From consumers to consumption: The socio-technical assemblage of the persona in market segmentation

Abstract

Market segmentation is a fundamental concept in marketing research and practice, which, over the past seventy years, has become synonymous with customer segmentation—the act of classifying homogeneous consumer groups and representing them as idealized personas. However, customer segmentation and market segmentation are not identical, as the former focuses on different groups of people and the latter on strategically distinct markets. To address this issue, this paper contributes to marketing research by reclaiming market segmentation’s original meaning: distinguishing markets. Using assemblage thinking as an analytical tool, the paper proposes that socio-technical personas are proxies that represent markets as assemblages constituted by people (consumers), spaces, devices, and agendas that afford recurring practices (consumption). Drawing from an illustrative case of chocolate consumption, the study builds upon a recent ontological shift in consumer research and strategy that distributes agency from the consumer to a socio-technical assemblage that intertwines as a consumption practice is actualized.