ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces theory of biopolitical marketing, and argues that biopolitical marketing wishes to supersede hitherto dominant corporate modes of marketing management based on customer manipulation and control. Biopolitical marketing is a mode of governing consumers that aims at finding opportunities for consumer participation for the purpose of creating value for the company. Digital marketers like to talk about the consumer empowerment generated by new information and communication technologies. Biopolitical marketing rejects any clear distinction between marketer and consumer and sees marketing as entangled with, and increasingly indistinguishable from, the fabric of everyday life. Biopolitics is a concept mostly associated with Michel Foucault and his 'Birth of Biopolitics' lectures. Social media marketing is a practice in which we see biopolitical management of autonomous and 'anarchic' consumer life. The biopolitical marketing paradigm is one in which customer communities are held as harbingers of new engagements between marketers and consumers.
