chapter 5 shows, this exchange often takes place when the individual enters a contest, draw, or lottery). Whereas this book has focused primarily on the influential panopticon chapter of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), other treatments of consumer culture such as Rick Maxwell’s (1996a, 1996b) have turned to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978) to explicate the reciprocal and (self ) governmental dimensions of information exchange. Maxwell’s (1996b, 107) studies of market researchers (or interviewers) as quasi-ethnographers[2] characterize the human interaction between market researcher and consumer as a form of ‘‘confessional,’’ albeit in more secular terms. For Foucault, the act of confession reinforces a mode of governmentality that requires individuals to routinely articulate their loquacious desires and transgressions. To elicit such ‘‘confessionals,’’ the market researcher must gain the confidence of the interviewee through a relationship based on a mutually respectful reciprocity. The desire for interviewees to confess to enjoying a certain product or service—in the hopes that their lifestyles will be ‘‘represented’’ in future commodities and market decisions—must, in other words, be ‘‘rewarded’’ with an understanding or supportive response on the part of the researcher or with a promise of financial reward. Hence, Maxwell (1996b, 107–108) argues, market researchers in this capacity
listen to stories about people’s relation to every imaginable kind of product, from household cleaners to perfumes and flight attendants. Market researchers interpret these stories as local assessments about the value people ascribe to goods and services, reporting what they find to corporate clients wishing to improve merchandising techniques in as many different markets as possible. . . . The market researcher furnishes a place for people to report their beliefs and opinions, doubts and successes, gossip on the streets rumors from the neighbors. This secular confessional is the first station supplying the human face to global products.
Maxwell’s comments on the role of the market researcher are helpful because they broaden the definition of consumer solicitation—in this instance, to a transnational and ‘‘front-line’’ dialogic moment. However, when Maxwell (1996a, 222) argues that ‘‘the perceived innocuousness of the encounter of course does not eliminate domination; it just distances and ex-nominates the political economy,’’ he nonetheless fails to relate the confessional as ‘‘technology of the self ’’ (as self-discipline) to the reproduction of other more automated and ubiquitous consumer technologies. The process of solicitation is, as such, but one element in the reproduction of consumer markets and topographical relationships.
And just as techniques of solicitation come in various shapes and sizes (some exceedingly blatant and obtrusive, others banal and ubiquitous) in their bid to address the predictability and routinization of particular consumers and markets, likewise, not all personal information collected is of the same stock and utility. Rather, as raw materials for market researchers, various categories of data become integral elements in the diagnostic process—that is, the means by which information is cross-referenced. In Lifestyle Market Segmentation, Ronald D. Michman (1991) outlines four primary categories of data. First, geographic data encompass categories such as region, climate, population density, and market area. Examples of geographic data include telephone area codes, zip codes, and Internet URLs and domain names. Second, demographic data tend to focus on personal information that is specific and unique to an individual. Examples of demographic data include age, sex, race, marital status, income, occupation, education, religion, race, and nationality. Third, psychographic data attempt to address social aspects such as class, values, lifestyles, and personality. Finally, consumer behavior data refers to specific needs and desires, such as usage rate, brand loyalty, product knowledge, and attitude about specific products.
Each of Michman’s categories of data serves a distinct role in the diagnosis of commercial markets and consumer behavior. Demo- graphic data often serve as a baseline of relatively consistent and easily understood statistics (we change our domicile much less than we change our tastes for commodities and services such as restaurants, for instance). Demographic data also distinguishes us as individuals to such an extent that this type of information serves as fodder for everyday small talk (‘‘How old is your baby?’’ ‘‘When is your birthday?’’) and for increasingly common solicitations or exchanges over the phone, online, or at the checkout counter (‘‘May I have your last name, please?’’). Thus, demographic data might seem to serve as a powerful means of surveying and tracking individuals, but its purpose in diagnosing and profiling consumers is largely restricted to a baseline function: demographic data often serve as the object rather than the subject of consumer database marketers. By comparison, psychographic data often blurs the distinction between object and subject positions by both categorizing values (object) and potentially changing or modifying values (subject). This process is then crystallized in consumer behavior data (which can be conceived of as an individual’s overall lifestyle), where for the purposes of expanding and reconstituting markets, notions of use value and brand loyalty are actively and constantly in need of reformation. The process of data acquisition for consumer databases operates via numerous techniques, technologies, and places, yet one commonality that unites these disparate attempts at solicitation is the need for the collected data to be codified and profiled—typically the transformation of actions, habits, and behaviors (in short, lifestyles) into a simple system of classification. Faye W. Gilbert and William E. Warren (1995, 229), for example, classify consumer profiles into a number of types. The ‘‘economizer,’’ for instance, is a profile (the sum of data cross-referenced to give a picture) for an individual who is likely to shop for specials. Not surprisingly, the ‘‘credit user’’ is a profile for those likely to use credit for almost all purchases. The more abstract ‘‘self-confident’’ profile refers to individuals who perceive themselves as independent minded. The ‘‘home oriented’’ profile is used for those who are interested in domestic technologies (particularly entertainment) and who ‘‘would rather spend a quiet night at home than go to a party.’’ And finally, the ‘‘fashionable’’ profile is constructed for those who believe that it is important to ‘‘dress smartly.’’
Such consumer profiles form the backbone of contemporary marketing research—the categorization of ‘‘probable’’ consumers based on patterns of past behavior. Yet consumer profiles alone remain ineffective without the introduction and diagnosis of geographic data. Geographical data allow marketers to rationalize and henceforth make efficient everyday communication and circulation of information in the nation-state (such as zip codes in mail delivery) and spatially anchor data collected from more routinized technologies of solicitation (such as credit-card purchases and videotape rentals). These are critical points that Gandy, for example, largely avoids in his Foucaultian analysis of the information economy. In other words, Gandy’s ‘‘Panopticon Sort’’ (1993, 10) logically mirrors Jeremy Bentham’s (1995) panoptic prison and Michman’s (1991) previous three modes of indexical apparatuses in that it
serves as a powerful metaphorical resource for representing the contemporary technology of segmentation and targeting, which involves surveillance of consumers, their isolation into classes and categories, and their use in market tests that have the character of experiments.
Thus, without visualizing consumer databases in graphical or iconic models, marketers can only attempt to integrate strategies of marketing with the actual delivery of commodities and services and therefore are limited in their ability to govern or prescribe spatial reformation. Taking the example of zip codes (or political jurisdictions, such as counties or school districts, or telephone area codes) in computer databases, it is important to distinguish between coding space and categorizing or coding lifestyle and consumer habits. In the former, we are still ‘‘segmenting’’ in the Foucaultian sense: we are distinguishing between this and that particular quality. Such an argument is, for example, clearly at work in Foucault’s (1986, 23) thoughts on demography in situs, as opposed to a topology of psychographics or lifestyle:
The problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world—a problem that is certainly quite important—but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.
[2]Maxwell (1996b, 107) claims that ‘‘interviewers and their supervisors are unique among cultural workers. They are charged with carrying people’s life stories across the divide separating two structurally differentiated groups: manufacturers and consumers.’’
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