Search results

This study aims to explore the phenomenon of visceral food pleasure, described as a unitary experience that, after an initial sense of pleasure and relief generated by the satisfaction of eating impulses, is followed by negative feelings – such as guilt and worry – linked to the consumption of hedonic or unhealthy foods.

An exploratory approach has been adopted. In particular, the critical incident technique among 87 individuals has been used to extract insights about visceral food pleasure.

Contrary to previous research results, this study shows that viscearl food pleasure is not a unitary phenomenon, identifying four types of different facets, two of which have a negative valence in terms of felt emotions post-consumption and psychological well-being (i.e. the “greedy” and the “maladaptive” experiences). More importantly, the other two facets are associated with positive consequences in terms of emotions felt post-consumption and perceived psychological well-being (i.e. the “social” and the “fair sin” experiences).

Companies that provide food experiences can prime meanings that influence consumers’ perceptions of the episode to elicit positive emotions post-consumption and psychological well-being.

Promoting a more holistic view of food consumption and psychological well-being can free consumers from negative emotions during food consumption episodes. Priming a particular meaning can be a way to do that. However, as visceral experience can still lead to health issues, this must be combined with an education process that makes consumers aware of their food habits.

This research challenges the idea that visceral food experiences are always negative. Indeed, when associated with particular meanings (i.e. social and reward), they have a positive valence post-consumption.

Service businesses face a unique challenge: how to effectively communicate the necessarily intangible benefits of their service offering. Their attempts to tangibilize the service are often ill‐designed, making service benefits more rather than less obscure. This article presents a scheme that identifies the communication task at various stages of consumer decision making and then matches appropriate communication strategies. Rather than embracing misguided tangibilization, the recommended strategies handle the intangibility challenge without necessarily using any tangible props.

From experiences recollections, this study aims to explore the place of emotions in the souvenir’s step of the family consumption process of luxury hotels stays.

To explore the emotional dimension, this exploratory research is based on a triple qualitative approach (software, manual and a psychology-based approach). In total, 1,055 e-reviews, following a family stay in four- and five-star hotels, were collected.

The findings highlight an omnipresent emotional dimension in the recollections of experiences of consumers who have travelled with their families. These emotional traces differ according to the hotel’s positioning. Overall, positive emotions are much more prominent in the most luxurious hotels, while negative emotions are more related to the four-star hotels. Moreover, the four-star hotels reviews mainly associate emotions with the tangible aspects of the offer. Those in five-star hotels are more structured through intangible aspects.

The study of family decision-making dynamic, with a focus on the role of each family member, is a first perspective. That of experiences recollections apart from the digital approach is also to be considered.

On the one hand, the objective is to extend the literature about the role of emotions in a service consumption process, and especially in a family context, trying to understand the post-purchase step of these customers. On the other hand, it is interesting for hotel managers to identify to which aspects of the offer (e.g. comfort, room, catering, decoration) the emotional traces that have remained in the customers’ memory are associated.

This study considers the family unit in a new way, that of its emotional memories’ traces of luxury hotels experiences. The post-consumer stage of the purchase process based on many spontaneous online reviews analysis is investigated.

This article aims to examine positioning strategies of international and multicultural‐oriented service brands.

Following review of the literature and pilot study, three main populations (executives and experts, companies' marketing communications, and the target group of consumers) were examined. The methodology concerned triangulation research involving face‐to‐face long interviews, secondary data, content analysis and mail survey.

The paper highlights that while no single positioning strategy is significant across the four card brands (Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Diners Club), “the brand name” positioning strategy appears to be the most preferred among Visa, MasterCard and Amex and not Diners Club. The findings also show that “top of the range” positioning strategy is favored among Amex and Diners Club card brands. However, “country of origin” positioning strategy is incompatible within the study setting.

Apart from the low response rate from survey of the general public, another limitation of this study is the concentration on a single sector of the services industry. The latter poses difficulties for generalization across all service brands.

Service managers now have an insight into the positioning activities of the plastic card brand sector. These serve as building blocks and benchmarks for appreciating and operationalizing the concept of positioning – a research issue that is missing in the extant literature.

This study is a step forward in the operationalization of the concept of positioning. The research also provides diagnosis of the congruence between management's presumed positioning strategies, firm's actual positioning practices and target group's perceptions of the positioning strategies. Without such knowledge, managers cannot expect to choose the best competitive options to defend or enhance their positions in the market place.

This chapter analyzes detailed 24-hour diary data from the United States to provide evidence on the relationship between workers' effort and well-being while at work. In doing so, we first measure workers' effort in terms of the amount of on-the-job leisure, number of on-the-job leisure episodes, and the time working until consuming on-the-job leisure. Second, we link these three measures of worker effort to data on instantaneous well-being while at work. We find that the less time devoted to on-the-job leisure and the number of on-the-job leisure episodes, and the more time workers spend working until on-the-job-leisure, the higher the levels of stress during their work tasks. In analyzing workers' effort and stress during market work activities, we contribute to the scant literature on the determinants of worker happiness while at work, positing the consumption and the frequency of on-the-job leisure as affective factors.

This paper aims to explore the interaction between consumer empowerment and social interactions as fundamental social media elements. It demonstrates their relationship in both experiential and informative social media setting where social media complements an offline consumer activity. The study aims to contribute to the literature on social media by demonstrating its complementary role on offline activities through these fundamental elements.

The paper reports three experimental designs that manipulate the empowering and the socializing elements of complementary activities to show their effects on both the complementary online and the complemented offline activities.

The paper presents three empirical studies that reveal the effects of two fundamental social media elements (i.e. empowerment and socialization) on consumers’ responses toward consumption episodes that consist of complementary online and complemented offline activities. It reveals that that these elements increase positive consumer responses toward both the online and the offline activities through psychological empowerment. However, the interaction between the elements changes with respect to specific empowerment types.

The paper contributes to the literature on social media by demonstrating its complementary role on offline activities through its empowering and socializing elements. It bridges research on consumer empowerment and socialization in a way that reveals their interaction beyond the extant definitions of empowerment resulting from enhanced communication among consumers. The paper also demonstrates the complementary role of social media on offline consumer behaviors through the effects of these two fundamental elements.The participants of the experimental studies are presented with hypothetical scenarios and asked about their behavioral intentions. Thus, future studies should address the research questions in real-world settings.

The paper includes implications for social media usage as a complementary activity to offline real-life consumer behavior through the effects of consumer empowerment and social interactions. Thus, it may benefit marketers seeking to optimize the empowering and socializing components of their social media strategies.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how social media may affect real-life consumer behavior. It also identifies the interaction between the empowering and the socializing elements of social media offerings in both experiential and informative settings.

This paper furnishes an inaugural reading of abjective consumption by drawing on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection within the wider terrain of consumer cultural research. It offers a conceptual framework that rests on three pillars, viz. irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution of selfhood.

Qualitative research design that adopts a documentary ethnographic approach, by drawing on a corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction” and “Freaky Eaters”.

The findings from this analysis point to different orders of mediatized discourse that are simultaneously operative in different actors’ frames (e.g. moralizing, medical), in Goffman’s terms, yet none of which attains to address the phenomenon of abjective consumption to its full-blown extent.

Although some degree of bias is bound to be inherent in the data because of their pre-recorded status, they are particularly useful not in the least because this is a “difficult sample” in qualitative methodological terms.

The multi-order dimensionalization of abjective consumption opens up new vistas to marketers in terms of adding novel dimensions to the message structure of their communicative programs, in line with the three Lacanian orders.

The adoption of a consumer psychoanalytic perspective allows significant others to fully dimensionalize the behavior of abjective consumption subjects, by becoming sensitive to other than symbolic aspects that are endemic in consumer behavior.

This paper contributes to the extant consumer cultural research literature by furnishing the novel conceptual framework of abjective consumption, as a further elaboration of my consumer psychoanalytic approach to jouissance consumption, as well as by contrasting this interpretive frame vis-à-vis dominant discursive regimes.

This study aims to explore how the use of a performance measurement system (PMS) reflects the compatibility between institutional logics at different levels. It emphasises the centrality of institutional logics behind actors’ expectations.

Drawing on pragmatic constructivism, the study assumes that a PMS is used coherently when it realises the values and beliefs of the actors involved. This requires that actors communicate and understand one another (communication coherence) and accept the PMS in use (value coherence). The study argues that a coherent use of a PMS reflects the compatibility between the institutional logics at the same (field levels) or different levels (field and societal levels). The empirical evidence comes from a large public hospital located in the south of Italy.

The empirical results describe episodes that highlight how the coherence in the use of PMS reflects the compatibility of institutional logics at different levels and episodes where the compatibility can be hindered by problems in the coherent use of the PMS related to value and communication coherence. A lack of communication and value coherence is highlighted in the use of PMS as “compromising accounts”.

The study sheds light on how coherence in the use of PMS reflects the compatibility between the institutional logics involved at different levels, suggesting that a focus on one prevailing logic must be avoided. The study extends logics compatibility beyond the field level to the societal level.

This study aimed to explore the association of childhood experience of being forced to eat – where a particular person forced a child to eat a specific food item against one's will – on food consumption, especially vegetables later in young adulthood.

An online questionnaire survey was conducted from 19 to 24 February 2020 with 1,277 young Korean adults in their 20s. A total of 1,226 eligible responses were obtained, wherein 410 (33.4%) responses with forced-eating experiences in childhood were collected. To answer the survey questionnaire, the respondents were asked to recall one of the most memorable forced-eating episodes.

The results showed that forced-eating occurred mostly among lower grades or pre-schoolers, at home or in schools/childcare facilities, and by parents or homeroom teachers. Vegetables were the most common target food for forced-eating. The Forced-Eating-Experienced group with vegetables as the target food tended to have significantly lower preference for and acceptance of vegetables. Furthermore, among this group, those who had displayed unpleasant post-ingestion physical symptoms after forced-eating or refused to eat the target vegetables at all despite forced-eating, showed significantly lower acceptance of vegetables. Additionally, they were also less likely to eat the target vegetable at present, but more likely to agree that their current dietary habits were affected by their childhood experiences of forced-eating.

The study attempted to fill the knowledge gap on the association of negative childhood experiences of forced-eating with food consumption, especially vegetables, later in young adulthood.