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Consumer Subjectivity In The Age Of Internet: The Radical Concept Of Marketing Control Through Customer Relationship Management, Detlev Zwick, Nikhilesh Dholakia

College of Business Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present a poststructuralist analysis of customer database technology. This approach allows us to regard customer databases as configurations of language that produce new and significant discursive effects. In particular, we focus on the role of databases and related technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) in the discursive construction of both customers and customer relationships. First, we argue that organizations become the authors of customer identities, using the language of the database to configure customer representation. From this perspective, we can see the radical innovation that the customer database brings to the organizational construction of its …