alfisti’s 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 team’s 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 envis-aged 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 moun-tain road’ as emphasized by one of the members of the marketing team. The marketing team dis-covered 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 Romeo’s marketing strategy to inform the dialogue. Box 4 shows an exam-ple 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).
Biscione67—‘In 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 Romeo’s ReplyVideo interview of the director of the Museum to reassure the Alfisti worried by the information.
Box 3. (Continued)
(Continued)
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Box 4. (Continued)
Personal meeting between the Alfista Biscione67 and the director of the museum.Reaction of the CommunityLoric—‘I can just say thanks ☺’Biscione67—‘THE MUSEUM FOREVER IN ARESE!’Falconero79 ‘I agree … LONG LIVE THE MUSEUM OF ARESE!!!’Anfortas—‘Thanks with all my heart!!!!’Tenerone—‘A 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 interac-tions 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 6 months 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 embar-rassment with respect to the traditional red colour of Alfa. The marketing team had to reas-sure 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 cor-porate image. Indeed, before reacting to specific issues, the marketing team had to consult the company’s CEO and the public relations (PR) function. Once the response strategy was out-lined, 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 co-creative 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 commu-nity management possible. However, brand community management was not part of the new CEO’s 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 team—complemented by the netnography of the Alfisti.com online platform—enables us to discuss how companies organize the collective work of consumer brand communities in collaborative marketing programmes and how marketing profes-sionals integrate consumer work into their marketing work.
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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 Voß, 2010) to suggest that consumers within col-laborative 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 top-ics 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 pro-cesses into tasks to be undertaken by Alfisti. This resembles what Edwards (1979) calls techni-cal 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 Romeo’s management and not the Alfisti decided what the work was about (building the com-munity 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 Alfisti’s decisions were, in fact, no more than pseudo-decisions (Kornberger, 2010). Whereas many Alfisti had envisaged that their collaboration could really bring something rele-vant to the brand, the most important issues were excluded from the discussion. Like other brand community members, Alfisti claim ownership of the brand (O’Guinn and Muñiz, 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, mar-keting, design and similar tasks. In other words, they wanted to do what could be called tradi-tional 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 consid-ered 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’ (Demazière et al., 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 manag-ers 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 pro-gramme resonates with Denegri-Knott and Zwick’s (2012) statement: ‘What start[s] as enjoya-ble 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 envi-ronment. While work-like practices are common and run smoothly in self-organized brand com-munities (Schau et al., 2009), these work practices cannot easily be exported to a collaborative marketing programme such as Alfisti.com.
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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 sug-gested 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 con-sumers. Starting with the Balocco workshop and during the first 6 months 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 col-laborative 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 4 years after the end of the venture. They returned to the previous relationship marketing–type 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 pro-fessionals 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 criti-cisms 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 interac-tions with Alfisti. They developed communication tools to convey emotions—especially 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 pro-cesses undertaken by Alfisti. This transformed the marketing work from supplying marketing nar-ratives for the mass of consumers and deciding, planning and buying the service from advertising
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agencies and other marketing service companies to facilitate and coordinate the efforts of the com-munity 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 consum-ers ‘really’ work and this changes marketing work in unforeseen ways.
Conclusion
Consumer work (Rieder and Voß, 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 et al., 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 collabora-tive 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 down-playing 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 collabora-tive 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 pro-grammes compel marketing professionals to engage in requires further elaboration as do the criti-cal 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.
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Author biographies
Bernard Cova is Professor of Marketing at Kedge Business School Marseille/Bordeaux (France) and Visiting Professor at Università 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 solu-tion 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.
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Per Skålén 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 apply-ing 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.
