“Know your customer”: marketing, governmentality and the “new consumer” of financial services

This paper aims to illustrate the important role marketing technologies play in contemporary neo‐liberal policies which aim to effect social control over a populace through the shaping of the desire and freedom of individuals. This argument will be developed through an analysis of the expanded role of marketing technologies in the UK financial services industry in the light of studies of governmentality. Drawing on Foucauldian work, it will be argued that to understand governmentality, power relations must be reconceptualised beyond notions of institutional power and repressive mechanisms of control towards an understanding of their productive and seductive operation. From this perspective, deregulation should be seen not as a liberation of market forces or an empowerment of the “new consumer”, but rather as “government at a distance”. The danger of such neo‐liberalist solutions lies in their rhetoric of liberalisation and empowerment which does much to obscure the governmental operation of power in modern societies.