Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
49th Annual Macromarketing Conference, Helsinki, Finlandiya, 17 - 20 Haziran 2024, sa.21681481, ss.824-828
Abstract
The power of data-crunching technologies and online targeting algorithms over consumers has been widely discussed from different angles. Most of them tend to assume consumer data as a "digital twin" or "digital shadow" representing the individual consumer. This notion has been challenged by a reconsideration of consumer identity, which can be divided, reassembled, and retargeted as data points - defined as dividual consumers. While limited research has examined the processes of dividualisation (Bruno and Rodríguez 2022; Iveson and Maalsen 2019), in what ways consumers are dividualised through marketing practices remains underexplored. Drawing on Italian autonomist Marxism, this paper looks at the processes of dividualisation through marketing practices by looking at the intersection of individual and dividual forms of subjectivation. Based on qualitative research conducted in the Istanbul office of a global communications agency, I argue that the dividualisation of consumers occurs at the intersection of individual and dividual forms of subjectivation. By zooming in on marketing campaigns, this paper argues that individuals’ performing playfulness, affects, collective knowledge, and activities that shape public opinion as an individual form of subjectivation can be captured as data points and reassembled as segmentation or social media metrics that function as vectors of "proto-subjectivation'' at dividual level, enacting certain actions and affects through machinic assemblages while suppressing others (Lazzarato 2014, 30). This paper extends the dividual consumer debate, firstly by looking at the processes of dividualisation based on real life marketing practices; secondly by conceptualising the datafication of consumer activity based on subjectivation beyond exploitation; thirdly by highlighting the co-existence of the individual and dividual levels on which subjectivities or "souls are put to work" in everyday marketing practices - what Berardi defines as a "psychopathology" triggered in the incessant flow of signs on networks (Berardi 2009).
Keywords: dividual consumer, subjectivities, autonomist Marxism, data-driven marketing, digital tools