Building relationships with consumers: consumer research as formative objects

How do advertising agencies consume and produce consumer research, and what role do those practices play with their clients? To answer this question, this article introduces formative objects, an analytical concept for identifying practices around the formation of exchange relationships in the knowledge economy. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic research and 68 interviews conducted across three U.S. advertising agencies, the article illustrates practices around the production and transformation of consumer research as a formative object across three steps: (1) agency employees negotiate what kinds of consumers matter with their clients; (2) they produce consumer research in ways that generate particular types of aesthetic materials; and (3) they use these materials to craft representations of the consumer to serve as formative objects, facilitating the exchange of campaign ideas and money between agency and client. The article contributes to our knowledge of practices in advertising specifically and the knowledge economy generally.