Marketplace orchestration of taste: insights from the Bridgewater Hall

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to explore how a concert hall can orchestrate and shape individuals’ classical music tastes. The paper is based on an 8-month ethnography at the Bridgewater Hall concert venue in Manchester. Our emergent findings illustrate how classical music tastes are influenced via the spatial meanings of the concert hall. These meanings include various physical, historical and sociocultural aspects that are revealed in the context of the Bridgewater Hall. Our study contributes to various streams of consumer culture theory research and opens up avenues for future research on the interrelationships of space and place with taste.     

Beyond plug and play: The acquisition and meaning of vibrators in heterosexual relationships

This article presents an exploration into women's purchasing of vibrators and how they negotiate the meaning of these sex toys with their partners' preferences and attitudes. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 32 female consumers, the study identifies ways in which emotional, transformative and contextual aspects of meaning revolve around choosing, buying and using vibrators in heterosexual relationships. In analysing such experiences, the article points to the potential of vibrators to become imbued with notions of desire, maintenance, privacy and preference. Overall, this research draws attention to salient and nonsalient meanings attached to vibrators that constitute the sex toys' significance beyond simply functional elements. The paper enriches research on consumer behaviour and vibrator use in sexual relationships and proposes an understanding of object relations grounded in the intimate spheres of consumer studies.     

Consumption and Production in Two Oaxacan Communities

This paper suggests that the trend towards the conceptualisation of ‘post‐modern’ forms of consumption threatens the very basis of research into consumption and consumers. Arguing that although a fascination with the symbolic aspects of consumption has much to offer, the suggestion here is that the future of consumer research is potentially undermined by a preoccupation with post‐modern rhetoric which has in turn tended to divert consumer researchers away from their object of study. Examples of post‐modern consumer research are therefore critically discussed. In this context, the continued influence of modernist guises of consumption and the need for a datadriven prioritisation of consumer meanings is emphasised. The danger inherent in being seduced by the superficial attractions of a post‐modern mind‐set is therefore said to lay in the fact that post‐modernism operates as a disabling intellectual orientation which can only fulfil its potential if used in a more flexible and imaginative fashion than is currently the case.     

Using metaphors in new brand design

This paper addresses an important gap in brand development. While attention has been rightly focused on consumer understanding of brand imagery, insufficient attention has been given to how the firm's managers create, understand and communicate to each other something so intangible as a future brand's vision. We demonstrate how using metaphors in brand design enhances the ability of a cross‐functional team to create a coherent brand vision: facilitating both creativity and its communication. Brand visions are vital given the essential periodic improvements and mutations brands must undergo, without sacrificing the integrity and values which drive their purchase. Management complexity arises because brand development happens in a multi‐disciplinary environment. Moreover these different managers must translate the intangible meanings held by consumers into very tangible product and service specifications. The role and nature of metaphor in this process is examined in detail. We then provide practical examples of how this technique has been used with managers in a variety of branding tasks.     

Encoding Advertisements: The Creative Perspective

The role of advertising within consumer culture as an ideological force has received much attention within academic studies in the advertising and marketing disciplines, and has also been the subject of inquiry and debate in related fields within sociology and cultural studies. While many of these works approach the role of advertising in society through textual analysis of advertisements and consumer interpretations of advertising meaning, surprisingly fewer studies have approached the subject from the perspective of the producers of advertising, particularly within the advertising and marketing disciplines. This paper examines how advertisements are encoded with meanings by advertising "creatives" by exploring the practices and processes in which these cultural practitioners engage. A discourse analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with copywriters and art directors within an Irish advertising agency forms the empirical material for this inquiry. Four central interpretative repertoires are developed from these interview texts which provide insights into the pivotal work of advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries within consumer culture.     

Consumer multiculturation: consequences of multi-cultural identification for brand knowledge

Whilst there has been a sustained interest in ethnic migrants developing composite cultural identities in emerged multi-cultural contexts, considerations of identity transitions among mainstream consumers (i.e. the non-migrant, locally born majority in a given marketplace) have been so far limited to the local–global culture dichotomy. This paper argues that, in multi-cultural marketplaces, mainstream consumers are exposed to a diverse range of local, global and foreign cultural meanings and may deploy these meanings for identity construal in a more complex manner. The paper offers a conceptual framework of consumer multiculturation that (a) includes foreign cultures as other discrete influences in multi-cultural marketplaces; (b) constructs a more coherent conception of how, through interaction with foreign, global and local cultures, mainstream consumers' identities may diversify beyond local/global/glocal alternatives and (c) considers the impact of these transitions on consumers' perceptions, expectations of and behavioral responses to culture-based brand meanings.     

Comparing retailer purchase patterns and brand metrics for in-store and online grocery purchasing

ABSTRACT

Research on how vulnerable consumers navigate various marketplaces and service interactions, developing specific consumer skills in order to empower themselves during such exchanges, has received inadequate attention. This paper contributes to this area by empirically drawing on a multi-perspective go-along travel study, consisting of a combination of in-depth interviews and observations of consumer and service provider interactions in mobility services. It addresses both factors that are a source of vulnerability and forms thereof during service interactions, thus unearthing critical mechanisms that explain why vulnerability comes into being. Further, the finding of four distinct forms of active coping strategies, building on the dimensions of proactiveness/reactiveness and explicit/implicit articulation, and how these are related to different forms of vulnerability, provides an understanding of coping with vulnerability during consumer and service provider interactions.     

A book‐review essay on the role of ambi‐diegetic film music in the product design of hollywood movies: macromarketing in la‐la‐land

This paper investigates consumer identity negotiation via product disposition, specifically analyzing disposition as a means of identity separation, management, and incorporation within the context of tattoo removal in the United States. Evidence for separation and management functions of disposition replicate previous studies and demonstrate tattoo removal is a valid consumer domain for analyzing disposition. Motivations conceptually tied to identity incorporation are proposed, expanding upon previous disposition research. This work focuses on how the process, rather than the object, of disposition can symbolically alter a person’s self‐concept by allowing him or her to further incorporate an identity into, rather than separate it from, his or her self‐concept. Implications for disposition, the transfer of personal meanings, and self‐authentication are discussed.     

Articulating the Meanings of Collective Experiences of Ethical Consumption

In the context of the growing popularity of the ethical consumer movement and the appearance of different types of ethical collective communities, the current article explores the meanings drawn from the participation in Responsible Consumption Cooperatives. In existing research, the overriding focus has been on examining individual ethical consumer behaviour at the expense of advancing our understanding of how ethical consumers behave collectively. Hence, this article examines the meanings derived from participating in ethical consumer groups. A qualitative multi-method approach is adopted to increase the validity of findings. This includes focus groups, in-depth interviews, observation and document analysis. Results show that ethical consumption in a group project offers a greater sense of effectiveness and control when compared to individual actions. Furthermore, these groups facilitate the creation of a social circle and encourage new learning as a result of the social interaction that takes place in the ethical community of the cooperative.     

Heterogeneous consumers,search and retail formats

This paper proposes a model featuring the heterogeneity of consumer preferences and analyzes the multiple equilibrium of retail formats by building a map of the relationships between consumer heterogeneity and retail formats. The key questions analyzed in this paper are how the retailer adjusts its combination of marketing elements through repositioning and how innovation in retail formats is implemented to match consumers’ heterogeneous preferences in a market with consumer search costs. Unlike recent research, our model, by taking different consumer preference structures into account, introduces consumer psychological costs into the Ehrlich-Fisher model and deduces the existence of different retail formats and their multiple equilibriums. We find that consumer heterogeneity, retailers’ diversified transfer costs and economies of scale are endogenous drivers of prosperous retail formats. Accordingly, diversified retail formats with complementary functions and differentiated services can be described as the horizontal extensions and interface changes of the retailing industry.     

Consuming counterfeit: A study of consumer moralism in China

The consumption of counterfeits is a central theme in understanding consumer moralism. While some studies on marketing have highlighted the consumption motives and socio‐economic factors behind this seemingly unethical phenomenon, research on the subjective experiences of consumers and the cultural concerns about the consumption of counterfeits is lacking. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of how consumers construct and negotiate their moralistic identities through engaging in counterfeit consumption. We also examine how consumers utilize counterfeit goods as symbolic resources to echo, or even reproduce, the entrenched Chinese social relationships and marketplace ideological conditions. Our findings suggested that the research participants attempted to make sense of their counterfeit consumption behaviour by infusing the moralistic meanings drawn from the Chinese socio‐cultural value orientation. The study concludes that the moral identity work and counterfeit consumption practices are interwoven in a web of multiple discourses and resources available in the contemporary marketplace under the overarching consumer moralism framework.     

Consumer ethoses in Finnish consumer life stories – agrarianism,economism and green consumerism

This article examines Finnish consumer ethoses and the moral rules that include them. We argue that Finnish consumers legitimize their consumer and spending practices, and constitute themselves as moral agents through three culturally dominant and historically constructed consumer ethoses: agrarianism, economism and green consumerism. The material of the study consists of 53 consumer life stories collected between September 2006 and May 2007 using a writing competition. Through our material, we are able to illustrate how consumers negotiate, produce, transform and contest these three ethoses. We interpret life stories as socially constructed stories. Thus, our aim is to analyse the culturally shared and historically transformed meanings, rather than to reveal the motives or intentions of the individual consumer.     

Retail Image as Seen through Consumers' Eyes: Studying International Retail Image through Consumer Photographs of Stores

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore how retail store image is perceived by consumers from different cultural backgrounds and with different degrees of awareness and experience of the retailer. The subject is IKEA, a retailer recognized as having a global approach to the markets in which it operates, resulting in a highly standardized approach to store branding. However, rather than employing traditional methodologies to elicit consumer perceptions of store image, we attempt to capture consumer perceptions through interpretations of the visual images generated by the participants themselves. The photo-elicitation method employed captured the different interpretations and meanings attached to commonly identified elements of store image and reinforced the central role played by the store itself in retail image formation.     

Do values or goals better explain intent? A cross-national comparison

Among six major lines of inquiry on motivations, two theories are especially pertinent to consumer behavior studies: values and goals. Several studies show that consumer behavior can be predicted on the basis of values or goals; this study examines which are the stronger predictors by presenting a cross-cultural comparison of the values and goals that may influence the behavioral intentions of U.S., Chinese, and French students to study abroad. As a service, study abroad has financial implications, represents a choice, and competes with other educational products. Therefore, goals appear to explain behavioral intentions better than do values, except among U.S. students. The goals and values associated with behavioral intentions differ across cultures and have different perceived dimensions, such that items cluster on those dimensions with specific meanings, depending on the culture. The different influences of values and goals on behavioral intentions may help marketing managers design more efficient marketing strategies in international markets. This paper thus contributes to the marketing literature by suggesting that national cultures moderate the effect of values and goals on consumer intentions.     

Pet‐related consumption as a consumer identity constructor

The objective of this paper was to analyse how pet‐related consumption can be connected to consumer identity construction. This objective is based on the idea that consumers use symbolic meanings from possessions to construct and communicate their identities. Objects of attachment have especially been found to be closely connected to the formation of consumer identity. Furthermore, it is often assumed that consumers struggle to maintain a true sense of self or personal identity while retaining a feeling of belonging and social identity. This may be portrayed through layers of identity, which are composed of personal identity, social identity and other people. Empirical research was conducted using focus groups to create individual collages. The findings indicated that pet‐related consumption was used in the following six ways to construct consumer identity: ‘character developer’, ‘source of well‐being’, ‘means to connect’, ‘status communicator’, ‘object of devotion’ and ‘intermediary’, all of which found their places in the layers of identity. Each of these ways of using pet‐related consumption was paired with one other so that the extremes formulated three dimensions in a consumers' identity construction: the personal dimension, the social dimension and the dimension of emotional attachment. In conclusion, it was proposed that consumer identity construction illustrated via pet‐related consumption as created within both social interactions with meaningful others and those three dimensions is multi‐levelled and multifaceted. The paper invites future research to study both identity construction and emotional attachment, being such multifarious phenomena, and to explore the dynamic interactions that may exist.     

Leveraging consumer personality and social media marketing to improve a brand's social media equity

Consumer personality traits impact consumer actions, preferences, online behaviour and shopping motives. This study examines personality traits as drivers of social media equity by addressing the mechanisms under which consumer personality traits influence social media equity. We aim to combine consumer-level information with brand-level metrics to advance our understanding of consumers' associations with brands on social media and how specific consumer personality traits can be leveraged to improve a brand's social media equity. Using a self-administered survey, a total of 418 respondents from an online consumer panel participated in this study. The results from structural equation modelling revealed that while extraversion, openness to experience and neuroticism personality traits are positively associated with brand engagement and brand advocacy, agreeableness and conscientiousness are significantly associated with brand advocacy and not with brand engagement. This study advances theory by examining how consumer personality traits influence social media equity via brand engagement and brand advocacy as mediators. The findings provide rich practical insights into underlying mechanisms through which marketers can increase social media equity using consumer personality traits.     

Away from home: How young Chinese consumers travel with global brands?

This interpretive study investigates how a group of young Chinese students consume global brands of American origins, in China and in the UK. More specifically, this research examines how meanings attached to global food brands travel abroad with consumers and investigates the relationship between brand consistency and brand meanings across national boundaries. Findings from a thematic analysis of focus group interviews conducted over a nine-month period, reveal that some brand meanings are context and culture specific (contextual meanings) while other meanings travel with consumers across borders (core meanings). Theoretically, this study shows how global brands provide a platform of structural meanings, ideas and practices that are global and globalising in themselves, allowing a degree of fluidity and adaptation in relation to the local context of consumption.     

Struggles in organizational attempts to adopt new branding logics: the case of a marketizing university

Recent research underlines that strong branded identities are created through co-creational processes in which multiple stakeholders are actively involved and brand identities are matched with cultural, political, and economic forces in society. However, there is a lack of in-depth research into how organizations attempt to adopt new branding logics. To address this research gap, we conduct a study of a university that is rebranding itself in accordance with a new market-oriented, service-dominant logic. While harmonic value co-creation between the brand and stakeholders is emphasized in an earlier literature, our study shows that attempts to adopt these logics trigger contradictory and adversarial interpretations among stakeholders about the role and identity of the focal actor vis-à-vis their own. We conclude that adopting new branding logics involves struggles and dynamics of power and resistance, which have passed unnoticed in earlier research. Resistance is not only targeted toward the brand's symbolic meanings and conducted by marginal consumer groups to enhance their own identities. Rather, it can also be targeted toward the tangible resource roles that stakeholders are expected to assume vis-à-vis the brand, and conducted by various stakeholder resistors – with the outcome of undermining and shifting the essence of the brand itself.     

Partly primitive: discursive constructions of the domestic surfer

Various studies highlight the importance of discourses in consumer culture, yet fewer explore the historical development of these phenomena. This paper examines a long-view of the meanings and uses of primitive discourse in consumer culture. An investigation of the changing representation of indigenous Hawaiian surfing within Euro-American culture between the late-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century illustrates the ambiguous and malleable articulations of marketplace discourses. We find that over the course of this period, primitive discourses are expressed differently by changing figurations of social actors in manners that serve colonial, celebratory, contemplative and countercultural intentions. Finally, we find that the construction of surfing as a partly primitive marketplace culture combines these discourses to offer consumers a distinct and domesticated theatre of liberatory othering. Illustrating the changing possibilities and potentials for otherness in consumer culture, this paper reaffirms that contemporary marketplace cultures have complex historical roots. These legacies justify extended contextual investigations. Implications concerning representation and the politics of marketplace primitivism are discussed.