Beyond human-centered marketing: Rethinking market relationships as technocultural infrastructures

Relationships today are increasingly diverse and technologically mediated, rendering traditional marketing theories of connection insufficient. This commentary argues that marketing must realign its theories with contemporary digital life. It contrasts traditional “market relationships” (social connections embedded in economic exchange) with digitally mediated relationships that are co-produced by interfaces, algorithms, and platforms. Reconceptualizing relationships as technocultural and infrastructural phenomena, it situates them along a continuum ranging from human–human through human–machine to machine–machine interaction. Whereas traditional theory treats relationships as dyadic, human-centered, and narratively coherent, digital mediation reveals them to be networked, episodic, and distributed across human and nonhuman actors. This shift produces a central double movement: the enduring human need for connection is increasingly organized through emergent technocultural practices while simultaneously captured and commodified within technocapitalist systems. The commentary examines these ambivalent flows of empowerment and extraction, including the hybridization of connection through AI and other nonhuman actors. It calls for a renewed marketing theory that moves beyond engagement to interrogate the infrastructures of intimacy and governance shaping contemporary connection and highlights the need for methods such as netnography and related approaches capable of tracing distributed agency and lived experience within these systems.