Who is a potential consumer

In any case, the ethos that keeps a public together, and installs communality in the absence of community also generally contains a set of standards and expectations that allow members of that public to make judgements as to the value of the conduct and character of other members, or other publics.

Again, such expectations can be strong or weak, implicit or explicit. Publics of Free Software developers have strong expectations as to the conduct of their members which are rendered explicit in manifestos, constitutions and other textual products where values are directly spelled out.

Corporate brands prosper as long as the explicit value statements that they set for themselves are mirrored in the judgments that their stakeholders make as to their actual practice.

As such, they are able to confer value judgements on the conduct of their members as well as on the conduct of other actors. What is judged is generally not only or even primarily technical competence. Such non-technical judgments are even more important in publics that require less in terms of technical brilliance, like brand communities or publics of people devoted to a common erotic kink, where the conduct and virtue of individual members often becomes the main determinant of their standing in the eyes of others.

Generally, such judgments are conferred on individual members as reputation. As such, public reputation has a number of particular characteristics. First, as opposed to trust, reputation does not presuppose the intimacy of interaction. On the contrary, reputation can be conferred on strangers on the basis of limited public information about their behaviour and character. We do not need to know Jamie Oliver to know he is someone who can not only cook, but is also socially-engaged in virtuous ways.

Reputation is the form that social capital takes among strangers. Once again, the reputation of Jamie Oliver presumably depends on judgements as to his conduct and virtue performed by people who are meat-eaters as well as vegans. For Bourdieu , these mechanisms remained hidden and mysterious, to be reconstructed through minute empirical research. In many publics, at least those which use online media, they can be spelled out quite explicitly in the form of the algorithms that underpin value metrics used by, for example, publics of software developers.

Third, insofar as reputation builds not only on technical brilliance, but also on the comprehensive contribution that a member is able to give to the cause of a public, then his or her reputation represents an abstraction of the collective judgement as to the value of his or her overall contribution to the common pursuit to which the public is devoted. In this way, reputation is the abstract form that value takes in an economy of commons. Once a person has acquired a reputation, this can be realized in different ways.

First, in creative scenes, reputation is often directly monetized. It is the reputational status of an actor that largely determines the monetary value of his work. This is true for artists, musicians and DJs, as well as, increasingly, freelance knowledge workers and mobile corporate managers Currid, ; Martin, Second, reputation can be used as social capital.

Finally, reputation can enhance the enjoyment of participation. If are coneived of as a cool guy it is more fun to go to the Star Trek fair. However reputation is realized, the prospect of accumulating reputation constitutes a motivation for participation in productive publics. Whatever my other reasons for participating are, the fact I can acquire a reputation that I can subsequently enjoy in many different ways makes participation in productive publics quite compatible with classic notions of economic rationality.

In other words, if we think of productive consumption as happening in publics, we can also find a way to explain why people participate in such practices that is perfectly in line with established models of economic action.

The notion that productive publics in general are coordinated by a new kind of reputation economy is presently being consolidated by a wide range of empirical studies that analyze highly diverse practices. In addition, actual developments that point towards the objectification of reputation and the integration of such objectified measurements in a number of value decisions — on the micro as well as macro level — point towards the possibility that such a reputation economy is presently undergoing a process of rationalization.

For example, many recent qualitative studies point to how knowledge workers consistently cultivate an online reputation to enhance the monetary value of their work and further their careers more generally Hearn, ; Clegg, , and often use objective measurements of such reputational capital, like Klout status, in order to justify the fees that they charge Marwick, et al.

It seems reasonable to suggest that as productive consumption enters into a normal part of the life conduct of knowledge workers, and in particular for the younger generations of future knowledge workers who are now the most passionate self-branders on social media platforms Marwick and Boyd, , a reputation for excellence in such practices of productive consumption becomes part of the social capital that knowledge workers and others too, perhaps can deploy.

What is new is not that reputation per se becomes important to economic success. This mechanism has already been identified by sociologists like Weber , Parsons and Bourdieu Consequently, participation in such productive consumer publics becomes in part motivated by the ability to accumulate reputational capital that can be realized in other walks of life.

Until quite recently, the relation between consumption and ethics has been conceived in largely two ways. First there is the liberal view that suggests that consumers express their exogenous preferences, including ethical preferences, via their consumer choices.

The values actually expressed here are understood to originate from the private concerns of individuals. Second, there is the critical theory perspective, whereby consumption and consumer society is understood to be diametrically opposed to the very possibility of ethics. This is because, in a consumer society, the sense of communality necessary for ethics to thrive. But the phenomenon of consumer publics seems to indicate another possibility, in line with recent empirical research on ethical or socially responsible consumer practices Barnett et al.

Such a different conception of ethics also builds on a different conception of consumer practice. I think this operation is misleading for, principally, two reasons. First, from an economic point of view, the ways in which consumer practice adds value to capital are different from those traditionally associated with the ability of labour to create surplus value in the capitalist economy Arvidsson and Colleoni, Second, and more important for our purposes, the experience of productive consumption is different from that classically associated with labour.

Labour is thus a human productive activity that is alienated and commanded Arendt, 79; Sennett, But the productive activity of consumers is neither alienated nor is it commanded. Action is immediately related to ethics in the sense that, through it, human beings create a common world a polis that enables them to live together.

Consumers who come together in publics act together to form common horizon of values that, in turn, determine the direction of their passions and engagements. And those common value horizons, those ethoi , last as long as they are, in turn, able to involve and render passionate new and existing actors.

What is more, the ethics of consumer publics entails the coming together of a multitude of points of view, representing the multitude of orders of worth Stark, that prevail in contemporary society, and their fusion into one — however temporary — value construct that enable a value judgement to take place, however momentarily. In this way, networked consumer publics can potentially offer a new conception of value by means of which the worth of action might be judged.

Consumer publics are also political spaces, or at least they might represent the beginning of a new politics concerned with the direct management of common resources. Like the communities that Elinor Ostrom studied in her Governing the commons, publics involve participants in a series of engagements and deliberations — frequently highly conflicting — in which members build the norms, rules, institutions and organizational forms, including definition of ends and aims, that enable the public to keep operating productively and further the cause that it has in common.

Both the ethical and the political aspects of consumer publics are directly linked to the creation of economic wealth. The creation of wealth, whether this be a free computer operating system, a strong brand identity that can be capitalized on as financial equity, or social wealth in the form of the ability of a public like the US food movement to contribute to addressing social concerns or some combination of the three is also immediately political in the sense that the successful pursuit of such wealth presupposes the successful deliberative administration of a common production process.

Similarly, this process of wealth creation is impossible to separate from the ethical practice of creating common values that is what unites publics in the first place. Publics produce, deliberate and evaluate at the same time. They represent a new institutional form in which the spheres of economics, ethics and politics, tragically separated in the modernization process, come together in forms of public action Arendt, That is, publics might offer us a possible way of imagining both a new politicization of the economy and a new paradigm of value that is both ethical and economic at the same time.

Indeed, from the point of view of political economy, publics constitute a possible way of running an economy of commons. The value form that they articulate is highly compatible with an economy of commons in that economic value comes to depend directly on a diffuse perception of ethical virtue, or in other words, the economic value of a person or of a public itself comes to depend directly on how its overall contribution to the commons is evaluated by a multitude of actors that are affectively proximate to and have an interest in that commons.

Possibility is, of course, a key term here, because in their present state, consumer publics remain subsumed and dominated by a media system in which power is increasingly concentrated among a select handful of actors and in which large corporations maintain disproportionate communicative power Wu, This obviously limits the political and ethical potential of consumer publics. But the empirical phenomenon of consumer publics points towards a different kind of value, one which is closer to the vitalist tradition of Tarde and Simmel than to Marx.

Marxists have rightly criticized this tradition for its lack of attention to the ways in which value and its measure are politically constituted Lukacs, I would suggest that attention to precisely such a politics of measure is of key importance in our present context: the construction and design of a new public sphere, with new kinds of devices and spaces that can enable value to emerge in a new way is, I think, a key ingredient of a progressive politics that tries to unlock the economic, political and ethical potential of productive publics in ways that point beyond the crumbling neoliberal edifice.

In , Habermas suggested that since we no longer believe in the doctrine of natural law, or in legal positivism, jurisprudence could be opened up to processes of public deliberation. But, like Habermas, we sense that the setting of economic value could be opened up to wider forms of deliberation. I suggest that publics and the reputation economies that they enact can constitute a possible way of achieving this.

Adam Arvidsson teaches sociology at the University of Milano. Go to the definition of customer. See other collocations with customer. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day have a heart of gold. Blog Outsets and onsets!

Read More. November 08, To top. Examples of potential customer. Definition of potential Definition of customer Other collocations with customer. Sign up for free and get access to exclusive content:. Free word lists and quizzes from Cambridge. Tools to create your own word lists and quizzes. Word lists shared by our community of dictionary fans. Sign up now or Log in. Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English.

Click on the arrows to change the translation direction. Follow us. Choose a dictionary. Even when no comparable market offerings exist, there is always a competitive alternative. In business markets, one competitive alternative may be that the customer decides to make the product itself rather than purchase it.

Field value assessments also known by other names, such as value-in-use or cost-in-use studies are the most commonly used—and, we believe, the most accurate—method for building customer value models.

Field value assessments call for suppliers to gather data about their customers firsthand whenever possible. Although field value assessment—gathering data firsthand whenever possible—is the most common way to build customer value models, not all situations lend themselves to it. Indeed, in some cases, the only way to obtain information for a value model is to rely on customer perceptions.

The results of such assessments may not be as precise as those calculated from field value assessments; nonetheless, they can be quite effective. Consider a telecommunications company that used focus groups to gain a better understanding of the worth of an advanced intelligent network service called single-number reach. Single-number reach is designed for people who want callers to reach them easily, even if they are not at a single location or phone number during the course of a day.

Provided from a central office switch, the service allows a caller to seek the buyer of the service via a sequence of programmed telephone numbers. To determine the target market segment, the company conducted four focus groups with itinerant Generation X professionals, some of whom had six telephone numbers on their business cards.

At the beginning of each focus group, the moderator demonstrated the service using a specially arranged prototype and then asked focus-group participants to write down their first impressions of the service and how much they would be willing to pay for it per month. The participants then engaged in a discussion of the service, how they would most likely use it, and so on.

At the conclusion of the approximately hour-long discussion, the moderator asked the participants to write down their interest in the service using a ten-point scale and again, how much they would be willing to pay for it per month.

Although the company was interested in the actual monetary amounts given at the beginning and at the end, it was more interested in any pattern of differences between the amounts. An ominous pattern would be steep declines from the initial amounts to the ending amounts, indicating that the participants were initially intrigued with the service but, upon further consideration, concluded that it would not offer them much value.

No significant change between the initial amounts and ending amounts would be a preferable pattern, provided the specified amounts were sufficiently large.

The final pattern, considerable increases from the initial amounts to the ending amounts, would indicate that when the participants thought about the service, they recognized a greater potential value. That pattern would suggest the crucial role of business marketing communications in conveying the value of using the service to prospective customers.

Without a doubt, the most difficult customer value model that a supplier will build is its first one. Indeed, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the value of a market offering in a particular customer setting may appear monumentally difficult. But it can be done. The first step is putting together the right kind of value research team. The team should include people with product, field engineering, and marketing experience, and two or three forward-thinking salespeople.

Having salespeople involved at the start is particularly important. They know the customer and how the offering is used; they also know which customers might be willing to cooperate in value research. Sales-people who are part of a value assessment initiative from the outset are also more likely to understand and appreciate it.

They will, therefore, support the approach and can then persuasively relate their experiences to others in the sales force. Selecting the right market segment to target is the next step. Before approaching a customer, the team should think through what it will need from the customer and what the customer will gain, and be prepared to offer an incentive. For example, the supplier might offer to provide the resources to gather the data at no charge to the customer and guarantee to share all findings.

For most companies, the promise of shared research findings among participating customers in an aggregated or disguised manner is an irresistible incentive because it allows them to benchmark. Grainger, a major distributor of maintenance, repair, and operating supplies in North America, offered both incentives for the 15 companies that participated in its initial model-building effort. These elements may be technical, economic, service, or social in nature and will vary in their tangibility.

How well a pigment disperses in a coating, for example, would be a technical element; providing a consolidated monthly invoice rather than a separate invoice for each purchase would be an economic element; design assistance would fall under the service heading; and ease of doing business with the supplier would be social. As it is generating the list, the team should consider the entire life cycle of the offering in question, from how the customer acquires and uses it to how the customer disposes of it when it is no longer needed.

By identifying as many elements as possible, the team will be able to gauge more accurately the differences in functionality and performance its offering provides relative to the next best alternative.

But they tend to leave out cost elements, producing less valid estimates of worth. A bottle breaking in a filling line causes downtime, certainly, but it also generates costs in scrap, discards, disposal, maintenance labor, cleaning and sanitizing chemicals, and so on, many of which tend to be buried in various plant-overhead accounts. Believing that this was frequently the case, Alcoa Aerospace developed a program in which the company trained its salespeople in field-value-assessment methods and then gave them an assignment in which they had to comprehensively chart all the steps a customer took in acquiring, converting, and disposing of an Alcoa offering.

Interestingly, the program gave salespeople a reason to approach customers: to ask them to cooperate in letting them do their assignments. The promise of enhanced knowledge of their own businesses provided an incentive for those customers. At the end of a two-month period, the sales-people got together and presented their findings to one another.

With a comprehensive list of value elements in hand, the next step is obtaining initial estimates for each element and finding out what each one is worth in monetary terms.

To allay any concerns on the part of the employee, customer management should tell them that the person is there to help out and to learn. The customer may think the information does not exist.

In fact, the kind of data that needs to be pulled together in the analysis may reside on six or seven databases or systems in different functional areas. Sometimes, the only way to find the data is for team members to ask around until they come across the individual who knows where the information is. Focus groups made up of representatives from each functional area in a company can also be an effective mechanism for uncovering data.

The Proaction Group, a Chicago-based consulting and strategy implementation company, recently conducted four internal focus groups at a customer company for exactly that purpose. To prepare themselves and the prospective focus-group participants, Proaction consultants met individually with each prospective participant before the session, learning what the issues might be and gathering some initial data. During the session, participants were asked what kinds of information they thought should be used in a value model and then where in the organization to look for that information.

The value research team also needs to be creative in finding other sources of information. Independent industry consultants or knowledgeable personnel within the supplier company can be good sources of initial estimates. The ease with which the team can establish monetary estimates for its value elements will vary. The value of social elements such as greater peace of mind, for example, is generally very difficult to express in monetary terms.

In fact, most suppliers do not even attempt to assign monetary amounts to social elements. Instead, they put those elements aside and discuss them with the customer in a qualitative way after presenting quantitative results.

In any field value assessment, suppliers will find that some assumptions must be made in order to complete an analysis. It is critical for the supplier to be explicit about any assumptions it makes. After building the initial value model, the supplier should validate it by conducting additional assessments with other customers or potential customers in the market segment. In other words, the supplier should provide the initial estimate and ask the informants whether that element is more or less valuable to them than the estimate.

In conducting additional assessments, the supplier will also learn how the value its offerings provide varies across kinds of customers. The supplier can then build a database that contains value estimates—and the individual customer characteristics, which we call descriptors, that might affect those estimates—from all participating companies.

Looking at all of the data together, the supplier can then determine which descriptors have more impact than others on the value customers receive from the offering in question. As a result, the supplier can choose to pursue those customers and prospective customers for which its offering will provide superior value.

Suppliers can not only use value models to inform and guide their own decision making but also to create persuasive sales tools. One common sales tool is a value case history. Rather than selling customers the more commonly marketed corrugated-cardboard packaging materials, Sonoco offers packaging systems that, it maintains, are stronger, lighter, and smaller. Sonoco maintains a file of these case studies, which its salespeople draw on when making proposals to other prospects.