Marketing machines at work: performing e-commerce by assembling, adjusting, and maintaining a complex market device

This paper aims to explore and conceptualise the marketing work of e-commerce managers. It draws on an ethnographically inspired study involving 21 e-commerce managers and approaches marketing work as a set of socio-material practices. The analysis shows that the marketing work of e-commerce managers centres on assembling, adjusting, and maintaining ‘marketing machines’ – complex market devices designed to perform marketing work. These heterogeneous arrangements comprise digital technologies, staff and their competencies, and organisational procedures. When put together, these marketing machines work to calculate demand, develop a product assortment, advertise and promote products, sell and deliver products, and provide customer service. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the device-focused analysis of marketing work for our understanding of the digitalisation of marketing.