Identity,Ethnicity and Gender: Using Narratives to Understand their Meaning in Retail Shopping Encounters

This paper examines the ways in which two women (Sweetie and Desiree) experience a dissatisfying retail encounter. Citing data derived from memory-work methodology, we illustrate how stories can be used to gain a detailed insight into the complexity of consumption experiences and give voice to women consumers. By allowing women to write about, and critically reflect on their experiences, we show how consumers attach meaning to retail encounters and how we, as researchers can offer alternative interpretations of consumer behavior to those commonly reported in the literature. In this paper we use memories of "nasty" retail encounters to illustrate how social constructs related to identity, such as ethnicity and gender, have meaning in shopping experiences. Because of the new understandings possible via this method, we argue for using reflexivity in our research and analyses informed by feminism.     

A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity,representations, and storytelling

ABSTRACT

This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.     

The care-less marketplace: exclusion as affective inequality

ABSTRACT

The care-less marketplace is a discrete site which reinforces structural inequality in the affective domain of life. Drawing on the work of pro-care feminist theory, this empirical paper explores marketplace exclusion from the perspective of economic disadvantage and its impact on relations of love, care and solidarity. Adopting a voice-centred-relational approach, this interpretative study examines the narrative accounts of a diverse group of women living in diverse poverty contexts. Articulating marketplace exclusion as a series of affective burdens, material struggles and disconnections embedded within the relational web of family, friends and community – these experiences mirror participants’ imposed exclusion in the marketplace due to chronic economic hardship. Through the diffusion of an alternative theoretical lens, affective inequality surfaces the importance of care and how it is often most visible in the lives of vulnerable consumers when it is absent or broken.     

Collective Service Learning Experiences Uncover Both Personal and Interactive Student Potentialities: A Case Study Within an Academic Setting

ABSTRACT

Across a twelve-year span of time, students at a small rural college in upstate New York have engaged in a broad range of research and consultative activities. The quality of their work has been recognized in a variety of ways, as has been manifested in international awards and abundant local expressions of appreciation. But it is the student service learning experiences that are remarkable—and often personally transforming. This paper relates the context of those service-learning experiences and includes an example of the quality of their collective efforts. Insights are also provided to benefit hands-on service-learning leaders and both marketing instructors and post-graduate institutional trainers.     

Beating,ditching and hiding: consumers’ everyday resistance to marketing

ABSTRACT

This article illuminates consumers’ views of marketing in light of theories of resistance. It argues that consumers engage in resistance to the power of marketing through their everyday actions and also through the ways they construct their accounts of these actions. It identifies three theoretical approaches to resistance (hegemonic, relational and autonomous). These are used to discuss consumers’ accounts of marketing collected through 78 personal interviews in which participants were asked to describe marketing and provide examples of their experiences with marketing as they defined it. Through this, the study uncovers various forms of consumer resistance, which can often go unnoticed. These are conceptualised through the notion of everyday resistance to marketing and are used to challenge existing marketing theory and develop paths for future research.     

Exploring the impact of packaging interactions on quality of life among older consumers

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the concept of consumer vulnerability in the context of older consumers’ packaging interactions. Consumer vulnerability is viewed as a situational state of powerlessness where marketplace imbalances or harm may occur from consuming marketing messages and/or products. The paper draws upon evidence from a series of in-depth interviews and observations with a cross section of 11 consumers aged between 59 and 85 years concerning their experiences with fast-moving consumer goods packaging. The findings reveal that changes as a result of the multiple dimensions of ageing can increase older consumers’ risk of experiencing vulnerability during packaging interactions. The paper provides new insights to aid firms in empowering older consumers through packaging development, thus reducing vulnerability.     

Cultural consumption,interactive sociality,and the museum

Abstract

Within marketing and consumer behaviour research, museums have been generally conceptualised as public consumption spaces where visitors benefit from a variety of affective, recreational, and cognitive experiences. As such, the social context has been largely subordinated to enhancing visitors’ cultural consumption experience in the physical environment of the museum. Our study takes a reverse path by highlighting how the cultural consumption experience in the museum nourishes ‘interactive sociality’ both inside and outside the museum. The analysis of our qualitative data (interpretive individual and group interviews and non-participatory observations) on Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow, UK, imply that by leveraging interactive sociality, managers can enhance the museum’s value proposition and societal worth in contemporary society.

The paper critiques museum studies’ over-reliance on (social) psychology theories and demonstrates the value of adopting alternative (sociocultural) approaches to the advancement of theory in the field. It provides evidence for the fact that cultural consumers’ interaction with(in) the organisation is not confined to the physical boundaries of a given context. People extend their varying experiences and sensibilities to other domains beyond the museum walls.     

Running wild in the marketplace: the articulation and negotiation of an alternative food network

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine how actors within what we conceptualise as an emerging wild food alternative network are navigating through the foodscape to find alternatives to homogenous and standardised food products. Drawing on data from different research engagements with wild food consumers and producers over the last decade in Canada, we use the context of wild foods to explore how the ‘alternative’ is being articulated and negotiated. Inspired by scholarly work exploring the pedagogical promise of food, we also explore the transformational potential of the ‘alternative’ – how bringing wild foods to the table can both inspire and teach consumers about sustainability and alternative consumption practices. We conclude with directions for future marketing research on alternative food networks.     

Are households ready to engage with smart home technology?

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes new knowledge regarding consumers’ preparedness for smart home technology adoption. This research bridges together three important frameworks – the technology readiness index (TRI) 2.0, consumer engagement, and perceived risk and trust – to understand consumers’ intentions to adopt smart home technology. We examine both direct and indirect effects, with results demonstrating the model explains 77% variance of consumers’ imagined engagement with smart home technology and 74% variance of intentions to adopt; hence, our model has greater predictive power than others proposed in the literature. Theoretically and managerially, we demonstrate a new pathway to consumers’ adoption of smart home technology in two ways. First, we depict the impact of consumers’ general perceptions of technology (TRI) on opinions and imagined engagement experiences with smart home technology. Second, we show how opinions and imagined experiences with smart home technology impact their intentions to adopt.     

Dodo Lé Là: how consumers promote a local iconic brand in postcolonial creole culture

ABSTRACT

This videography shows how consumers in the Reunion Island (France) promote a local Dodo beer towards an iconic status through their identity work. An alternative approach to Holt’s theorising on iconic brands is taken on two levels. First, the videography contributes by offering a non-American, postcolonial and creole aspect of a brand myth-making, as well as the ‘promotion’ of the brand by the local consumers and multi-ethnic community. Second, the consumers’ voice in citing the brand is examined (Nakassis, 2012. American Anthropologist, 114(4), 624–638.). Based on the findings, the citing of the brand happens in two different ways: when including it into personalised identity narratives and when producing new brand tokens, thus nurturing the brand ontology further.     

The crossing of physical boundaries: de-materialization and the move towards de-collecting

ABSTRACT

The tension between materiality and liquidity in society provides a promising opportunity to elucidate how de-materialization influences the iconic transfer of meaning from a singularized physical object into alternative formats of experiential consumption. We conducted in-depth unstructured existential-phenomenological interviews with physical book de-collectors. We investigated the role of imagination in maintaining a connection to the de-materialized collection and its impact on the person–object relationship. When consumers de-materialize a collection of physical books, they confront their values related to materiality and emotional physical attachment while opening the possibility of sharing and undergoing new experiences that can transform their relationship with singularized objects and with other human beings. De-collecting represents a way in which consumers can maintain indexical connections to singularized objects’ meaning while letting the physical item go.     

Online Music Consumption in Today’s Technological Context: Putting the Influence of Ethics in Perspective

Whereas in the past ‘free’ and ‘illegal’ were nearly synonymous in the music industry, consumers nowadays face a myriad of music platforms with widely different characteristics in terms of business model (advertising supported, fee based, etc.), delivery mode (streaming, downloading, etc.), and others. The current research examines music consumption preferences in this new context. In order to break with the outmoded free-illegal versus paid-legal dichotomy, the present research studies consumer preferences for a broader range of music platform attributes, including free versus paying business models, (il)legality of use, artist revenues, downloading versus streaming, and audio quality. Based on a literature review and a qualitative study with in-depth interviews (N = 92), an online conjoint survey (N = 764) quantifies online music preferences. Results show that consumers of all ages clearly and consistently prefer legal and ethical options if available, but favor different ways of making this economically viable. Youngsters and young adults are more open to advertising, while middle-aged adults are more often willing to pay for advertising-free platforms. Thus, in real-life choices, youngsters may appear to be less ethical and law abiding, but the driving force behind this is mainly economical. Finally, a market segmentation provides deeper insights into online music consumer preferences and leads to recommendations on how to define viable legal and ethical music offerings.     

Interactive music for multisensory e-commerce: The moderating role of online consumer involvement in experiential value,cognitive value,and purchase intention

Background music adds a multisensory element to marketing and e-commerce. Applying interactive sensory-enabling technologies (SETs) to online shopping websites is an area of interest in sensory marketing. This research examines interactive background music in e-commerce and investigates how online consumer involvement moderates the effects of interactive music. Single-factor experiments with three conditions (interactive music, static background music, and control) were conducted to investigate its impact on experiential value, cognitive value, and purchase intention of high- and low-involvement consumers among both students (Study 1, N = 251) and nonstudent samples (Study 2, N = 218). Different music genres were applied to stimuli of the two studies to demonstrate the generalizability of the findings. Results find that interactive music enhances the experiential value of e-commerce for low-involvement consumers. By contrast, high-involvement consumers show greater purchase intention under the interactive music condition due to a heightened level of perceived cognitive value. Involvement is an effective predictor of elaboration and purchase intention under the interactive music condition, but not under the other two conditions. The contribution is twofold: (a) it shows the impact of music as an interactive SET and, (b) demonstrates the moderating role of consumer involvement in the context of multisensory integration in e-commerce. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with limitations and directions for future research.     

The Impact of Social Networking and Learning Orientation on Performance

ABSTRACT

Organizational learning orientation and social networking have been recognized as drivers of innovativeness and performance. The authors’ study extends existing research on these concepts in several ways. First, they posit that innovativeness mediates the effects of social networking and learning orientation on performance. Second, they propose that environmental munificence moderates the hypothesized relationships. Third, data for the study were collected in Pakistan, which represents a novel and as-yet-unexplored context for this type of research. A structural equation model based on 176 small firms in Pakistan supported most of the hypothesized relationships.     

Integrated consumer shopping decision model: A Japanese online supermarket context

Abstract

Online shopping is not a new marketing channel but has been growing tremendously throughout Japan. The rapid growth of Internet technology has enabled the Japanese to break away from their conservative culture and embark on different shopping experiences by shopping online. With the growing importance of online reviews to promote one’s business, Japanese online supermarkets are looking for ways to increase consumer-generated content. The purpose of this study is to investigate Japanese repeat online consumers and the antecedents that encourage them to review their shopping experiences, including the supermarket website they used and product availability in the online supermarket. It was found that online supermarkets must focus on establishing confidence with their repeat online consumers if they desire to increase the electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) of their online supermarket. Implications are discussed in relation to online supermarkets and repeat consumers’ intentions to review their online shopping experiences.     

Cultivating group-oriented travel behaviour to major events: assessing the importance of customer-perceived value,enduring event involvement and attitude towards the host destination

Abstract

Major events, such as the Olympics and Glastonbury music festival, attract tourists and result in increased consumer spending in host economies. The purpose of this study is to gain insights into the key determinants driving future intentions of travel consumers to participate in group-based travel to major events. An integrated theoretical model is empirically tested with 424 travel consumers who have had prior experience travelling in a group to a major event. The results substantiate the model showing that customer value perceptions of a past group-travel consumption experience conceptualised with multiple benefit dimensions has the largest relative effect on future intentions to engage in group-travel behaviour to major events, followed by attitude towards the host destination and enduring event involvement. The results provide managers with holistic insights into components that are used as the basis upon which group-travel consumers develop their choice behaviour which can be used to effectively cultivate more attendees to major events.     

The servicescape: The social dimensions of place

Abstract

Place should not be viewed solely as a physical space that people inhabit or, within a servicescape context, patronise because the experiences consumers have in place are very much shaped by its occupants. Marketing literature, though, has tended to focus on the physicality of place, or the stimulus–response aspects of place, whereas in other disciplines such as geography, place has been viewed in terms of its temporal, spatial, natural, and social dimensions. The purpose of this study was to gain a greater understanding of how women's non-commercial relationships shaped their patronage decisions. Since this study was interested in why consumers make repeat retail visits, qualitative methods were used. As the findings revealed, one's need for social connectedness and desire to feel like an insider were sometimes more important than the products available and/or the servicescape's attributes.     

Like a member of the family: including and excluding paid caregivers in performances of family

Abstract

We explore the construction of family in contemporary families that employ professional providers of childcare and elder care. We find that families and caregivers at times construct family together, including the caregiver as a family member, while at other times, consumers construct family in ways that exclude the caregiver. Through our exploration of these various ways of constructing family, we offer three theoretical contributions. First, we challenge traditional distinctions between consumers and producers and highlight the fluid, contextualised nature of family by demonstrating that some contemporary constructions of family include paid service providers. Second, we elucidate the ways in which the provision and consumption of a service, everyday care, produces a liminal position for some service providers. Finally, we develop a broader understanding of the ways in which performances of family protect cultural values.     

Uncovering consumers’ returning behaviour: a study of fashion e-commerce

Abstract

The increasing prominence of e-commerce is shaping the nature and dynamics of retailing. E-commerce offers consumers lower prices, wider product categories and a more convenient shopping experience. In addition, consumers seek ways to manage the risk that is often perceived when making purchases online, which is why retailers’ online return policies have become an increasingly important attribute through which companies compete. Lenient return policies fuel unnecessary ordering and increase return rates, which in turn has major implications both for consumer behaviour and for managing the increasingly complex ecological and economical issue of online returning. Despite its relevance, prior research has paid limited attention to this evolving phenomenon. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to explore and analyse online returning behaviour in the context of fashion merchandise. As a result, 10 categories of online returning behaviour are identified that capture the reasons why consumers actually return items they have ordered online. These categories are further linked with when the decision to return ordered items emerges. Based on the results, managerial implications are provided to give guidance in managing online returning behaviour.     

Consumers as legitimating agents: How consumer‐citizens challenge marketer legitimacy on social media

Previous research has shown that consumers increasingly challenge the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online contexts. Based on a qualitative study, this article examines how and for what reasons consumers challenge marketer legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of marketers and their activities—in the empirical context of Reddit, a popular social news and community website. The study suggests that consumers challenge or accept marketer legitimacy in online communities based on particular, community and situation specific, legitimacy criteria that reflect and reproduce the values and norms of the community. In doing so, it is argued, consumers play a role as legitimating agents—consumer‐citizens that have the power to confer or deny legitimacy in the context of business‐society relations. Overall, the study advances knowledge in the field of consumer studies in two ways. First, it builds a symbolic interactionist perspective on consumer‐citizens as legitimating agents who enact their active citizenship role in the marketplace by assessing and constructing marketer legitimacy in online communities. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how and for what reasons consumer‐citizens challenge or accept the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online communities.