Search results

Historically, research on perceptions of health either converged upon the meanings created and proposed by specialists in the healthcare industry or focused on people who have medical conditions. This approach has failed to capture how the meanings and notions of health have been evolving as medicine extends into non-medical spheres and has left gaps in the exploration of how the meanings surrounding health and well-being are constructed, negotiated and reproduced in lay discourse. This paper aims to fill this gap in the understanding of the perceptions surrounding health by investigating consumers’ digitized visual accounts on social media.

Textual network and visual content analyses of posts extracted from Instagram are used to derive conclusions on definitions of health and well-being as perceived by healthy lay individuals.

Research demonstrates that digital discourse of health is clustered around four F’s, namely, food, fitness, fashion and feelings, which can be categorized with respect to their degrees of representation on a commodification/communification versus bodily/spiritual well-being map.

Our knowledge about the meanings of health as constructed and reflected by healthy lay people is very limited and even more so about how these meaning-making processes is realized through digital media. This paper contributes to theory by integrating consumers’ meaning-making literature into health perceptions, as well as investigating the role of social networks in enabling a consumptionscape of well-being. Besides a methodological contribution of using social network analysis on textual data, this paper also provides valuable insights for policy-makers, communicators and professionals of health.

Consumer resistance has been a popular research area in the previous decades, and concepts such as boycotting, brand avoidance, voluntary simplicity and anti-consumption appeared to be hot topics in exploring the ways the consumers resist market dominance in the postmodern culture. However, research on this topic in the Turkish (and partly Eastern) context is very limited, inhibiting our understanding of the topic in different economic and cultural settings. Through a comprehensive discussion that provides institutional-, structural- and community-level perspectives relating to consumer resistance phenomena in Turkey, a developing country with historical and cultural roots in both the East and the West, the chapter intends to equip scholars and practitioners with a better insight to conceptualise this phenomenon as well as to formulate further studies and marketing strategies.

Anti‐consumption is a new domain of research that deals with why individuals avoid consumption of particular products. To date, research in this area is only confined to the rejection of goods, with no evidence from the services industry. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of anti‐consumption behaviour for public health services, by deriving data from Swine Flu vaccination resistance in Turkey.

The research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 519 individuals.

Findings suggest that there is a strong anti‐consumption attitude of the Turkish public towards the service, and a major reason for avoidance was moral incompatibility, such that the public believed that the vaccination served the interests of pharmaceutical companies and the government. The findings also reveal that all the factors previously mentioned in the literature may be involved in the anti‐consumption of public health products.

This study suggests that public products, including public health services, are highly subject to anti‐consumption movements, and policies involving such products should also be considered from this perspective in order to provide an increased welfare for the public.

In recent years, brand personality as a branding construct has received considerable interest, which has led to a significant effort to develop tools to measure the personality of brands. Although the majority of these studies have focused on the brand personality of conventional product brands, the new boundaries of marketing obviously necessitate the application of branding constructs to non‐traditional products such as places. This study aims to focus on brand personalities of places, and to examine the applicability of this concept for city brands.

The research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 898 college students.

The findings of the study reveal that differentiating places with regard to their brand personalities is achievable. The paper introduces two new dimensions of brand personality for cities.

The extraction of two new factors that contribute to place brand personalities is considered a major contribution of this research to the marketing literature.