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Adopting a socio-spatial approach, this study develops a consumer-centric conception of service experience customization. In contrast to existing service customization research, which has focused on company-centric approaches, the purpose of this paper is to examine the practices through which consumers use, abuse, subvert, transform, or complement organizational resources to construct their consumption experiences.

The empirical context for this study is a Meetup group: a consumer network organized around members’ shared interests and activities in theme parks. The research utilized participant observation of members’ face-to-face activities during two years and over 80 events, interviews with key informants, and content analysis of online interactions.

The findings outline how consumers interact across physical and virtual spaces utilizing technologies and material objects. The data are used to propose a new consumer-centric conceptualization of experience customization, distinguishing between three modes: collaborative co-production, cooperative co-creation, and subversive co-creation.

It is argued that the three modes of customization provide a way to understand how consumers mobilize and (re)deploy organizational resources to create experiences that may complement existing service propositions, but may also transform them in ways that challenge the service provider’s original goals and expectations. Furthermore, this study identifies the factors that shape which modes of customization are possible and how they are enacted. Specifically, the discussion examines how experiential complexity, governability, the compatibility of consumer and organizational practices, and the collective mobilization of resources may determine the scope and form of customization.

This paper aims to explore how unreflective and reflective value experience emerges in value co-creation and co-destruction practices in a consumer context.

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological heuristic consisting of three interrelated modes of engagement, which is used for interpretive sense-making in a dynamic and lively case context of amateur-level football (soccer) played on artificial grass. Based on a qualitative study using ethnographic techniques, this study examines the whats and the hows of value experience by individuals playing football at different qualities and in varying conditions across 25 Dutch football teams.

The findings reveal three interrelated yet distinct modalities of experience in value co-creation and co-destruction presented in a continuum of triplex spaces of unreflective and reflective value experience. The first is a joyful flow of unreflective value experience in emergent and undisrupted value co-creation practice with no potential for value co-destruction. Second, a semireflective value experience caused by interruptions in value co-creation has a higher potential for value co-destruction. Third, a fully reflective value experience through a completely interrupted value co-creation practice results in high-value co-destruction.

This research contributes to the literature on the microfoundations of value experience and value creation by proposing a conceptual relationship between unreflective/reflective value experience and value co-creation and co-destruction mediated through interruptions in consumer usage situations.

This study’s novel perspective on this relationship offers practitioners a useful vantage point on understanding how enhanced value experience comes about in value co-creation practice and how this is linked to value co-destruction when interruptions occur. These insights help bolster alignment and prevent misalignment in resource integration and foster service strategies, designs and innovations to better influence consumer experience in journeys.

This study deploys an integral view of how consumer value experience manifests in value co-creation and co-destruction that offers conceptual, methodological and practical clarity.

Purpose – The objectives of this study are to explore how consumers achieve, maintain, and/or regain privacy and to more fully understand the meaning consumers ascribe to privacy.

Methodology/approach – Image-elicited depth interviews were conducted on a theoretical sample of 23 informants.

Findings – Consumers are active participants who assert their dominance in the marketplace and resist organizational practices that impinge upon their privacy. Seven categories of privacy management practices were identified: withdraw, defend, feint, neutralize, attack, perception management, and reconcile. The findings also reveal that when informants desire privacy and engage in these practices, they are ultimately in a quest for the meta-goal of sovereignty over their respective personal domains.

Research limitations/implications – This study provides support for and expands upon knowledge of the privacy management practices identified in extant literature, and offers an encompassing conceptualization of privacy as it applies in the context of contemporary consumption.

Social implications – This study may assist policy makers and managers in their efforts to develop appropriate solutions to manage consumers’ privacy concerns and support them in their pursuit of privacy.

Originality/value of the paper – This study injects the voice of the consumer into the privacy debate. A broad theoretical framework for understanding what consumers mean when they talk about privacy and the practices they engage in to “do privacy” is presented. It is hoped that this study provides a basis for managing consumer privacy concerns and future research on the issue so that improved outcomes can be attained for all.

This study aims to answer two research questions, namely, what kinds of mundane resistance practices emerge in the local food system and which spatial, material and social elements catalyse the resistance practices.

The study adopts a post-humanist practice approach and focusses on exploring the agentic capacity of socio-material elements to generate resistance practices. The data were generated through a multi-method approach of interviews, field observations and Facebook discussions collected between 2014 and 2017.

The empirical context is the rejäl konsumtion local food network in Finland. The analysis presents two types of resisting practices – resisting facelessness and resisting carelessness – which are connected to spatial, material and social elements.

The study focusses on one local food system, highlighting the socio-material structuring of resistance in this specific cultural setting.

The practical implications highlight that recognising the socio-material elements provides tools for better engagement of consumer actors with local food systems.

The study adds to the extant research by interweaving the consumer resistance literature and local food systems discussions with the neo-material approach. The findings present a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which consumer resistance is actualised in a non-recreational, mundane context of consumption. Consequently, the study offers new insights into the agentic socio-material actors structuring the local food system.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of unfair commercial practices in advertising and marketing law.

The differences addressed in the paper relate to the role or tasks of consumer law in regulating the marketplace.

A comparison of the UK, German and Nordic approaches reveal interesting differences at least in nuances in the approach to omission of information as an unfair commercial practice.

The paper provides useful analysis of the deeper understandings behind unfair commercial practices law.

The purpose of this paper is to identify which consumption practices lead to the co-creation of collective service experiences and to outline a conceptual framework for their understanding.

The authors use a multiple case vignette approach combining examples from leisure industries described as perfect contexts to study collective experiences. Four case vignettes were selected according to community forms and types as defined by consumer culture literature.

The study identifies and delineates the neglected phenomenon of the co-creation of collective service experiences and related practices. It highlights the ambivalence of these practices in terms of the co-creation or co-destruction of the experience and indicates their relative unmanageability.

The cases largely rest on symbolic service experiences, which are a small set of the total universe of consumer experiences.

Companies should replace their efforts in organizing consumer practices with monitoring mechanisms and react to collective consumer actions, pursuing a co-evolutionary perspective when they do not have a dominant and permanent role in the relationship with their consumers.

The paper gives voice to an understudied collective phenomenon in service management and provides the building blocks for its conceptualization.

E-commerce last-mile logistics is undergoing dramatic changes. By inviting consumers to participate in self-collection, they collectively form a mass crowd of resources that can be integrated into last-mile logistics. However, consumers' participation may lead to a spectrum of value outcomes from value co-creation to co-destruction. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to critically examine the value formation process focussing on micro-level practices and resource outcomes.

Anchored on practice theory and resource conservation theory, content analysis is adopted to analyse 546 practice-based experiences extracted from a leading social media platform.

The analysis reveals five sequential practices of self-collection: purchasing, delivering, notifying, receiving and confirming. Furthermore, the co-created practices are characterised by gains in material, esteem, social and energy resources of the interacting actors. Meanwhile, the co-destructed practices cause a chain of resource losses, where the interacting actors suffer primary losses which subsequently triggers consumers' coping behaviours and further destroys resources for all.

Focussing on constituent service practices, this study zooms into the value formation process. The authors contribute to logistics literature with a service-dominant logic by stressing end-consumers' involvement in the creation and consumption of last-mile logistics.

This study conceptualises the sources and consequences of the nuanced service practices (value formation or destruction) of self-collection. A unified framework is thus proposed, which guides logistics service providers to channel consumers towards more constructive participation in last-mile logistics.

This paper aims to understand the elements of bridging practices enacted by Asian immigrant consumers and exploring how these practices constitute reverse acculturation within immigrant-receiving Western cultures.

A practice theoretical perspective was deployed in concert with a hermeneutic analysis of two-part depth interviews with 26 Southeast Asian immigrants in New Zealand. Multi-modal methods and open narrative reflexivity were deployed to improve depth and trustworthiness.

Participant narratives revealed three intertwined elements of bridging practices: articulations (involving sayings and meanings), performances (involving embodied social activities and material artefacts) and contestations (involving tensions and anxieties). Bridging practices create shared social spaces and facilitate the intensification of intercultural translation.

Bridging practices provide a partial view of wider “circuits of practice” (Magaudda, 2011) which cumulatively constitute reverse acculturation. Future research is needed to show how bridging practices serve as resources for transforming the consumption practices of local consumers in Western cultures.

This study advances consumer acculturation theory in three ways. First, this study identifies a key practice of intercultural translation between Asian and Western consumer cultures. In particular, this study shows that intercultural translation occurs not only through ethnic economies but also in a diverse range of private and public sites. Second, in addition to local consumers’ practices (Sobh et al., 2012), this study highlights the role of immigrant consumers’ practices in reverse acculturation, thereby providing empirical evidence for Luedicke’s (2011) conceptual model of intercultural adaptation. Third, in addition to the influence of acculturating agents on immigrant consumers (Askegaard et al., 2005; Peñaloza, 1994), this study demonstrates how immigrant consumers themselves can act as acculturating agents.

The present paper seeks to analyse the role of brand images in consumer practices for uncovering brand strength.

By employing a qualitative approach, data are analysed based on three elements that constitute the practices: objects (what tools or resources are required in the practice), images involved, and competences (what competences does the practice require).

The authors suggest practices as an additional unit of analysis for understanding brand strength based on image. Towards this end, the paper identifies and systematically categorises consumer practices and proposes that consumers develop novel and personal practices related to brands. The findings reveal embedded brand strength in mundane, routinised practices.

The paper presents a novel approach for understanding the past (image heritage) and current (image‐in‐use) dimensions of brand images and their embeddedness in consumer practices.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptually examine how value is created in (social) practices in which consumers use offerings as operand resources.

Drawing on service‐dominant logic, practice and consumer culture theories, this paper conceptualizes the operational logic of value creation in practices and draws implications to marketing theory and practice. The approach to markets is “markets as practices” in value networks.

Value is tied to practices, not to offerings. Therefore, a key research unit for examining value creation is a practice. Value creation is socially constructed because a practice‐specific meaning structure, influenced by the context and consumer resources, configures consumers' activities. Guided by it, consumers do what makes best sense to do in the practice in the specific moment. As the context and consumer resources are unfixed, fragmented consumers emerge. Therefore, segmentation of value‐creating practices offers a valid description of value creation.

The paper extends the examination of value creation from use to practices. Drawing on marketing and other social sciences, it conceptualizes the operational logic of value creation in a practice: it defines practice elements, their roles and interdependencies in the value‐creation process. The operational logic introduces meaning structures as value‐creation mediators: influenced by the context and consumer resources, they steer consumer participation in the practice (including the use of offerings) and experienced value. Understanding meaning structures helps firms to identify value improvement opportunities which can be transferred to improved or new value propositions. Finally, the paper proposes segmentation of practices in the presence of fragmented consumers.