Marketing Looked at Concretely. The Case of the “Social Drama of Work” of Marketing Studies Experts in Large Companies[Le marketing au concret. Le cas du “drame social du travail” des chargés d’études marketing en grandes entreprises]

The term "marketing" generally arouses mistrust, for it is immediately associated with the idea of manipulation. But, beyond that, what, concretely, do "people in marketing" do ? In order to provide some leads to answering this question, in this article we concentrate on the issues involved in material supposed to nourish the marketers' reflections and decision-making : qualitative marketing research studies, carried out in the context of consumer meetings. This approach leads us to explore the relationships existing between internal marketing studies experts in large companies and their backers from marketing services. More precisely, we study the professionalism of the responsible and the ramifications of the social drama of their work, the latter being conditioned by an asymmetrical relationship with their backers. Beginning with an examination of this dynamic tension, revealing the relationships between these two professional groups, we describe a chapter in the real exercise of marketing in an organized milieu. Our analyzes, which, in our view, can be generalized to other professional categories, are based on a participatory observation carried out in a French mobile telephone company and on a campaign of semi-directed interviews.