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Brandfests are conceptualized as marketer-initiated events that facilitate consumers’ individual and social engagements with brands. After its inception in the late 1990s, the concept of brandfests was quickly folded into the concept of brand community, leaving conceptual and strategic opportunities untapped. The purpose of the paper is to suggest a broadened conceptualization of brandfests based on the play theory and the notion of ludic interagency.

This paper includes a longitudinal study and ethnographic method.

Unlike previously studied brandfests, this context entails a low-involvement product, a brand that is not the focal point for participants, a broad range of market-facing enactors, shifting roles and the realization of multiple meanings and values for multiple enactors. The findings demonstrate that brand meaning and value can be constituted through ludic engagement of a broad range of market-facing enactors through a ludic spectacle such as a brandfest. Moreover, the authors find that this can go on outside the established spatial and temporal frames normally considered by the marketing literature.

This has implications for theories of emplacement (servicescape) and brand meaning actualization in terms of where, when and whom is involved in brand meaning actualization.

The paper develops four strategic propositions which broaden the type of brandfests that allow managers to define a range of potential strategies for engaging consumers and other enactors in a broader range of brandfests.

The paper reconceptualizes a dormant concept in the marketing literature to develop strategic implications based on the play theory. It challenges the prevalent centrality of the brand and consumer brand involvement.

Purpose: This chapter seeks to understand ethnic identification among second-generation consumers by drawing upon the lived experiences of British Indian migrants in England.

Methodology/Approach: The authors analyze interviews with middle-class, Hindu, second-generation British Indian women through Bourdieu’s key concepts of capital, field, habitus, and distinction.

Findings: Through resources such as Bollywood cinema, and Indian schools for language, music, and dance, second-generation consumers acquire, use and (re) produce situationally prized subcultural capital for distinction from other ethnic consumers and members of the white majority group. Ethnicity is central to second-generation consumers’ identity projects, and their everyday social interactions. Ethnicity is considered in uplifting and empowering terms, and first-generation consumers play a key role in reinforcing this belief.

Research Limitations/Implications: Due to our small sample size, limited by class, religion, and gender, the findings of this chapter might not be generalizable to the wider population. Instead, they can be used to develop new theoretical ways of understanding ethnicity in multicultural settings with long-established migrant populations.

Social Implications: Ethnicity can play a central and positive role in the everyday lives of second-generation consumers. By investigating this further, we can improve our understanding of contemporary, multicultural societies.

Originality/Value of Paper: Prior work in consumer research has focused on understanding first-generation migrant consumers through the lens of acculturation, and foregrounding experiences of stigma and tension. Instead, the authors foreground the positive and uplifting lived experiences of second-generation consumers in relation to their ethnicity. This chapter extends the literature on second-generation ethnic consumer identity work.

Purpose: Market logics have increasingly dominated consumer life worlds. Consumers may embrace marketization, or they may resist it, try to escape it, rebel against it, or actively manage its effects. This chapter examines the marketization of elderly care (in the form of transactional service provider relationships) and how consumers apply humanizing strategies to market relationships.

Methodology/Approach: This is a qualitative interpretive study using in-depth interviewing, observations, and the analysis of media coverage.

Findings: Drawing on institutional theory, this study shows how consumers humanize a marketized service relationship by weaving social logics into existing market logics. Our research finds consumers engaging in three humanization strategies: (1) moving beyond transactional relationships; (2) sharing consumption experiences; and (3) reinforcing social bonds through giving. The end result is the do-it-yourself (DIY) creation of extended family relationships from market resources.

Social Implications: The context of this study is a government-supported, non-profit, exchanged-based retirement support scheme that addresses the challenges of global population aging and the increasing anonymization and estrangement in our society. The authors tentatively suggest that our findings represent a move to mitigate adverse effects of neoliberalism.

Originality/Value of the Paper: Prior research has shown that consumers embrace marketization, resist it, try to escape it, rebel against it, or actively manage its effects. The authors identify another strategy used by consumers to address the increasing marketization of their life worlds, namely humanization. This study shows that consumers assemble market resources and humanize transactional service provider relationships by weaving social- into market logics resulting in the creation of a DIY extended family.

The purpose of this paper is to forward an extension of reception analysis as a way to incorporate and give insight to social media mediations and big data in a qualitative marketing perspective. We propose a research method that focuses on discursive developments in consumer debates for example on YouTube – a large-scale open-access social media platform – as opposed to the closed and tightknit communities investigated by netnography.

Online reception analysis

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we find that big data can enrich online reception analyses by showing new aspects of weak tie online networks and consumers meaning making.

The potential of online reception analysis is to encompass a discursive perspective on consumer interactions on large-scale open-access social media and to be able to analyze socialities that do not represent shared cultures but are more representative of transitory everyday interactions.

Our method contributes to the current focus to define levels of analysis beyond research centered on individuals and individual interactions within groups to investigate other larger socialities. Further, our method also contributes by incorporating and investigating the mediatization of interaction that social media contributes with and therefore our methods actively work with the possibilities of social media. Hence, by extending the advances made by netnography into online spaces, online reception analysis can potentially inform the current status of big data research with a sociocultural methodological perspective.

Purpose: This chapter aims to illuminate the cultural perceptions of illicit alcohol and to examine the role of cognitive polyphasia in changing the perceptions and legitimacy of market practices.

Methodology/Approach: An ethnographic study of the Kenyan illicit alcohol market, which combined digital news media data analysis, with observation and interview data.

Findings: Cognitive polyphasia serves to delegitimize illicit alcohol by portraying it as incongruent with existing cultural beliefs, values, and assumptions. Illicit alcohol is portrayed as a contaminated product, a cursed business, a practice that causes cultural breech, and a scheme of witchcraft/sorcery used to enslave consumers. Findings also show that cognitive polyphasia involves drawing on traditional knowledge to explain misfortune and difficult social phenomena such as addiction. The delegitimation of illicit alcohol induces behavior and perception change. Consumers play an important role in this change process.

Research Implications: This research proposes the incorporation of cultural language into alcohol policy and education.

Social Implications: By illuminating social representations in the cultural-cognitive arena, a theory for applying these factors to change markets/behavior is proposed.

Originality/Value of Paper: The chapter highlights the delegitimation of market practices, unlike previous research that focuses on legitimation processes. This chapter also demonstrates how cognitive polyphasia, a scarcely researched concept in consumer research, can induce behavior change. This chapter also contributes to the literature on market/behavior change by revealing potential cultural-cognitive barriers to change.

Purpose: Cool, a subjective, socially constructed concept has interested several researchers investigating its nature and successful marketing applications. However, the authors note a lack of studies investigating its perceptions in non-Western cultural contexts. The aims of this study are to investigate the meanings of cool in Tunisia, a North-African, Arab-Muslim emerging country.

Methodology: The authors conducted qualitative research through focus groups with Tunisian consumers. The authors used lexical, thematic, and semiotic analyses to investigate cool meanings.

Findings: Findings show that the term “Cool” in Tunisia is mostly related to lexical synonyms and meanings of lightness and flexibility, fun and amusement, humor, and trendiness rather than originality, divergence, creativity, and uniqueness long argued to be the significations of cool in Western literature, despite their minor presence in our results.

Originality/Value: Results show further evidence that the concept is culturally laden and that the socio-cultural characteristics of Tunisia altered its meanings established in the West, mostly associated to its origins and emergence.