Abstract

"'Identify Your Profitable Customers': Individualization As Rationalized Embedding in 1990s Academic Marketing and Technology Fields "

Zsuzsanna Vargha, ESCP Business School (zsuzsanna.vargha@gmail.com)

How did the idea of giving each consumer a personalized offer emerge and become widespread? The now-pervasive practice of individualization and personalization in mass markets, using information technology, reach back to the early 1990s. I draw on English-speaking sources from academic marketing, and archives of Computerworld magazine. The 1990s saw key changes in marketing theory towards Relationship Marketing and later Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This shift to the “market of one” had multiple origins within anglophone academia: in the UK, US, Australia and Scandinavia. Meanwhile, information technologies that organize the contact lists of salespeople and those that compile customer databases converged towards comprehensive “CRM systems” that could create customer profiles and analyze customer data all in one. Importantly, these theories and technologies preceded the Internet. In the mid-to-late 1990s, a new concern for “web personalization” arose with different, internet-based technologies, eventually merging with the commercial CRM concepts and softwares.

Three main points emerge: first, individualization had roots in business-to-business marketing. Thus, while consumerism intensified, reworking the categories of gender, race, and class, I show that key philosophies and techniques of individualizing the marketing messages and product offers for consumers were first developed for handling business customers or customers generally. Second, in the new marketing paradigm, individualization was not a primary goal of marketing per se, but a consequence of focusing on relationships with customers, which implied “knowing” each customer. Third, individualization was justified as directly enabling profitability: customers had to be individually identified and differentiated according to the long-term gains they would bring. Like the consumer engineering movement, it did not question the knowability of customers, but the focus changed to anticipating and serving their needs instead of creating them. In Polanyian terms, this calculative approach brought a reversal, the “rationalized embedding” of social relations in markets.