The rise of the customer database: from commercial surveillance to customer production

With the widespread adoption of Fordist regimes of production and Taylorist regimes of management in early twentieth-century America (Gramsci 1971; Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 219-350), the supply of commodities began to surpass market demand consistently for the first time in history. The advent of mass production required mass consumption and as a consequence, the profession of marketing management was developed. Though marketing management had its roots in agricultural economics and was characterized initially by pragmatic macro-economic concerns about distribution efficiencies and co-operative marketing of agricultural products (Bartels 1988), it obtained an increasingly dominant function within commercial practices as it focused on selling more of a particular product than the competition. The new priorities set by a nascent corporate capitalism that pitches companies directly against each other for scarce consumer resources produced novel needs for knowledge about the market, including knowledge about consumers. Hence, corporate marketing management developed early forms of market research to produce consumer knowledge that would help outsell any rivals. Early market research led to a view of the consumer as a relatively stable, homogeneous, and immobile set of preferences that could be managed and controlled with mass advertising (Beniger 1986). An understanding of the consumer as a psycho-socially complex and mutable collection of needs, wants, and desires did not emerge until the 1940s (Miller and Rose 1997; Rose 1997). But even then, the surveillance of consumers and consumer practices qua market research (or “commercial research” as it was then called, see Elmer 2004), while becoming increasingly sophisticated, was driven by a need of the corporation to control consumers, reduce marketing complexities, and improve production efficiencies (Arvidsson 2004). In other words, the surveillance of consumers was motivated by a company’s intention to align consumer preferences for products and brands with what was being produced.