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By tracing something of my history in becoming a marketing professor and conducting research, I hope to demonstrate that if I can flourish without compromising my ideals or losing my enthusiasm for research, so can anyone.

I attempt to show my trajectory, emphasizing the little turns along the way that have sent me in certain directions. I also discuss several of my most cited articles and discuss how they emerged.

I emphasize reading broadly, working with interesting co-authors, learning from my students and breaking free of narrow disciplinary boundaries as ways that have helped to stimulate and inspire me. The implicit message here is to take a chance and dare to do something different from what seems to be the mainstream.

There is certainly no single way to pursue a successful career. But I hope that by showing how I happened to get to where I am, I may give support and encouragement to those who may feel they are outside the academic mainstream in marketing or that their ideas don’t quite jell with those of colleagues.

The story and opinions here are mine alone. Together with others’ biographies and autobiographies (Shaw and Wilkinson, 2011), hopefully the reader can find a range of possibilities.

Loyalty programs (LPs) worldwide are maturing even as such programs are growing at a sluggish pace and losing appeal among consumers. This creates a need (and a potential opportunity) for firms to redesign their LPs that better resonates with their customers. The purpose of this paper is to identify that reorienting LPs to focus on societal and environmental causes, in addition to economic causes, can revive the growth of LPs.

This study uses a triangulation approach to integrate knowledge from past research, managerial insights and the popular press that is used in two ways. First, this study identifies a dominant logic in the evolution of LPs toward a focus on societal and environmental causes. Second, based on this evolving logic, this study advances a framework to design cause-related LPs that is an integration of a firm’s economic, societal and environmental imperatives.

The proposed framework submits that designing a LP consisting of tangible and intangible characteristics will lead to the increased adoption of LPs by the focal industry firms, and the increased acceptance of LPs by customers across all focal industry firms, while moderated by the competitive pressure faced by firms, and the prevailing regulatory framework. Further, the adoption and acceptance of LPs by firms and customers, respectively, will lead to the realization of established LP outcomes, while moderated by the intensity of customer usage.

Based on the proposed framework, this study identifies important implications for customers, firms, society and the environment worldwide in redesigning their LPs.

By integrating various sources of knowledge (academia, business and press) from multiple domains (e.g. marketing, sociology, environmental studies and finance), this study presents an integrative framework that presents a holistic approach in redesigning LPs.

Markets for free from foods have undergone extensive growth as consumers attempt to manage their health in increasingly novel ways. This research explores the making of consumer perceptions about the health of gluten-free foods.

This research employs qualitative methods including in-depth interviews with consumers of gluten-free foods and content analysis of online consumer comments.

Findings illustrate how consumers leverage personal responsibility, social commentary and political criticism in ways that forge essential connections with traditional medical authority. In particular, consumers blend diverse views together by expressing reverence, positioning complementarity and framing temporality.

This research highlights the productive role of consumers in shaping what constitutes health-related concerns and widens the scope of explanatory factors beyond product- and individual-level differences. This research is set in the context of gluten-free foods and draws on interview data from a single set of consumers. Future research could consider other free from markets including, for example, soy-free foods and corn-free foods, both of which implicate some of the most common ingredients in food products and potential regional differences both within and outside of North America.

This research offers insights into the marketing of gluten-free foods and free from foods in general, specifically the participation of consumers in legitimising the need for these foods on the basis of health.

I weave together multiple streams of work across disciplines including food marketing, contested illnesses and institutional logics to further our understanding of the dynamic nature of contemporary markets for free from foods.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the methodological importance of how researchers exit fieldwork to draw attention to implications for participant and researcher well-being.

Reflecting in detail on one researcher’s final six-months exiting fieldwork at a retirement village, this paper critically examines the unintended consequences of participant observation and researcher-participant relationships.

The paper illustrates that difficulties to exit fieldwork can be unintended consequences of participant observation activities and developing researcher-participant relationships. The findings also discuss how fieldwork exit can impose upon participant and researcher well-being.

The findings are built upon fieldwork at a retirement village where the researcher served as a volunteer. Thus, the discussion focusses on participant observation activities that are likely to lead to close researcher-participant relationships. However, this paper aims to serve as a useful resource for researchers when considering how to exit their unique fieldwork contexts “with grace”.

The paper provides practical suggestions to help marketing researchers such as ethnographers, manage fieldwork exits with participant and researcher well-being concerns in mind.

The practical suggestions provided by this paper aim to enable marketing researchers to exit fieldwork contexts “with grace” through reflection and proactive management of the social impacts of their research activities.

Even though researchers acknowledge fieldwork is social and personal by nature, little research attention has been paid to the management of researcher-participant relationships and the exit stage of fieldwork. This paper discusses and addresses this blind-spot in marketing research.

This paper aims to focus on Brazilian business fairs primarily attended by metalworking companies.

Using a qualitative and exploratory approach, data were collected through semi-structured interviews answered by exhibitor companies from two of the most relevant Brazilian states in this industrial sector: Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul.

The results recognize the four pillars of the interorganizational relationship developed among exhibitors at business fairs and launch serious implications for the effective development of business fairs as spaces of interorganizational relationship and of value creation.

This is the first study discussing the trade fairs of the Brazilian emerging industry related to the metal-mechanic sector of two of the most significant states in the country: Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.

A growing stream of consumer research has examined the intersection of family dynamics, consumption practices and the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of the complex nature of family for senior families (adult children and their elderly parents) who employ the use of elder care services and facilities.

This research analyses data gathered from in-depth interviews with adult siblings and their elderly parents through the lens of assemblage theory.

This paper advances a conceptulisation of the family as an evolving assemblage of components, including individual members; material possessions and home(s); shared values, goals, memories and practices; prominent familial attributes of love and care; and marketplace resources. Three features of the assemblage come to the fore in senior families: the fluid meaning of independence for the elderly parent, the evolution of shared family practices and the trajectory of the assemblage that is a function of its history and future.

This research focuses on a stage of family life that has been under-theorised; applies assemblage theory to the family collective, demonstrating that a family can be conceptualised as an ever-evolving assemblage of human and non-human components, and this is a useful lens for understanding how senior families “do” family; and argues for a broader notion of family – one that is not household-centric or focused on families with young children, that encompasses members and materiality and that foregrounds the dynamic, evolving nature of family life.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of US MBA and specialist master's degree alumni to determine the influence that their degree program experiences had on subsequent perceptions of career success.

Data were collected from 318 alumni MBA and specialist master's degree recipients from a large university in the southwestern USA; more than half of them were male. The university provided independent demographic data used to match respondents' surveys.

Evidence was found that men and women graduates perceived their post‐graduate degree success differently, with women graduates reporting less salary gain but higher hierarchical levels and job satisfaction compared to men. Social capital and perceived discrimination indirectly affected the reported career success of graduates on hierarchical level salary gain.

Use of self‐report data, for all model variables, puts the findings at risk for common‐method bias. Additionally, while discrimination measure had acceptable reliability for this sample, it has not been widely validated.

The findings that women viewed their graduate program as less effective for advancing their careers than men despite earning higher grades suggests that business schools emphasize improving graduate student experiences as well as managerial competencies. Organizations' leaders should make their diversity management practices readily apparent as women and minority MBA graduates are likely to view such practices as important during their job search.

This study contributes to the knowledge of factors that influence career success.

Mental well-being is associated with positive outcomes throughout the life course. This study aims to examine interventions delivered by allied health professionals (AHPs) to alleviate community stressors adversely impacting public mental health and well-being.

Review inclusion criteria comprised experimental and qualitative process evaluations of public mental health interventions delivered by AHPs. Electronic searches in Cinahl, Embase, Medline, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library, were combined with grey literature searches of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence public health guidance. A narrative synthesis and the Effective Public Health Practice Project appraisal tool were used to evaluate the evidence.

A total of 45-articles were included in the review describing AHP-delivered interventions addressing social disadvantage, trauma, bullying, loneliness, work-related stress, transitional stress, intersectionality, pain and bereavement. No articles were identified evaluating interventions delivered by operating department practitioners or orthoptists. A conceptual map was developed summarising the stressors, and a typology of public mental health interventions defined including: place-based interventions, discrete/one-off interventions, multi-component lifestyle and social connector interventions and interventions targeting groups at risk of mental health conditions.

Many mental health conditions begin in childhood, and a strength of the review is the life course perspective. A further strength is compiling a compendium of public mental health outcome measures used by AHPs to inform future research. The authors excluded many articles focussed on clinical interventions/populations, which did not meet review inclusion criteria. While playing a key role in delivering public mental health interventions, clinical psychologists are not defined as AHPs and were excluded from the review, and this may be construed a limitation. Given heterogeneity of study designs and interventions evaluated numerical analyses of pooled findings was not appropriate.

The review highlights the breadth of community stressors on which AHPs can intervene and contribute in public mental health contexts, stressors which correspond to those identified in UK Government guidance as currently important and relevant to address. The findings can inform developing community public mental health pathways that align with the UK National Health Service (NHS) Long Term Plan, on prevention and early intervention to protect community mental health and well-being. Further can inform the NHS strategic direction for AHPs including informing ways of increasing utilisation of core AHP skills to optimise contributions in public mental health agendas.

It is surprising there were not more AHP delivered evaluations of interventions for other stressors important to address in public mental health settings, for example gambling, domestic violence or that used digital technology, and these are areas for future research. Future research should identify the most active/effective dimensions of multi-component interventions which could be informed by frameworks to guide complex intervention development. The relative paucity of research identified, highlights the predominant focus of research to date on interventions for clinical mental health conditions and populations. The lack of preventative approaches is evident, and an important area for future research to align with UK health and social care priorities.

The review highlights AHP-delivered interventions impacting diverse community stressors across the life course. The findings can inform developing public mental health pathways aligned with government health service priorities to protect mental health and well-being, prioritise prevention and early intervention and increase utilisation of AHP skills across public mental health settings.