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In marketing and consumer research, the study of Indigenous ideas and rituals remains limited. The authors present an Indigenous-informed study of consumption rituals co-produced with members of the Shipibo–Konibo Indigenous group of the Peruvian Amazon. Specifically, the authors worked with the Comando Matico, a group of Shipibos from Pucallpa, Peru. This study aims to investigate how Indigenous spiritual beliefs shape health-related consumption rituals by focusing on the experience of the Shipibos and their response to COVID-19.

Drawing upon the principles of Indigenous research, the authors co-produced this study with the Comando Matico. The authors collaboratively discussed the research project’s design, analysed and interpreted data and co-authored this study with members of the Comando Matico. This study uses discourse analyses. The corpus of discourse is speech and text produced by the Comando Matico in webinars and online interviews during the COVID-19 pandemic. The full and active participation of the Comando Matico informed the discourse analysis by ensuring Indigenous knowledge, and worldviews were infused throughout the process.

The authors foreground how Indigenous spiritual beliefs act as a force that imbues the knowledge and practice of health, wellbeing and illness, and this process shapes the performance of rituals. In Indigenous contexts, multiple spirits coexist with consumers, who adhere to specific rituals to respond to and relate to these spirits. Indigenous consumption rituals involve the participation of non-human beings (called rao, ibo, yoshin and chaikoni by the Shipibos) and this aspect challenges the traditional notion of rituals and ritual elements in marketing.

The authors demonstrate how Indigenous spiritual beliefs shape consumption rituals in the context of health and draw attention to how the acknowledgement of alternative ontologies and epistemologies can help address dominant hierarchies of knowledge in marketing theory.

This study aims to examine the ramifications of an unfavorable public incident resulting from an organizational leader’s transgression on member outcomes and their intentions to purchase associated symbolic products as gifts. This study also considers how members’ attributions of organizational control affect the relationship between members’ organizational identification and their purchase behavior.

The study applies a longitudinal design involving two rounds of data collection over two years to examine a case of leadership transgression. Using the customer panel of a privately owned retailer, sorority members were surveyed before and after an unfavorable public incident involving their president. This study applied t-tests of mean differences and regression analyses to test the hypotheses.

After the leader’s transgressions were publicized, sorority members exhibited lower levels of cognitive organizational identification, satisfaction with the organization and purchase intention of organizational gifts. The association between cognitive organizational identification and gift purchase intentions was stronger after the incident. Further, controllability attributions positively moderated the association between cognitive organizational identification and the intended purchase quantity of organizational products after the incident.

The sample limits the generalizability of the findings, as the study is conducted on one case of a leader’s transgression in an identity-based organization (IBO).

The findings imply that efforts to repair customer identification should be taken rather than satisfaction enhancement when a leader of an IBO commits a public transgression.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply identity threat theory to understand how an organizational leader’s public transgression affects member outcomes and purchasing. The findings imply that it is critical to repair members’ identification when these situations arise. The use of a real case and a longitudinal research design are rare contributions to this research stream.