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In comparison to the impressive amount of resources, time, and energy going into researching the inner life of consumers, a rather minor effort has been made to study the growing army of economic actors whose work it is to define markets and give shape to the consumer culture as we know it. Furthermore, the results of the work that marketers do are, by definition, highly visible. Indeed, we would suggest that making things visible (in the sense of bringing forward and rendering meaningful and recognizable) through, for example, product design, packaging, display strategies, commercial architecture, branding, advertising, and promotional activities is the raison d'être of marketing. Yet, the visibility of marketing activities contrasts with the relative obscurity of the inner workings of the marketing profession. Indeed, little scholarly work has been directed at investigating the practices, ideologies, and devices of marketing professionals and how “marketing work” is enacted in organizational contexts. This book brings together leading social scientists and business scholars to deliver a systematic attempt to theorize contemporary marketing from the inside out.

This chapter wonders about the overemphasis placed on consumers in marketing research. It starts from two questions: Is studying consumption exactly the same as studying consumers? Can consumption be understood through consumer behavior only? The emphasis placed on consumers tends to neglect at least two other factors that yet significantly frame the consumption game. The first factor is the supply side. Consumption is shaped by consumers, but also by marketers. As a consequence, if we want to fully understand consumption, we have to study both types of actor; we must research marketing as well as purchasing and consuming. The second factor is that of market objects, devices, and technologies (Callon & Muniesa, 2007). If we really want to account for consumption, we thus have to study the three vertexes of the triangle: we need to supplement the study of consumers with a study of marketers, and the study of consumers and marketers with a study of “market-things” (Cochoy, 2007). The chapter proposes to follow such a view in starting from the latter vertex: through an analysis of the trade press journal Progressive Grocer over the 1929–59 period, and from the perspective of actor-network theory, it shows how many market-things (cans, shelves, turnstiles, magic doors, …) were put in motion and articulated in order to help grocers and consumers behave differently, thus modifying the very actions and identities of consumers and other marketing actors.

This chapter is concerned with the work of focus group-based market research in representing the consumer. Dedicated to generating answers from consumers to questions asked by marketers, focus groups represent a process that requires a series of preliminary steps to physically “convoke” the consumer in the focus group room. Benefiting from the authors' extensive immersion in the field of market research in France, the chapter analyzes these steps from the initial “marketing brief” to the recruiting process to the writing of the discussion guide. During the preparation of focus group sessions, the consumer persona becomes so precisely defined that the moderator's challenge during the actual course of the focus group is to make the “flesh and bones” respondents in the room correspond to the pen-and-paper consumer previously defined. In addition, the focus group device with its concealed backroom frames the marketer who finds himself progressively trained to hear the voice of the consumer in the manufactured discourse of focus groups respondents.