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The purpose of this paper is to attempt to explore the relative importance of the physical and interactive elements of service on overall satisfaction, particularly when these elements are moderated by the point‐of‐view of repeat and new customers. Evidence is drawn from the transport sector industry.

The data for this study come from 388 ferry passengers. Regression analysis was used to test the influence of each parameter and SEM employed to assess the moderating effects of repeat patronage on satisfaction.

The results suggest that the physical elements of the service are of greater importance in determining customer evaluations on overall satisfaction than interactive features of service. The results also suggest that these effects are not just direct but also moderated by the repeat use of the service. Finally, both elements are very good predictors of overall satisfaction.

As results are obtained from only one industry, generalisations should be drawn with care.

The presumption of managers when looking at satisfaction as the primary, even sole, gauge of customer loyalty appears to be erroneous. The consequence is potential misallocations of resources due to myopic focus on customers' satisfaction increase. The findings suggest that attention should be given to increasing the loyalty of passengers/customers.

This study suggests a moderating role for repeat and new customers in the satisfaction‐loyalty relationship and implies that to maximise investments in service improvements based on a focus on increasing physical satisfaction rather than seeking to develop an interactive “delight” to the customer.

Image is important in business. Corporate advertising is a means of raising salience, heightening consumer awareness, establishing market presence and credibility, creating an organisational culture and, more recently, influencing shareholders and averting hostile takeover bids. To quote Management Today: ‘Familiarity breeds favour, not contempt. Nine times out of ten in every country, there is a high correlation between how well people know a company and how well they regard it’. It is hardly surprising that corporate expenditures on media advertising can be reckoned in billions of dollars. Transnational corporations (TNCs) and political parties alike have discovered that image is not a matter of peripheral concern, but a fundamental lever in manipulating public opinion. Opinion polls over the last decade have demonstrated that seven out of 10 people believe that a company with a good reputation will not sell poor quality goods. That perception may be spurious, but its effect on profitability is very real. However,‘… if a company can't deliver its corporate promise at point of sale, lavish ad campaigns are nothing less than a waste of money’.

This paper aims to argue that the limited success in addressing rising rates of obesity is underscored by health promotion practices and policies’ failure to consider the instrumental and symbolic functioning of food as part of identity formation, relationship construction and socio-cultural conditioning over consumers’ life course events. The aim of this paper is to ignite the power of critical approaches that seek social change through contextualising the subjectivities of obese individuals’ personal lived experiences with food.

Taking a transformative consumer research approach which recognises the range of theories and paradigms required to comprehend and positively influence well-being, this paper draws on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu to study the discourses of 21 obese adult consumers.

The research shows that food behaviours conducive to weight gain are enmeshed in participants’ biographies and everyday experiences across the arenas of identity, environment and the body. Transposable dispositions are formed across these arenas which often can be at odds with practices of self-care and frame how individuals use food in their responses to significant life occurrences.

The findings provide an avenue to potentially guide policymakers in shaping health-promotion programmes which assist consumers in self-regulation without compromising their relational identities, interests and self-knowledge.

This paper makes several important contributions to the managerial understanding of obesity, including the consideration of “obesogenecity” beyond its relativity to the temporal surroundings of “built” and social fields in the here and now, and more relative to the illimitable occasions, times, spaces or stages consumers traverse through their lives.

An effective means to promote optimal nutrition for any group of consumers is to expand nutrition professionals' understanding of the cohort's food choice processes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the situated food choice influences of the videogames subculture; a known consumption enclave for calorie dense low nutrient foods. The investigation is conducted by application of an abbreviated version of Furst et al.'s model of the food choice process as a conceptual framework.

This investigation uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis. In total, 14 purposively sampled semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews were carried out with members of the videogames subculture.

Informants' food choices and preferences during social gameplay were strongly influenced by beliefs related to appropriate food behaviour and ideal characteristics of foods suitable for grazing. All informants described some constraints imposed by the physical surroundings and environmental nature of gameplay such as issues of messiness and inability to eat with utensils while gaming. Social structure played an important role in informants' food choices, and much of this structure was built around the hedonic intersection of food and gameplay. Informants' food choices were also influenced by poor cooking abilities and unwillingness to devote much effort to meal preparation during gameplay.

Used in conjunction with theories of behavioural change, the insights gathered here should help inform interventions and communications strategies. Both commercial and social marketing domains have a role to play in positively influencing gamers' diets.

The paper offers social marketers insight into the influences that underpin unhealthful food choices within the videogames subculture and how to positively bring about change.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how food is used to create identity and community for gamers during core rituals. These meanings are to be explored within the broader context of subcultural experience in an investigation of the motives and the self‐concept dynamics underlying this symbolic consumer behaviour.

This paper uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a multi‐method ethnographic approach that includes: netnography: multiple, in‐depth, ethnographic interviews; and prolonged participant observation. Interview informants are young Irish subcultural members aged between 18 and 23. Data analysis proceeds according to a constant comparative method.

The findings suggest that the social gaming ritual, when intersected with food, is closely linked to issues of identity, community, fantasy and escape, gustatory rebellion and prolonged hedonism. Commensality during the core social gaming ritual contributes to a sense of communitas, while the “junk” nature of the shared food products helps to manufacture the hedonism of the event. The social ritual then is sovereign and bound by its own subcultural parameters, which oppose mainstream culture's norms and dietary regulations. From its role in helping to create a Utopian and rebellious experience, food is then leveraged as part of the gamers' collective identity. Practitioner implications of the results are discussed.

This paper investigates contemporary food consumption behaviour within a postmodern community. The main contribution pertains to providing an insight into a previously neglected group of food consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to build an understanding of what we term “consumer discipline” by unpacking the practices and strategies by which people manage and exert control over what they consume. This is facilitated by looking at the context of food, an everyday necessity imbued with sizeable importance in terms of its impact on personal well-being, and how it is experienced by individuals who must manage the constraints of a chronic illness.

Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and theories surrounding the social facilitation of self-management, this paper analyses interviews with 17 consumers diagnosed with diabetes or coronary heart disease.

By exploring how the chronically ill generate different strategies in managing what they eat and how they think about it, this paper outlines four analytical areas to continue the discussion of how consumption is disciplined and its conceptualisation in marketing and health-related research: “the Individual”, “the Other”, “the Market” and “the Object”.

The results signal to policymakers the aspects of health promotion that can be enhanced to improve self-management amongst consumers in the pursuit of well-being.

This paper makes two contributions: it conceptualises consumer discipline as a practice that involves self-control but also comprises the capabilities to self-manage one’s identity and relationships through leveraging personal and social strategies across various contexts; and it identifies macro influences such as the market as negotiable powers that can be contested or resisted to help assist in one’s self-management.

This paper aims to investigate the role of store brands as a time- and money-saving heuristic in the context of an omnipresent store brand hierarchy. Drawing on the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1982), it proposes that the store brand hierarchy is characterised by many of the traits of frequently used heuristics employed by grocery shoppers.

Based on Chaiken’s (1980) model of information processing and Stigler’s (1961) perspective on the economics of information search, the study deductively establishes a model of store brand proneness to reveal the role of store brands as time- and money-saving heuristic. The model is tested on a sample of 535 US households using structural equation modelling and subsequent multigroup analysis based on two subsamples of households experiencing high financial pressure but who differ in terms of time pressure.

The findings provide strong support for store brands as a time- and money-saving heuristic and as a substitute for price search among households experiencing financial and time pressures.

The main limitation is that the study is based on a sample of households located in one region of the US market.

Retailers need to be aware that any extension of the store brand portfolio beyond the traditional multi-tiered price/quality hierarchy risks undermining what has emerged to be a valuable heuristic used by certain shoppers.

This study extends our understanding of the role of store brands in the marketplace by going beyond their conceptualisation as a competitive device used by retailers to instead position them as a decision-making tool used by consumers. It also deepens our understanding of the boundary between rational search activities and the transition to the use of frequently flawed heuristics within the shopping process.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the contributions presented in this special section on the selfie phenomenon and its significance for marketing practice and scholarship.

The significance of the topic is reviewed and themes related to the selfie phenomenon and marketplace issues are discussed in connection with extant research. The contributions of each paper are briefly highlighted and discussed.

Although the selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, both marketing practice and scholarship have noticed its prominence in consumer lives and potential for generating marketplace insights. Despite its frequently presumed triviality, the selfie is a multifaceted phenomenon of significance to key marketing areas such as branding, consumer behavior or market research. Possible avenues for future research are outlined.

Key issues relating to research into the selfie phenomenon for marketing scholars are illuminated.