Consumption as biopower: Governing bodies with loyalty cards

For more than a decade, many retail companies have been collecting large volumes of data on a daily basis through loyalty card programmes. These programmes gather, at point-of-purchase, the identity of the consumer, date and time of the transaction, and the list of products purchased. With the help of data mining techniques, companies can use this data to get a better knowledge of their customer and to address them personally with targeted advertisement. This “mass customization”, which is at the core of the relationship marketing paradigm, has traditionally been viewed as a means of customizing services to meet the needs of an existing market. However, it appears also to be invested in actually customizing consumers to meet market needs. To investigate this aspect of relationship marketing, a study was conducted to examine the extent to which companies in Switzerland use data-mining technologies and strategies, their data collection and analysis practices, the privacy risks posed by such practices, and the modalities of power they create. As a result, and as it will be developed in this article, I finally theorized surveillance of consumption as being a much elaborated form of biopower, which strongly relies on the use of data mining to reveal patterns in consumption. This biopower is actually growing as data collected through loyalty programmes is now becoming a prime target for other purposes than pure marketing, such as helping the fight of health policies against obesity, or to control the consumer’s intake of food additive. These new kind of practices bring major ethical issues that are also discussed in this article.