An alternative to the “customers’ figurations”, “products figurations”[Faire acheter : le marketing de l'offre, une technique de mise en marché sans "configuration de la demande"]

Recent works on markets and consumption have displayed a great interest on the demand making associated with the spreading of the mass consumption. They have shown that the uses of marketing techniques were leading to the formation of "customers'figurations". These were interfaces operating on one side with the customers by supporting their own definition and so helping their choices, and on the other side by supporting the conception of customer adapted products.These "customers' figurations" allow to explain for the widely spread reflexive customer product adjustment. Nevertheless, next to the demand oriented marketing techniques, many enterprises have recourse to the supply oriented marketing ones, which are grounded in the product and do not precisely care of any product consumer adjustment. By centring the investigation on the luxury sector, where sellers almost exclusively use supply oriented marketing techniques, this analysis tries to show how these few studied techniques support the production of commercial transactions: their use do not lead to a reflexive configuration of the customers, but on the contrary to the formation of "products figurations", which support awide array of different buying or consumption acts. They thus contribute to explain the widely admitted elusive character of the demand for the luxury products.Finally, as many enterprises generally use both kinds of marketing techniques, this article hopes to provide a richer and more complex understanding of the product consumer interactions on the markets.