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Fantasy is a concept often used in everyday life and in academic research. While it has received attention in consumer research due to its connection to desires, community creation, meaning evocation, and identity development, it lacks a commonly shared understanding. This paper explores and theorizes consumers’ experiences of fantasy as performed in real-life situations.

The research was conducted as an ethnographic study of live action role-playing games (LARP) and analyzed through the lens of performance theory.

LARPs are performances that take place between imagination and embodied reality, with participants drawing on each realm to enrich the other. Consumption elements of LARP include media products and materials used in creating settings, costumes, and props. LARPers gain various benefits from the performance of fantasy, including escapist entertainment, self-reflection, personal growth, and participation in social criticism. Fantasy performance is, therefore, an important and under-theorized vehicle for consumer identity development and social interaction.

This research theorizes the experience of fantasy as a performance that takes place between reality and imagination. As such, it involves both embodied and social aspects that have largely been ignored in prior research. A richer theorization of fantasy performance promises greater insights into research areas including the dynamics of consumer identity projects and of consumption communities.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a careful articulation of one’s perspective of a key construct (in this case agency) can facilitate critical reflection and move the field forward (by bridging two hitherto separate agency debates).

Four years of engagement with 24 consumers involving prolonged observations and unstructured depth interviews provided the empirical evidence for this paper.

Even humans who perceive their personal capacity to influence events as limited (whether due to actual or perceived limitations in physiological capabilities, material resources, and/or interpersonal networks) can assemble a network of persons, possessions, and practices to signal the agency to themselves, and to others. These assemblages, which invariably feature indexicons, allow people to construct semiotic agency in ways which are shaped by their habitus.

This research has important implications for social and housing policy because disadvantaged consumers are more likely to rent than own, which limits their capacity to assemble semiotic agency.

This research introduces the new concepts of semiotic agency and indexicons to consumer culture theory and shows how even disadvantaged consumers can deploy these to signal agency to themselves and others.

While the relevance and rationale of strategic communication in organized religion are prevalent in academic and professional literature, there exists a dearth of both theoretical concepts and empirical knowledge, especially from a European perspective. Therefore, this chapter examines how strategic communication can be modelled in organized religion with its specific characteristics and logics by building a framework for strategic communication in this field of research. The framework questions perspectives of strategic communication and communication management that only concentrate on entities like famous persons, groups, movements or organizations and less on belief systems, organized and less organized entities interacting with each other. Religious organizations follow other rationalities like companies or non-profit organizations. Therefore, theories of corporate communication or public relations do not fit within the realm of organized religion, whose mission goes far beyond the organization. Taking into account religious institutions in strategic communication, this chapter delivers new theoretical insights by demonstrating how strategic communication can contribute to the specific purposes of organized religion. Furthermore, the study indicates the specific challenges communication professionals working in the area of religion are confronted with. Finally, it offers practical solutions for the specific field of organized religion by evolving specific target horizons of organized religion. Activating and developing the communication function of more or less independent bodies are main tasks for communication professionals working in organized religion and other meta-organizations.

Purpose – To explore the nature of metaphorical thinking in marketing and consumer research, with particular emphasis on consumers’ metaphor-manufacturing proclivities.

Methods/approach – The chapter concentrates on one of the most compelling and powerful metaphors of the 20th century, the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912. It uses introspective methods to interrogate consumers’ figurative interpretations of the iconic catastrophe.

Findings – Four categories of consumer metaphor-making are identified: negative, positive, reflexive and visual.

Research implications – The profusion of Titanic tropes suggests that researchers should resist unearthing ‘deep’ metaphors and focus instead on ‘wide’ metaphors, those that spread across the surface of society and culture.

Practical implications – ZMET, the widely used metaphorical elicitation procedure, warrants a complement called TMET. This Titanic Metaphor Elaboration Tendency is better attuned to contemporary branding thinking than its more familiar predecessor.