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Purpose – The present research seeks insights into the consumer socialization process of both children and adults in a developing country, Peru. The role played by two socialization agents, media and church, has been explored in terms of how each is related to an important facet of consumer attitudes, level of materialism.

Methodology/approach – Male students attending a faith-based high school in Peru, as well as one of their parents, completed a survey in Spanish seeking information on their television viewing, their faith, and their views regarding possessions.

Findings – The more traditional socialization institution, church, appears to be less important to younger consumers than to their parents; but it has a greater influence on materialism for youth than their parents. The power of media as a socialization agent for both groups is seen not only via television advertising, but also through television programming.

Research implications – As one considers how consumers learn to be consumers, both from a purely theoretical standpoint as well as from a strategic marketing perspective, one should take into account both avenues for information transmission. The role played by both seems to change people's lives, both in terms of perceived importance, as well as actual consumer decision making.

To investigate possibilities for integrating recent interdisciplinary research on materiality with basic issues in consumer culture theory, this chapter discusses understandings of materiality-based concerns and concepts in consumer research and maps possibilities for the future.

A review focuses on concepts of materiality, agency, and intention that mark a shift to a relational metaphysics in consumption contexts. Drawing from design theory, digital humanities, and philosophy, notions of flickering and witnessing evoke models of relations and interactions between consumers and consumption objects.

In this chapter, a disciplinary proposition emerges: consumer research is a form of materiality studies wherein the consumer is designated an element of interest in the relationships and interactions that bring forth the world.

An awareness of the fundamental role played in consumer research by materiality-related assumptions may inspire concomitant animation and explication of a relational metaphysics, opening opportunities to recognize processes and practices at the core of consumer behavior previously obscured by prevailing interpretations governed by a singularly agentic, autonomous, and effective human subject. Power relations must not be ignored.

The chapter makes several contributions: organizes and explicates often taken for granted concepts such as materiality, materialism, and agency, connects consumer research to high-level theorizations of materiality, and synthesizes diverse discussions in consumer culture theory with the possibilities of new materialities.

The COVID-19 bubonic plague, ravaging and reoccurring in waves globally, has impacted all aspects of human lives including the understanding and practice in the marketing discipline. The situation has pushed human behavior to its fringes with measures such as complete and partial lockdown of communities, cities and countries enforced to mitigate spread. Hence, consumers appeared to have subliminally reviewed their priorities in life as evident in the buying of essentials, neighbourhood shopping and the shift from offline to online buying behavior. Prior to the emergence of the viral disease, there has been a gradual change in consumer behavior, with respect to buying practices, and firm behavior with respect to distribution and supply chain management; largely induced by advances in technology and e-commerce. However, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have raised the bar and accelerated behavioral change in consumers and marketing organizations. With the attendant economic instability, consumers and organizations are experiencing behavioral transformation in response to the perceived vanities of life, changes in market dynamics, market -competitiveness, and the larger economic indices. In addition, there has been observable decline in capacity utilization and employee retention in response to the forced drop in demand and corresponding supply. This book chapter, with the aid of an in-depth review of literature, discusses the effects of COVID-19 on consumer and firm behavior with emphasis on the consequences of the sustained economic disruption for marketing strategies and policies. This was hinged on the relativity of business down cycles to the present pandemic in providing a basis for future post-COVID-19 crisis studies in order to understand consumer sentiments to crisis and its implications in the marketing discipline.

This paper argues for the following sensitizing proposition. At its core, much of consumer behavior that involves brand meanings is an attempt to influence, or symbolically mark, interpersonal relationships.

This paper presents a conceptual argument based on a literature review.

First, I argue that our pervasive concern with other people is a basic genetic component of human beings, and discuss some possible evolutionary pressures that may have led to this result. Then I discuss how this pervasive concern influences consumer behavior related to brand meanings. This discussion is structured around two aspects of social relationships: interpersonal closeness and social status. Relationship closeness is discussed with regard to brand communities, gifts, special possessions and brand love, and the often hidden ways that social relationships permeate everyday consumer behavior. Social status is discussed with reference to materialism. Materialism is sometimes misunderstood as an obsession with physical object, or as occurring when people care more about products than they do about people. In contrast, I argue that materialism is better understood as a style of relating to people.

This paper integrates a range of disparate findings in support of a broadly applicable generalization that nothing matters more to people than other people. This generalization can function as a sensitizing proposition that managers and researchers can bear in mind as they seek to interpret and understand how brand meaning influences consumer behavior.

This review identifies low self-concept clarity (SCC) as a source of consumer vulnerabilities and explains how the uncertainty associated with low SCC leads to processes that result in materialistic behaviors and overspending, product dissatisfaction, and potential self-harm. Processes include uncertainty reduction efforts through symbolic self-completion and social comparison, responses to everyday self-concept threats that result in feelings of deficiency and reduced consumption constraints, and susceptibility to interpersonal and marketer influences. In addition, the negative association between SCC and materialism is explained, risk factors for low SCC are described, and the need for research to help low SCC consumers deal with their vulnerabilities is explored.

Materialism is a consumer value that stresses the importance of acquiring more and more material goods. Success is defined in terms of the type and quantity of goods one owns and happiness is expected to result from physical wealth (Beutler, Beutler, & McCoy, 2008). Materialism as defined thus is closely tied to the idea of the pursuit of rational self-interest that has been associated with Adam Smith (1776).

This chapter discusses whether marketing can ever be Islamic given the common view of marketing functions as unsustainable and sometimes unethical, for example, how marketing promotes materialism.

This chapter reviews extant literatures in Islamic marketing, with a particular emphasis on stakeholder orientation in marketing.

We argue that Islamic marketing is indeed compatible with the concepts of ethical and sustainable marketing encompassing social, environmental as well as economic perspectives and encourages ethical behaviour.

This chapter highlights that discussions on Islamic marketing should include sustainable marketing and emphasises the growing importance of stakeholder orientation in marketing.

The purpose of this research is to conduct a literature review on the evolution, antecedents, and outcomes of luxury consumption (LC). To accomplish our goal, we used a combination of bibliometrics and systematic approaches to review 165 articles published between 1998 and 2019. The investigation revealed that the evolution of LC is mostly driven by consumer motivation and is influenced by cultural and psychological variables. Furthermore, we explored the aforementioned antecedents of LC along four major axes. Antecedents related to (1) individual characteristics, (2) brand components, (3) cultural and social values, and (4) organizational strategies. Furthermore, based on the outcomes of LC, we found two categories (individual traits and social values). The chapter concludes by proposing a broader research agenda for the future.

This systematic literature review used bibliometric and science mapping as a means of exploring and understanding the evolution and landscape of research in the counterfeiting of products and goods. The review sought to document the size, growth trajectory and geographic distribution of counterfeiting research, identify high-impact scholars and documents, and explore the intellectual structure of the field. We identified 403 peer-reviewed articles published in the SCOPUS database, within subject areas of business, social sciences, economics, decision-making, arts and humanities, and psychology. We used VOSviewer software to analyse the data set of SCOPUS-indexed articles. Using citation analysis, the review identified the most cited scholars, documents, journals and most productive countries publishing research on counterfeiting. Aiming to identify highly influential documents whose impact in counterfeiting research has been sustained over time, we conducted a co-citation analysis. Apart from identifying main aspects of knowledge production through citation and co-citation analysis, we employed keyword co-occurrence analysis to illuminate research fronts in counterfeiting research, notably: anti-counterfeiting strategies for combating crime; counterfeiting and intellectual property rights; counterfeiting of luxury products; consumer ethics; consumer psychology and brand protection. We conclude that bibliometric analysis and science mapping offer a novel and useful means of investigating the development of this field of study.