The market will have you:the arts of market attachment in a digital economy

McFall, Liz and Deville, Joe (2017) The market will have you:the arts of market attachment in a digital economy. In: The Arts of Market Attachment. CRESC Culture, Economy and the Social . Routledge, pp. 108-131. ISBN 9781138904293

Abstract

What might it mean to say that the market will have you? This chapter tackles this question by using Gabriel Tarde’s central provocation that what we are, our identities, are not matters of ‘being’ but of ‘having’. The art of markets lies in how this having – of data, relations, associations, ties, ‘us’ – is practically accomplished. We test this idea by looking at how marketing conversations have been conducted in two consumer finance product cases: the industrial life assurance company Prudential Assurance and the payday loan company Wonga. These two cases, we argue, shed new light both on how we understand market attachment and what this might mean in a rapidly evolving digital economy.