This article offers an historical account of the contestation surrounding MP3 and its legitimation as a consumer choice option. We juxtapose our narrative against the service-dominant logic (SDL) literature, which positions the consumer as the co-creator of value. In these debates issues of power and politics are downplayed. By contrast, we foreground the politicized processes that frame consumer choice options. Through a study of the legal disputes around MP3 and digital delivery services, we make a case that law courts provide the scaffolding for judgements of value in the market system. Contrary to proponents of SDL, value is not only a function of co-production between company and customer. Nor do all consumption practices acquire sufficient legitimacy to enter into legally sanctioned value co-creation interactions. This is a function of the ‘hyper-power’ practiced by the legal community and related actors, which constitute or deny value to product offerings. Value is not, therefore, necessarily phenomenologically determined by the ultimate consumer. Neither are they the sovereign individual of marketing lore. Their subjectivity is patterned by macro and meso actors and service provision is permitted when it is capable of enrolment within the circuits of capital accumulation.
Adopting a relative perspective on poverty, this article reflects on the social and psychological aspects of market access in a context of abundance. We consider the recent introduction of a consumption-related adolescent youth ritual and the implications this has for those who are financially disadvantaged and their ability to negotiate and navigate the market. Using dimensions of market practice as a lens, we reveal a system that resists reduction to individual actors and demonstrate how and in what ways the social collective facilitates social belonging as well as promoting higher level educational goals. This has important consequences for our understanding of meaningful social practice as well as realizing what is being shaped through market practices.
This article extends our knowledge of scientific marketing management and the reasons behind the emergence of the marketing concept. In our narrative, the banking community plays an important role in promoting marketing in the early 20th century. We illuminate this argument using the writings of Fred W. Shibley (1864–1944) and the theoretical resources of Michel Foucault. For Shibley, marketing advanced the interests of corporate financiers, shareholders and employees. Their profit focus was enabled through the marketing concept and accounting practices that mediated hyper- and disciplinary power. In this discourse, organizational relations reflected a pyramidal management of information through a ‘principle of omnivisibility’. These processes individualized departments and affected all employees. Importantly, these control mechanisms were seeded through ‘displacement’. This discursive move reveals a new dimension underwriting the promotion of the marketing concept and the pursuit of profit. These ‘progressive’ facets of marketing theory and practice were invoked to redirect employee attention away from their fractious relationships with management and the owners of capital. Redirecting employee focus was attempted by positioning the consumer as the ‘boss’, with increased production and consumption framed as ‘unpolitical socialism’. While the marketing management literature depicts the marketing concept in quasi-humanistic terms, we unearth the roles of hyper- and disciplinary power, combined with a status-quo orientation that underwrote its promotion in this formative period.
Combining previous work on market formation and regulation with a case study of the emerging legal cannabis markets in the United States, we develop the argument that interrelations to other markets contribute significantly to constitute the social systems of regulated markets. Specifically, market interrelations enacted during legitimation and regulation influence who becomes involved in the market formation process and direct attention to specific issues in that process. After successfully (re)regulating a market, new interrelations are enacted via practices borrowed from historic, parallel and auxiliary markets, and via material influences based on complementarity and substitutability. While these multiple interrelations to other markets complicate market delineation, they are also a historical precondition for it.
Consumers have been observed to engage in deceptive consumption behaviors, including hiding their brand consumption and pretending to consume brands that they actually do not. This article defines deceptive consumption behaviors as the deliberate falsification or concealment of an individual’s consumption behaviors pertaining to a brand. The present work recognizes deceptive consumption behaviors as a relatively unexplored construct in the consumer behavior literature. Therefore, this article sets out not only to define and delineate the various types of deceptive consumption behaviors but also to explore the underlying motivations that would result in consumers engaging in this practice. We propose that these behaviors are a response to an identity threat that occurs due to goal conflict between personal and social identities. We further propose a typology to illustrate the various behaviors that consumers may employ when engaging in deceptive consumption. We explore the consequences of engaging in deceptive consumption behaviors for the consumer as well as for the consumer’s relationship with the brand and the group. Finally, we identify avenues for future research on deceptive consumption behaviors.
Grounded in work on geography and markets, this article offers a conceptual framework to study the dynamics of markets through a spatial lens. The characteristics of four key spatial dimensions (place, territory, scale, and network) are explained and leveraged to provide distinct analytical vantage points and to conceptualize how various types of spaces matter differently in market dynamics. Findings from a qualitative meta-analysis identify 12 unique mechanisms tied to the four proposed spatial dimensions, which offer alternative theoretical avenues for unpacking market phenomena. These four spatial dimensions are then combined with 12 space-based mechanisms to offer novel research avenues for marketing scholars interested in market system dynamics.
This article examines how consumers may work strategically to alter market dynamics through formally organized activities. We address this issue in the context of the Danish beer market and its evolution over the last two decades, with a specific empirical focus on the role of a formally organized consumer association. We draw on key tenets of recent advances in sociological field theory, which views social order as comprising multiple and related strategic action fields. From this perspective, we describe the Danish beer market and its transformation, with an emphasis on how Danish beer enthusiasts played a significant role in altering the logics of competition in the market, but also played a significant institutionalized role within the field itself. We theorize this activity as consumers’ collective action.
Cultural hybridization indicates mixing, intermingling, and fusion of cultures that the globalized world enables and produces. Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines how hybrid cultural products strive for legitimacy in the context of yoga. We conceptualize American Yoga as a hybrid cultural practice that emerged as yoga was reconfigured through dialectical exchanges between India and the West and acquired new forms and meanings in the geographical and cultural sphere of the United States. The findings reveal a series of reterritorialization strategies through which market actors seek to advance moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy for American Yoga, accompanied by identity, ownership, and authenticity centered tensions. We illustrate reterritorialization as a legitimation process mediated by strategies of market actors and identify unique outcomes in legitimation of hybrid cultural products drawing from polar perspectives on hybridization.
In recent years, numerous marketing and organizational theorists have called attention to the analogy between jazz and management strategy. From the perspective of this jazz metaphor, key questions concern the implications of jazz training for marketing education. Too often—say, in motion pictures or television dramas—jazz is portrayed as an innocent folk music whose performance requires more feeling than knowledge. This inaccurate stereotype colors the treatment of music instruction found in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). A contrasting view of jazz as a technically demanding art form appears in the movie Whiplash (2014). These two films also represent diametrically opposed teaching styles—the first nurturing and customer-oriented, the second sadistic and product-oriented. A third motion picture entitled Keep On Keepin’ On (2014) presents a resolution of this dialectic in the form of a marketing-oriented instructor whose method of teaching combines kindness (the customer-oriented thesis) with rigor (the product-oriented antithesis) to achieve a balanced reconciliation (the marketing-oriented synthesis). From this perspective, like jazz training, marketing education is itself embarked on a marketing project that benefits from a rapprochement of customer-oriented and product-oriented impulses to attain a marketing-oriented synthesis. Thus, insights about jazz training become relevant to the challenges of marketing education—as illustrated by various examples from the author’s own experiences.
The purpose of our article is to propose that compromising is a constitutive characteristic of those marketing systems that entail matters of public interest or concern. In such markets, actors design compromises as they encounter criticisms of and contending justifications for the market’s products, as these refer to price, efficiency in production and use, regulatory compliance or ecological sustainability. Tests and justifications are vital in order to determine what is valuable and by which measure. As a theory framework, the economic sociology of conventions provides a basis for assessing these contests, compromises, and justifications over the issue of worth in a marketing context. Through an ethnographic study of the regulated activities of chemicals service companies supporting the upstream petroleum industry, we assess how actors evaluate and justify the market’s products and services in this environmentally sensitive setting by means of tests drawing from different orders of worth: the green, the industrial and the market order. Our contributions show that by artful and pragmatic compromising around exchanges, actors in marketing systems can balance several conflicting orders of worth over the question of worth without needing to converge on an overriding institutional logic.
The purpose of this article is to elaborate conceptually on the user–market relationship. Existing research reports a limited user–market relationship, which simultaneously exaggerates and underplays user influence on markets. Assuming a constructivist market studies (CMS) perspective, we argue that the scope of the user–market relationship is broader than developing offers and uses. We conceptualize market shaping as five interrelated subprocesses in which users may be involved as agents: qualifying goods, fashioning modes of exchange, configuring actors, establishing market norms and generating market representations. The extent of user influence in these subprocesses is likely to vary both within a specific market and across markets. By identifying conditions conducive to user involvement in each subprocess, we lay the foundation for empirical research into how users shape markets.
In line with the Fifth Transformative Consumer Research Conference held at Villanova University, USA, in 2015, we chaired a dialogical track that involved seven international researchers working on "alternative food system." Among many other subjects that emerged from brainstorming, three overarching themes were identified as significantly important for furthering research on "alternative" consumption and well-being. Manna, Ulusoy, and Batat explore the meanings behind alternative food consumption and discuss the role of ideology and anti- and post-sociocultural structures in shaping AFC meanings. Peter, Batat, and Ulusoy propose to rethink "literacy" in the adoption of AFC and offer a framework that represents a blueprint in the definition of literacy considering the adoption of other sustainable alternative behaviors (e.g. vegetarian diet, car pooling, recycling). Finally, Vicdan, Batat, and Hong explore social class dynamics in AFC. The three essays suggest potential areas of research with a focus on alternative modes of consumption and well-being and contribute to the theoretical conceptualization in marketing theory.
The purpose of this article is to identify the antecedents of diminished value in business-to-business exchange. There is only a limited amount of research on value destruction in the context of service-dominant (S-D) logic and, to the best of our knowledge, no dyadic studies. From a business perspective, awareness of factors that have the potential to impede value creation will enable relationship partners to increase mutual value realization. The article examines the accuracy of the term ‘value co-destruction’ as a blanket description for interaction that results in value reduction, and proposes that, in many instances, ‘value diminution’ may be more appropriate. The study adopts an exploratory, qualitative approach. One-to-one interviews are conducted with clients and their creative agencies. The results suggest that diminished value outcomes are caused by resource deficiencies and resource misuse by both relational partners, separately and jointly. We propose a model of five higher-order antecedents of value diminution: absence of trust, inadequate communication, power/dependence imbalance, inadequate coordination and inadequate human capital.
Value co-destruction is emerging as an important way to conceptualize non-positive outcomes from actor-to-actor interactions. However, current research in this area neither offers a clear way to understand how value co-destruction manifests nor does it consider the role of actor engagement behaviors. Drawing on a case study in the aerospace industry, the present study begins by identifying and describing two ways in which actor perceptions of value co-destruction form: goal prevention and net deficits. Next, the study identifies and describes nine actor engagement behaviors that moderate actor experiences of value co-destruction. The study also unpacks these concepts at both the actor-to-actor and service ecosystem levels. The article concludes with implications for marketing theory and practice.
Practice and experience are central concepts in service logic (SL), and research has provided increasingly sophisticated accounts of their role within value creation. However, to date, they have been largely treated separately and despite acknowledgement that they are intertwined, the precise nature of their relationship remains unclear. To respond to this problem, we introduce Bourdieu’s recursive triad of practice–habitus–field as a theoretical lens to articulate how sensemaking processes incorporate an explicit link between practice and experience. We then utilize the theoretical lens to examine value creation for participants of a self-reliance training course. Our article contributes to the theorization of value creation by showing how it is dependent upon the temporal intertwining of practice and experience; how the unconscious or anticipated/foreseen nature of practice and experience become manifested in value creation and how zooming in and zooming out can be simultaneously achieved to acknowledge the individual and contextual influences upon value creation. We present a dynamic model of practice-experience links in value creation, which both extends the theory of SL and provides a basis for further work. The article concludes with managerial implications.
This article develops understanding of consumer work at the primary level of sociality in the context of social networking sites. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and netnography, we reveal these sites as distinctive spaces of consumer-to-consumer work. To explain this work in consumption, we introduce the concept of social labour which we define as the means by which consumers add value to their identities and social relationships through producing and sharing cultural and affective content. This is driven by observational vigilance and conspicuous presence, and is rewarded by social value. This draws attention to the variety of work consumers enact within their social lives, indicating that consumer work is broader than previously acknowledged.
Drawing from the way the artist Piet Mondrian constructs objects in his paintings, we offer an epistemology for consumer research based on a five-step process for constructing the object of research. We show how the five steps fit with both existential phenomenology and the context of context approach. We also contribute to the current epistemological debate in consumer research showing commonalities between these two paradigms, often considered antagonistic due to their different unit of analysis. Finally, we encourage the shift towards art in consumer research, by studying artists to rethink the relationship between researchers and their objects of research.
This study explores how consumers collect, reconstruct, and protect autobiographical memories through the material possession of the scrapbook. Scrapbooking is a hobby that preserves photographs and mementos in an album decorated with narrative and ornamentation. Through 20 interviews with women who scrapbook, a framework was constructed to describe the types of memories preserved by the scrapbook, the modes of memory reconstruction cued by the scrapbook, and the memory protection strategies used by consumers. These memory protection strategies include overcollection of memory markers, overplanning of scrapbook aesthetics, increased journaling, and taboos on altering or removing scrapbook pages. Theoretical implications are provided.
An area that receives limited attention in service-dominant (SD) logic is exchange governance. Exchange governance provisions can determine how benefits and costs are created and distributed, hence their importance. Much of the rationale for this oversight arises due to the emphasis on "value" in SD logic. With this as a starting point, this commentary article offers three sets of suggestions to integrate exchange governance into SD logic research. First, the subjective, socially embedded nature of value necessitates a greater reliance on norms-based governance. Under SD logic, there is a need to govern for a wider variety of idiosyncratic interactions throughout a service ecosystem. This has a bearing on monitoring and control activities. Second, SD logic is virtually silent on resource ownership. Understanding the property rights associated with value-creating resources is likely to determine who creates and appropriates value. Third, value-in-use suggests that value does not occur at the point of exchange exclusively. Given this, there is a need to consider value at the point of exchange as well as during the course of usage. The commentary concludes with a brief research agenda.
This article explores the skin-ego, a theory associated with Didier Anzieu, which holds that we experience life as encapsulated by an outer shell. This insight is used to push understandings within consumer research of how we might regard the body, not as a finite entity bound in absolute time and space or as a canvas to be decorated, but as a porous and sprawling entity that bears unconscious and historically formed relationalities open to transformation. This vein of insight allows us to consider anew how music and noise is consumed in terms of containment, holding and individuation.
This article explores how the occupation of branding and the work it encompasses are discursively constituted and ‘made up’. It starts with the premise that branding is a cultural intermediary occupation about whose norms and practices we cannot assume certainty, stability or homogeneity. The study illustrates how branding is comprised of multiple social and occupational discourses, namely, ‘creativity’, ‘discovery’, ‘business’ and ‘morality’. Rather than stand alone, these discourses dynamically interweave and intersect. Consequently, branding emerges as an occupation with distinct liminal conditions, being simultaneously about art, science, business and social relational work. Instead of moving towards stability, our findings suggest that branding is an intermediary occupation that sustains rather than discontinues liminality and that enduring liminality lends itself to the non-distinctiveness of the occupation. For branders, occupying a liminal occupational position implies various challenges but similarly scopes for flexibility and autonomy.
A panel on "Marketing as Mystification" convened at the 2011 Academy of Marketing conference in Liverpool. Ideas from the Liverpool event were supplemented by commentaries from selected other authors. Each commentary explores the aspects of "mystification" observable in marketing discourses and practices. In what follows, Laufer interprets marketing mystification as modern form of sophism, Dholakia and Firat discuss mystifying ways that inequality is marketed, Varman analyzes the perversion and mystification of "development" via neoliberal marketing of "social entrepreneurship," Mikkonen explores mystifying marketing representations of gays and lesbians, and Freund and Jacobi present a fascinating interpretation of how Coca-Cola advertising mystically reassures us that our difficult, dangerous lifeworld is actually quite hunky-dory.
Resource integration, as it relates to value creation, has recently been a key aspect of the discussions about service-dominant (S-D) logic. However, the majority of research pays relatively little explicit attention to the process of theorizing and the epistomological and ontological assumptions upon which the theorizing process is based. This article addresses these issues. The processes that relate to theorizing and developing strong theory are discussed. We then examine how to conceptualize ‘resources’ and ‘resource integration’ following differing ontological and epistemological assumptions that guide the theorizing process. Research recommendations to help navigate through the finer details underlying the theorizing process and to advance a general theory of resource integration are developed.
This article explores the role of symbols in value cocreation in order to develop a deeper understanding of how actors communicate, interact, and reconcile perspectives as they integrate and exchange resources to create value for themselves and for others. We draw on a service ecosystems approach to value cocreation and propose a conceptual framework that highlights varying views of value and articulates the way in which value cocreation results from the integration of resources and interactions among multiple actors. We argue that symbols guide actors in enacting particular practices that enable the cocreation of shared meanings, which help actors determine the value of current and future interactions. In this way, symbols support the coordination of interaction, the communication of information, the integration of resources, and the evaluation of value, among actors. We provide an empirical example of our conceptual framework as supporting evidence for the role of symbols in value cocreation and point toward directions for future research.
Despite significant interest in value propositions, there is limited agreement about their nature and role. Moreover, there is little understanding of their application to today’s increasingly interconnected and networked world. The purpose of this article is to explore the nature of value propositions, extending prior conceptualisations by taking a service ecosystem perspective. Following a critical review of the extant literature in service science on value propositions, value co-creation, service-dominant logic and networks and drawing on six metaphors that provide insights into the nature of value propositions, we develop a new conceptualisation. The role of value propositions is then explored in terms of resource offerings between actors within micro, meso and macro levels of service ecosystems. We illustrate these perspectives with two real-world exemplars. We describe the role of value propositions in an ecosystem as a shaper of resource offerings. Finally, we provide five key premises and outline a research agenda.
Several researchers have pointed out that if marketing is to develop as a discipline and contribute to solving complex business and societal challenges, it should question the neoclassical view of markets and develop its own theory of markets. Efforts in this direction indicate an emerging view of markets as dynamic, subjective, and subject to multiple change efforts. However, the neoclassical view of objective, detached, and deterministic market still influences the dominant models used to describe market change. We argue that in order to better understand market dynamics, both academics and practitioners need new concepts and constructs that go beyond existing linear process and development stage models. We seek to contribute to improved understanding of markets by studying a special characteristic of markets that enables market dynamics. Borrowing a term used by Alderson (1957: 277), we propose that markets are characterized by plasticity, that is, a "potentiality for being remolded and responding in a different way thereafter." Even though the plasticity concept was introduced into the marketing literature nearly 60 years ago, the plastic character of markets remains underresearched. This article investigates the meaning and manifestations of market plasticity, drawing analogies from the physical, natural, and social sciences. We define market plasticity as the market’s capacity to take and retain form and propose that the dialectic between market stability and market fluidity lies at the heart of market change.
Resource integration has become an important concept in marketing literature. However, little is known about the systemic nature of resource integration and the ways the activities of resource integrators are coordinated and adjusted to each other. Therefore, we claim that institutions are the coordinating link that have impact on value cocreation efforts and are the reference base for customers’ value assessment. When conceptualizing the systemic nature of resource integration, we include the regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions and institutional logics. This article provides a framework and a structure for identifying and analyzing the influence of institutional logics on resource integration in service systems.
Value creation, both its nature and scope, can be better and more accurately understood by inverting six characteristics of goods-dominant logic, or what is also known as "old enterprise logic" or "neoclassical economics," into a service-dominant-informed perspective. These six inversions include (1) entrepreneurship and the view that value creation is an unfolding, emergent process seen as superordinate to management, (2) effectual processes understood as primary in relation to predictive processes and better for informing actors about the interactive, resource-integrating, collaborate nature of value creation, (3) marketing being fundamental to value creation and taking primacy over manufacturing, (4) innovation as more fundamental to, and descriptive of, value creation than invention, (5) a focus on effectiveness as captured by value in use and value in context for beneficial actors taking precedence over efficiency, which is inherently a firm-centric lens, and finally (6) the the predominant reliance on heuristics rather than rational, calculative decision making.
The environmental consumer-citizen has become a global master narrative that is the outcome of environmental discourse (Darier, 1999; Harper, 2001). In this article, we examine a particular strand of the environmental citizen identity in the context of environmental and consumption consciousness. Through interviews with Australian children about themselves, their consumption, and their links to local and larger global communities, we uncover an adapted strand of this narrative. A local transformation of the master narrative on environmental citizenship is seen in the national identity narrative of the ‘ethno-consumer’. This identity narrative is one of the ‘good’ green Australian consumer-citizen constructed in relation to regional political and economic discourses. We uncover how this strand of environmental consciousness is used as identity capital in children’s narratives of self and nation (Hage, 1998). We suggest that there exist several levels of identity narratives. In this particular context, the national identity narrative appears to adapt and accommodate, but also dominate, the global master narrative for these children.
The purpose of this article is to evaluate and advance tools that marketing and consumer researchers have recently gathered from assemblage and actor–network theories. By distinguishing between two different styles of applying these theories we explain that a ‘representational’, interventionist and problem-solving mode has come to dominate existing uses of assemblage and actor-network theories in our field. We explain that current applications can be supplemented by a non-representational mode of theorising that draws on work pioneered by Nigel Thrift. Specifically, we explain that non-representational marketing theory can expand our ontological sensitivities through improved attention to the minutiae and hitherto unrepresented constituents of life. Towards this end, we offer methodological suggestions to extend attention to flows of everyday marketplace activity, precognitive forms of networked agency, as well as affect and atmosphere in consumption spaces.
How can the positive power of a marketing ethos and techniques solve social problems? We propose a deepened understanding of social marketing in response to the sustainability imperative, applying systems theory to elaborate the impact of social marketing campaigns and to advance our understanding of viable practices. A meta-framework reveals the complexities of human behaviour that influences the aims and outcomes of social marketing. We clarify the ontological status of the social marketing field and recognise the world view within which marketing has expanded into the public realm of social problems. We identify the problem of ontological misconception stemming from the denial of nonrational forms of human behaviour. While complicated mechanism is assumed in the problem of long-term health and prosperity for citizens and society, organic complexity is the condition faced. Conventional social marketing has provided a ‘partial’ gesture towards a solution. We outline an alternative understanding grounded in a human-centred world view of socio-economic advancement.
This article contributes to the ongoing discussion, revived by the service-dominant logic thesis, on value propositions in service organizations. Against a backdrop of understanding value as a pluralistic social construct that takes place across different institutionalized practices of valuation or regimes of value, we argue that value propositions transcend the immediate localness of both value in exchange and value in use. Correspondingly, we claim that service practitioners may draw advantages from engaging with a politics of value that addresses multiple regimes of value, whether commensurable or not. A case study of waste management services in Sweden serves as an illustration of such a politics that combines practical, economic, political, and environmental aspects of value propositions.
Aaker’s (1997) brand personality (BP) scale is widely used in research and is an important foundation for the theory of BP. Building on extant critiques of the scale, this article considers the possibility that Aaker’s (1997) scale methodology ‘creates’ the BP that it measures. Using pictures of rocks as stimuli, this article applies the principles of Aaker’s methodology to examine the BP of rocks. Rocks are the chosen stimuli as they do not have any obvious commonalities with brands, or have antecedents to BP formation. Findings revealed that each of the rock stimuli has a distinct BP and that the personality is developed from sometimes surprisingly detailed personifications. In consideration of the importance of Aaker’s scale in the development of the BP concept, the findings raise questions about its conceptualisation and emphasises the importance of critical examination of the methods used to measure marketing concepts.
This commentary addresses recent debates in marketing research on the elusiveness of the notion of value, with the aim of starting a dialogue on the possibility of developing a comprehensive and culturally informed understanding of value and value creation processes. First, we provide an overview of the predominant uses of value in marketing and consumer research literature and discuss them in relation to three abstract conceptions of value. We show the interconnectedness of these value types in market and consumption contexts. Next, we suggest possible avenues that have their foundations in the notion of field, practice theory, and markets as networks approaches, in order to conceptualize complexity in value and value creation processes.
Spain during the time period 711 to 1492 was one of the most brilliantly creative and affluent nations in the Western Europe. During this epoch, Spain was populated by Muslims, Christians, and Jews who served as rulers, military leaders, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and merchants, as well as consumers. The highest levels of cultural creativity and affluence are traceable to those rulers who encouraged religious tolerance, regardless of their own religious affiliation. I propose that this historical pattern is a valid one for marketing systems in contemporary Muslim–Christian–Jewish societies. Enforcement of religious orthodoxy by the government appears to discourage cooperative entrepreneurial activities and to reduce affluence, whereas government support of interfaith endeavors is linked to advances in science, business, and the arts.
This ethnographic study in Qatar and United Arab Emirates addresses a particular Islamic consumptionscape as well as a related commodified practice: that of Arab hospitality. This much vaunted Arab virtue is examined in three contexts: home hospitality, commercial hospitality, and hospitality toward foreign guest workers and visitors. We find that home hospitality is largely extended inward and involves sharing in with close same-sex friends and family in a tournament of status, while hospitality toward foreigners is largely either nonexistent or outsourced to other foreigners. These patterns are explained in terms of hyper-ritualization of that which is most in doubt, namely, multiculturalism and patriarchal authority. We argue that this same pattern of hyper-ritualization may apply in other ritual contexts like American Thanksgiving celebrations.
This article enhances the understanding of consumption practices, particularly gift giving, within the context of an Islamic pilgrimage called the ziyara. Pilgrimages are rich sites of analysis of entangled secular and sacred consumption. The findings of ethnographic research undertaken in this area have made a significant contribution to the literature on gift giving. Three particular types of gifts have been identified (1) ordinary liturgical gifts, (2) supplication gifts that invite ‘prayer’ counter-gifts and (3) soteriological gifts in the form of hassanat that are given to ensure other-worldly salvation. Pilgrims see the purchasing and consumption of gifts as activities intrinsic to their pilgrimage, even as sine qua non in the case of gifts distributed in the shrines. The consumption of material objects appears to be integral to pilgrimage rituals and transforms the intangible spiritual experience of the pilgrims into something ‘palpable’. The gifts are intended to embody the sacredness of the sites visited by the pilgrims and allow family and friends to partake in their sacred experience.
In this speculative comment I will suggest that, in analogy with Colin Campbell's argument regarding the Romantic Ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism, there is prima facie evidence that there is also an elective affinity between Sufi-infused Islamic religiosity and the emergent Muslim consumerisms, particularly in Turkey and among Turkish (and Kurdish) diasporas in Europe. The main relevant features of Sufi spirituality in this context are identified as continuous creation, creative imagination and longing.
Sociopolitical analyses of religion evidence the increasing prominence of religious communities across the world. However, existing work on religion–consumption interaction focuses mostly on the personal effects of religion and examines how religion and religious ideologies influence individual decision making, choice, and purchase and shopping behaviors. In this study, we focus on the collective experiences of religion and unpack the multiple ways consumption shapes and is shaped by a communal religious ethos. Through an ethnographic study of a Turkish-based Islamic community, we show that consumption plays important roles in attracting individuals to the community, socializing them to the communal ethos, and drawing symbolic boundaries between the community members and outsiders. We also discuss how the communal religious ethos shapes consumption practices and brand relationships of members and influences the marketplace dynamics.
This essay explores Islamic marketing at the intersection of global capitalism and global Islam and argues that Islamic marketing is one case in point that global capitalism lives and thrives with religions rather than replace them. I review briefly the global rise of religions and the different accounts of that resurgence and point to the political nature of religions. Besides politics, the global search for community bolsters the value of religion and the opportunity for Islamic marketing. Given the multiplicity of capitalisms and the embeddedness of marketing in the nexus of global markets, religions, and politics, I suggest that the emergent arena of Islamic marketing is ripe for studies grounded in the particular context and history as well as in recent social theory. Research can potentially generate theory about markets and marketing if and only if marketing scholars regard the phenomena of Islamic marketing as part and parcel of the logics of the market, capitalism, and globalization and examine the locally specific links among religion (and communality), markets, and politics. Critical ethnography and political economy analyses are some of the promising approaches for that end.
The coupling of consumerism with Islamic cultural movements is cherished as providing counterevidence to Orientalist stereotypes. Although this coupling may be celebrated like the cultural recognition of Muslims, this commentary highlights some reserves against a premature conclusion for the emancipatory role of the Islamic consumerism. Liaising marketing and Islamic may be a dangerous liaison articulating an important discursive function related to the production of profits, ideology, power, and identity. Critical consumer studies up to now have emphasized the role of everyday religious and cultural practices as a form of resistance against the disciplinary role of modern institutions, state, and administrative apparatus. However, the disciplinary role of populist cultural movements has been relatively underemphasized. A critical position should keep its distance to rigid dichotomizations depicting popular as excluded subalterns struggling against the technologies of domination. The relations between the popular and domination are not so clear cut if we evoke that truth games perform within a matrix of complex relations between the self and structure. Branding neo-populist Islamist movements as more "humane", ethical ways of modernity tend to reduce complex political societal strategies struggling for cultural hegemony simply to a moralizing discourse. These movements tend to create an emulation of community and charity rather than the decommodification of the sociality dissected and atomized by neoliberal commodification. Public display of conspicuous charity and morality serves more to branding of Islam rather than the modesty of Islam. Marketing an emulated Islamic identity for self-branding of Muslims and excommunicating the internal other can be as dangerous as Orientalist ideology.
This commentary complements Karababa and Kjeldgaard's fine review paper. It discusses how a practice theory of value might be developed. It suggest value is one outcome of practices. And it draws attention to how value producing practices might differ depending upon what regime of value dominates. It encourages us to think that value producing practices critical to consumer culture differ from those in other cultural contexts.
This article considers the concept of ‘place’ in the context of place marketing. Following a discussion of the disciplinary antecedents of place marketing/branding, the article evaluates the concept of the ‘place product’, with specific reference to the construction of place narratives. In particular, contrasts are drawn between notions of materiality and realm of meaning as devices for conceptualising places as products to be commodified and marketed. This is illustrated using as a case study, a place marketing initiative in the city of Manchester in the north west of England. The implications of this are analysed in terms of three questions, relating to (1) what is being marketed, (2) who is implementing the place marketing activity and (3) how places are represented as a consequence. The article concludes by arguing that the place product should be regarded as a dynamic concept, composed as much from changing and competing narratives in and over time, as it is from its tangible and material elements.
Brand-management philosophy has recently expanded to include public and spatial contexts producing a cacophony of logos, slogans and events all aimed at promoting and marketing places. Yet, there is still a lack of understanding about how the brand-management philosophy changes when moving into and across places and in which way places change when affected by this way of thinking. Through a multi-site ethnography of three Italian territories, this paper applies a semiotic framework (based on the constructs of syntax, semantics and pragmatics) to interpret the interweaving of procedures, mechanisms and symbols that underpin the emergence of place brands. The enquiry reveals that each place brand is characterised by a specific level of integration (‘symbiosis’) between functional and representational dimensions. By recognising this interrelatedness through an ecological perspective that focuses on the connections among all the constituents of a place, the concept of brand ecology is offered to unpack the complexity of place brands and to reconsider the relationship between place branding and place marketing approaches.
Despite attempts to encourage music consumers in countries including the United Kingdom, France and United States to download music from legal sources, many not only continue to download from unauthorised sources but reject the very idea that what they are doing is wrong. Symbolic interactionist sociology helps us to structure these failed attempts to control this consumer misbehaviour. It shows us that opponents and proponents of illegal downloading have become locked in a battle over who can define behavioural standards for consuming music. This battle has come to a standstill as both sides have turned to the same economic imperative – that creators should be rewarded for their work – to justify their positions. Moving beyond this economic imperative, the article concludes, may mark a symbolic but ultimately hollow victory for proponents of unauthorised file-sharing.
Markets have been argued to be of central concern in marketing theory; nevertheless, the representations that depict what a market is, and how it works, remain understudied. To remedy the gap, this paper takes a qualitative in-depth approach to observe the representational objects that market research practitioners privilege when describing a market to their clients. The organizing of representational objects into market representations is studied through Latourian translations and assemblages. Four distinct dimensions of market representations are identified: frame, content, purpose, and approach.Tensions arise within those dimensions when managers privilege representational objects regarding: the frame of the market (exchange or nonexchange), what to include in the content of the representation (actors or practices), what purpose will be accomplished (ostensive or performative), and how to approach what is assembled (internal or external perspectives). This paper disentangles assemblages so that market representations can be qualified.
Over the last decade, there has been increasing recognition of the value of understanding the lives of people throughout the world who experience impoverishment. ‘Bottom of the pyramid’ is the term used to describe people living in absolute poverty who, despite economic limitations, can be ‘resilient entrepreneurs’ and co-creators of new market opportunities that result in win-win situations for companies and consumers (Prahalad, 2004: 3). A range of metrics are used to define and describe people living in poverty, and although these metrics help identify the neediest across the world, such measures exclude people living in developed nations where poverty exists on a large scale, but where welfare policy provides a safety net. In this essay, we discuss some of the issues for those living in poverty in both developed and developing countries and argue that this will lead to a deeper understanding of the consumption experiences of those living in poverty.
This comment addresses the context within which markets have turned into purported panaceas to alleviate poverty and promote development. Expanding formal markets and rescuing the poor from the traps of informality is often seen as recipe to unlock the untapped energies at the base of the pyramid (BoP), turning individuals into budding entrepreneurs and aspiring consumers. But, so far we have failed to appreciate how the informal sector plays a key role in supporting the formal economy and providing a route for subsistence at the BoP.
As far back as the 19th century, the notion of a ‘social pyramid’ was critiqued in the social sciences as an inadequate and simplistic model of society. The model encourages the idea that those at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) are uniformly mediocre and the small number at the top overtly exceptional—social pyramid thinking not only tends to reflect differences in incomes but blends together other ‘traits’ such as talent, genius, values, practices and so on. Despite the disfavour in the social sciences throughout the 20th century about the notion of a social pyramid, the concept is now enjoying a renaissance in business, marketing and management theory in ‘frontier’ understandings of poverty in places such as Brazil and India. This article argues that the idea of vested ‘globals’ at the top of the pyramid (ToP) transgresses the concept of a social pyramid because India’s ToP engages with the BoP from afar, remotely and in ways difficult to trace. Crucially, it is not those in India’s BoP who are demanding of inquiry, but instead those at the ToP in terms of their stakes in India’s austerity and their lived distance from these austere conditions.
There are thousands of journal articles that concern themselves with markets at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP).1 What is there to say that hasn’t been said already? In 2002, an article published in the Harvard Business Review (Prahalad and Hammond, 2002) brought to the forefront of business and academic attention a ‘missing market’ that was claimed to be lying dormant, ignored by international and multination corporations yet worthy of attention for its potential to contribute to both economic and social prosperity. The notion of markets at the BoP is concerned with providing the ‘poor’ in developing and emergent economies with access to markets. Prahalad and Hammond (2002) champion the needs of the ‘invisible poor’ to the marketing efforts of multinational corporations. Prahalad and Hammond’s (2002) assert that the poor as ‘consumers’ constituted a sizeable market opportunity but this view has been criticised. In this essay, we explore how BoP markets might be reconceptualising to better shape interventions that relieve poverty.
There are significant opportunities to learn from but also develop the literature on multinational corporations (MNCs) when analysing bottom of the pyramid (BOP) markets. This short review explores three potential opportunities relating to market making dynamics, knowledge mobilities and embedded power geometries. Each is explored in turn and helps reveal the complex questions that exist about the situated nature of both BOP markets and the activities of MNCs in these markets. The underlying theme that emerges from the review is that multinationals have the potential to shape in both positive and negative ways in terms of ‘trade not aid’ the development of BOP markets.
The present paper offers a new and potentially useful approach to the development of knowledge in the fields of marketing and consumer research. Specifically, it reports a dialogue between a doctoral student (Michael N. Woodward (MNW)) and a recently retired professor (Morris B. Holbrook (MBH)) in which MNW and MBH debate the meaning(s) of various concepts in general and of the ‘consumption experience’ in particular. The presentation of this material in dialogue form – echoing the Socratic method but in a manner new to our own discipline – sheds light on both the relevant issues at stake and the rhetorical strategies of those who espouse somewhat different points of view.
As portfolio models have evolved in the area of business marketing scholars have turned their attention from traditional product-based and transaction-oriented portfolios to portfolios based on business relationship considerations. However, the conceptualization of relationship portfolios has remained vague, and the applications of these analyses in business practice are quite limited. In a parallel stream of studies, the Industrial Network Approach (INA) has increasingly explored the concept of relationship value and highlighted the need to take into consideration the interdependent and dynamic features of business relationships as well as the phenomenological and situational nature of value perceptions. Although judgements in terms of relationship value applied to a set of business relationships are foundations of portfolio investment decisions, the connection between the two streams of research has not yet been explored in depth. This study introduces five critical elements of relationship value stemming from INA that have important consequences for business relationship portfolio management. Developing the concept of Relationship Value Portfolio provides the foundation for a discussion about the need to integrate the two fields of research – namely, relationship value and relationship portfolios – into a more grounded conceptual framework. This framework allows for propositions to be developed, which contribute to enriching the theoretical debate on both streams while offering important implications for managerial practice.
This article examines the highly under-researched area of exactly how a market orientation can be successfully implemented within an organisation. Market orientation is the key strategic orientation that assists for-profit organisations achieve improved performance and can potentially also assist charities that play a vital role within society but are facing increasing competition. Utilising a discourse transformation framework to case study a charity that introduced market orientation as its dominant strategic orientation, thematic analysis identifies how management transformed the organisation via a three-phase process and greatly improved performance. The new dominant market orientation was aided by elements of other strategic orientations, particularly entrepreneurialism. Minimal articles have previously examined how management of a charity can successfully implement a market orientation. The article also introduces a discourse transformation perspective into the examination of market orientation and offers charity managers valuable insights to assist performance improvement.