Paper short abstract:

Making a ‘new’ product concept requires the reconfiguration of corporate ‘boundaries’. This paper examines how the development of seemingly stable and mundane technologies, such as oral care products, are destabilized and remade anew by the performance of organizational politics, relationships, and know-how.

Paper long abstract:

Making a product concept requires the destabilization and reconfiguration of corporate 'boundaries'. Drawing upon participant observation of a marketing workshop at a multinational producer of everyday consumables, this paper examines the process of developing a 'new' product concept for the product category 'oral care'. Developing a product concept is a matter of cultural calculation whereby the relationships between products, practices, and actors (potential consumers and commercial competition) are destabilized and reconfigured into a 'new' product (Slater, 2002). Product concepts seek to mediate different socio-economic relationships (ibid). At the workshop, this entailed an analysis of existing markets and product categories; thinking about how to initiate new and competitive relations with commodities through the differentiation of a product's conceptual and material qualities. Developing a product concept also involved an exploration of the relations between competing goods and potential consumption practices. Through these investigations, it was believed that a 'new' commercially competitive product would emerge. The methodology appropriated within the workshop to examine these relationships borrowed from ethnographic methods, which sought to re-connect existing business knowledge to the lives of consumers. This paper discusses how the authority of the 'consumer', afforded by the ideals of ethnographic research and analysis, provided the workshop participants (advertisers, marketers, and scientists) an opportunity to assert their professional identities and know-how. The methodology adopted initiated a form of 'organizational learning' whereby professional differences (knowledge, practices, relationships) were managed and made familiar through the authority of 'the consumer'. Organizational politics, networks, and constraints materialized as the eventual product concept.