Databases and Consumers

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, data-driven marketing is ubiquitous and shaping business practice in a growing number of markets. The decreasing cost of information technology, datastorage systems, and data analytical services permits seamless and systematic consumer surveillance as well as increasingly sophisticated production of consumer representations. By capturing consumer activities in a ubiquitous fashion and in minute detail, databases become repositories of complex consumer lives by turning behavior into abstract aggregates of individualized and individualizing data points. Once consumption has been dematerialized and made available as coded, standardized, and manipulable data, there are no more limits to the construction of difference, to classification, and to social sorting, notes David Lyon. The electronic customer list allows visualizing of consumption, or rather consumer life phenomena, at the microscopic level. Customer databases reorganize the gaze of marketers and the way marketing practice configures and controls spaces of operation, production, and economic valorization.