Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Swiss Academy of Marketing Science Conference, Luzern, İsviçre, 24 Ekim 2025, ss.6, (Özet Bildiri)
Industry reports and business media have long argued that data analytics is changing how markets, marketing and organisations work. In the literature, becoming data-driven is often described as an outcome of the power of the data imperative: a dramatic, almost inevitable change subsuming organisations and professional groups to the power of data and metrics. Such accounts, however, overlook the heterogeneous practices and messy realities of becoming data-driven — the performative struggles and translation challenges of coordinating different expert groups; the negotiations around what “data” and how exactly it should “drive” organisations. Using Kjellberg and Helgesson’s notion of partial performativity focusing on multiplicity (2006), this paper examines how multiple ideas and competing interests result in the co-existence of controversial efforts that shape the process of becoming data-driven by drawing on qualitative research in a data-driven advertising agency following the merger between a data analytics and an advertising agency. The paper suggests that becoming data-driven is far from an irresistible, linear process enacted by metrics, calculations, and data professionals. Instead, it is a contested, often partial process shaped by interactions between data professionals, advertising creatives, and the data itself. In the context of a creative advertising agency, we identify two main ways in which the incompatibilities between a data-driven and creative culture are managed. First, through “avoiding encounters” between conflicting practices, and second, through coordination and translation work that enable mutual adaptation. First, the paper shows that inconsistencies between creative and data culture and power struggles between different professional groups, materialised in the workspace, lead to partial failure. Second, it shows that separating incompatible practices and intermediaries’ translation between data and creative experts enable mutual adaptation and partial success. By exploring multiplicity in becoming data-driven, the paper contributes to the studies on performativity in mundane markets, data-driven market practices and organisational conceptualisations of performativity.