| 1. |
- Aspara, Jaakko, et al.
(author)
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Struggles in organizational attempts to adopt new branding logics : the case of a marketizing university
- 2014
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 17:6, s. 522-552
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- 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.
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| 2. |
- Aspara, Jaakko, et al.
(author)
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Why do public policy-makers ignore marketing and consumer research? A case study of policy-making for alcohol advertising
- 2017
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 20:1, s. 12-34
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Public policy-makers have been noted to sometimes ignore marketing/consumer research, even when the policy issue clearly pertains to consumption markets. We embark to identify factors that may explain policy-makers' limited attention to marketing/consumer research, especially in cases related to consumer affairs that may have public health implications. Empirically, we focus on policy-making around the advertising of alcohol products. Having been involved in this policy-making process in Finland, we elucidate the case through an introspective narrative. We find that the factors explaining policy-makers' limited attention to marketing/consumer research range from the decision-making characteristics of policy-makers, through inconsistent definitions for key terminology, to the fear of over-generalizing certain theories of marketing/consumer research. Regarding the latter, a key issue in the present case was that public policy-makers were unconvinced about the generic marketing theory stating that in mature markets, advertising will not increase the total consumption demand of a product category.
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| 3. |
- Brown, Barry, et al.
(author)
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Word of mouth : products, conversations and consumption
- 2014
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 17:1, s. 29-49
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- While there is a rich collection of studies of consumption and identity, the role of buying practices in ordinary conversations has been largely neglected. Minor items and major purchases regularly play a key role in furnishing our talk with topics, news, jokes and formulations of what kind of people we are. This paper unpacks the idea of post-purchase conversations contained within the common phrase “word of mouth.” What happens when products are examined in ordinary talk is pursued through the close analysis of a series of conversations around a significant purchase (a mountain bike). Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, and conversation analysis more broadly, this paper documents how products as a topic provide not only resources for small talk, but also an opportunity to consider our identity and its transformation. In conclusion, this paper argues that the knowledge and experience that circulate outside of the actual marketplace or point of purchase are part of a domain of economics as ordinary practice.
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| 4. |
- Gopaldas, Ahir, et al.
(author)
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The bad boy archetype as a morally ambiguous complex of juvenile masculinities : the conceptual anatomy of a marketplace icon
- 2020
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 23:1, s. 81-93
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this article, we explore why the bad boy is a popular archetype inadvertising, erotica, fashion, journalism, movies, songs, television serials, andother forms of commercial culture. First, we interpret the bad boy as acombination of juvenile masculinities (aggression, rebellion, hypersexuality),appealing qualities (charisma, ruggedness, sensitivity), and moral ambiguities(via confusion, contradiction, and cumulation), which keep audiencesengaged. Second, we trace the evolution of these meanings in over acentury of American popular culture. Third, we reveal the many commercialfaces of the bad boy in the contemporary marketplace, including as anarchetypal brand positioning strategy, a transformative protagonist in eroticfiction, an unapologetic voice for macho fantasies, a beguiling object ofirrational love, a journalistic frame for polarizing masculinities, and aninexhaustible source of dramatic tension. In the final analysis, the bad boyarchetype is a contemporary marketplace icon because it has historicallybeen good at channeling all kinds of bad.
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| 5. |
- Hartmann, Benjamin J., 1981, et al.
(author)
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Academic liner notes : a re-inquiry of Chris Hackley’s (2012) CCT Blues
- 2018
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 21:3, s. 205-214
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- While in certain sub-areas of marketing and consumer research, alternative modes of investigation and representation have been mushrooming for a while - i.e. publications of poetry, poetry sessions at conferences, videography, and fiction - we suggest music and complementary academic liner notes as another form of alternative investigation and expression. This paper offers accompanying notes to our original contribution in musical format as an alternative mode of representation and critical dramatization in marketing and consumer research. The song is called CCT Blues and is perfomed by Postmödern talking sans frontièrs avéc fromage [the song can be found on Applemusic, iTunes, and Spotify searching for CCT Blues and the artist name.] These liner notes guide the academic listener through our reflexive critical dramatization of the current intellectual condition of the CCT research area in form of a cover song of Chris Hackley’s CCT Blues [2012a. CCT Blues Electric Version.wmv, June 2. Accessed November 25, 2016. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1pgyaiw610]. Consequently, this paper offers a backstage pass into the world of producing and packaging our critique in audio format.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Molander, Susanna
(author)
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A gendered agency of good enough : Swedish single fathers navigating conflicting state and marketplace ideologies
- 2021
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 24:2, s. 194-216
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Prior research has shown how global marketplace ideologies have grown in influence at the expense of the state. This study shows how state ideologies can gain momentum and encourage new forms of consumer agency. Based on Swedish single fathers' everyday childcare, it illustrates how agency is negotiated as fathers navigate between a progressive state ideology of gender equality and a traditional marketplace ideology of intensive mothering. Swedish fathers are drawn to the practice of childcare and forming emotional bonds with their children - yet with a gendered consumer agency of good enough that differs from mothers' agency. The findings have implications beyond the context of Swedish fathers. Firstly, they underscore the importance of taking the state into account regarding consumption, markets and culture. Secondly, they detail the interplay and tensions between ideology and everyday life and thirdly, they illustrate that while traditional gender structures tend to run deep, they can change.
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| 8. |
- Molander, Susanna, 1965-, et al.
(author)
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Hero shots : Involved fathers conquering new discursive territory in consumer culture
- 2019
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 22:4, s. 430-453
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children’s needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state’s gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settings.
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| 9. |
- Molander, Susanna, 1965-
(author)
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Not just a mother : embodied and positional aspects of consumer learning from a practice perspective
- 2017
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 20:2, s. 131-152
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Consumer socialization is usually associated with young consumers, but transitions that require learning new types of consumption patterns can occur at any point in life. Although the literature on transitional consumers is quite fragmented, an important body of consumer research explores transitional consumers from the perspective of role theory. Nonetheless, role theory has not problematized learning and due to its static nature role theory tends to overlook how consumer learning becomes embodied over time as well as how this learning is affected by experiences from related practices. With a practice theory approach to learning and based on an ethnographic study of mothering through dinner consumption, this paper highlights learning as an embodied experience influenced by the practitioners’ positioning in time and space as well as by multiple sources among which the market has become increasingly important.
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| 10. |
- Nilsson, Johan
(author)
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Producing consumers : market researchers' selection and conception of focus group participants
- 2020
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In: Consumption, markets & culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1025-3866 .- 1477-223X. ; 23:4, s. 376-389
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article inquires into how market researchers produce a relationship between subjects of study and objects of knowledge in consumer research. The relationship is explored through the routines that a group of market researchers use to select and exclude research subjects. Adding to studies of how market research and other marketing activities establish their objects of knowledge in terms of performing and construction, the article draws attention to how recruitment shapes respondents: research participants are selected through principles beyond clients' recognition of their customers, issues of representativity or resemblance to targeted groups. Selection practices are explored through notes from participant observation and interviews at the research firm studied, as well as the recruitment forms that are used to undertake selection. The assessed recruitment shows researcher concern over identifying respondents useful for producing descriptions of consumers and how common features of a targeted group may be excluded in this production.
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