IMCA Research Seminar - Yeşim Akmeraner Kökat, Università della Svizzera italiana
Istituto di marketing e comunicazione aziendale
Data: 13 marzo 2025 / 12:35 - 14:00
Room 253 (Main Building) In person
The ‘work’ of producing consumers through ‘databases’ and ‘co-creation’: How post-Fordisation of advertising work and labour shape value creation in marketing
Abstract
Existing research on value creation has focused on the productive role of consumers, either as co-creators/beneficiaries or as exploited labour. Although important work has explored the role of analytical work in creating value from consumer data, we know less about how creative work and labour shape value creation in marketing. Using qualitative research in a data-driven advertising agency, we identify two different modalities of advertising work that enable two forms of value creation. First, our findings show that value creation from databases depends not only on the analytical work of disassembling and reassembling consumers as data points and audience simulations, but also on the creative work of producing data-informed personas and creative content. Second, we show that consumer co-creation depends on the co-creative work of multiple professional groups, largely invisible to existing scholarship, who build the creative and technological arrangements that enable co-creative experiences. We theorise this process as an asymmetrical interdependence between the labour of consumers and the labour of marketing professionals that creates value along the blurred boundaries of production and consumption. This paper contributes to debates on value and co-creation, critical marketing and marketing work.
Bio
Yeşim Akmeraner-Kökat is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Marketing and Communication Management (IMCA), Università della Svizzera Italiana. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from Istanbul University with a focus on advertising agencies. Her research explores the relationship between data analytics and creativity in marketing, changing creative practices of advertising with digitalisation, and the valorisation of consumer/user subjectivities. Other interests include market studies, sociomaterial approach, critical marketing and autonomist Marxist theory.
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