From consumers to consumption: The socio-technical assemblage of the persona in market segmentation
重新审视市场细分的原始含义，提出社会技术角色作为代表市场的代理，将消费视为由人、空间、设备和议程组成的组合，而非仅消费者分类。
• The original meaning of market segmentation has changed to consumer segmentation. • Assemblage thinking reclaims market segmentation’s original meaning. • Reconceptualized persona concept, socio-technical persona, represents markets. • Socio-technical personas distribute agency among elements that catalyze consumption. 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.