Critical reflections on the marketing concept and consumer sovereignty

This chapter engages with mainstream concepts in marketing – the marketing concept, consumer sovereignty and exchange. It offers a critical evaluation of the assumptions and effects in practice. The chapter looks at the marketing system with fresh, critical eyes, and examines the marketing concept and consumer sovereignty. The linkage of the marketing concept and sovereignty was called a paradox and problematized. The chapter engages with the connecting concept between the ideas – the notion of exchange – and illuminated how this hinges on the rhetoric of mutual benefit and arguments about equality. It concludes with a discussion of a contemporary research direction for marketing that holds the potential to shatter the concept of sovereignty still further: the biopolitical management of populations and physiological management of the individual. This unification of biology with marketing has been cited as a potentially fruitful area of research by some; critical scholars and educated observers should view it with a great deal of concern.