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In an effort to explain the high level of scepticism and distrust towards marketing and marketers, this paper aims to explore how marketing practice and practitioners are depicted in the mass media.

The paper analyses 6,877 news reports that discuss “marketing” across two one-year time periods from three UK newspapers. A systematic content analysis is presented through N-grams and K-grams, close readings of individual cases and manual coding.

The paper finds that the news media cultivates an image of marketing and marketing practitioners as a cost to businesses and something that businesses do to consumers. The study finds that marketers are also presented through a narrow viewpoint. Marketers are depicted as male and tend to be viewed as a source of authority only when speaking on behalf of their organizations in response problems and crises.

The cultivation effect of mass media is widely accepted among communications scholar, yet its use within marketing research is limited. The paper represents an empirical application of this approach.

Organizations including the Chartered Institute of Marketing and American Marketing Association have attempted to counteract marketing’s image problem by redefining what marketing means. The results of this study suggest that such attempts are unlikely to work, as the practice of marketing, in particular PR, cultivates a negative image in the media.

The paper explores the relationship between marketing practice and the marketing profession and society.

The paper demonstrates the utility of cultivation theory and systematic content analyses of media texts. It develops a methodology to examine how professional practice is depicted in mass media.

Informed by social representation theory, the study aims to explore how marketing workers represent their activities on social media.

A naturalistic data set of 17,553 messages posted on Twitter by advertising workers was collected. A sample of over 1,000 unique messages from this data set, incorporating all external links and images, was analysed inductively using structured thematic analysis.

Advertising workers represent marketing work as a series of fun yet constrained activities involving relationships with clients and colleagues. They engage in cognitive polyphasia by evaluating these productive differences in both a positive and negative light.

The study marks a novel use of social representation theory and innovative social media analysis. Further research should explore these relations in greater depth by considering the networks that marketing workers create on social media and establish how, when and why marketing workers turn to social media in their everyday activities.

Marketing workers choose to represent aspects of their work to one another, using social media. Marketing managers should support such activities and consider social media as a way to understand the lives and experiences of marketing workers.

Marketing researchers have embraced digital media as a route to understanding consumers. This study demonstrates the value of analysing digital media to develop an understanding of marketing work. It sheds new light on the ways marketing workers create social relationships and enables marketing managers to understand and observe the social aspects of effective marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how people making music represent their production activities using images of consumption.

Supporting evidence is based on in-depth interviews with musicians and support personnel. The data are structured through a thematic analysis.

The paper argues that consumption serves as a discursive resource that allows cultural producers to make sense of production activities which do not conform to an image of production as an alienated form of labour.

Relating the analysis to the ongoing attempts to conceptualise cultural producers through the concept of prosumption, the paper concludes that there are limits to cultural producers’ abilities to represent their production activities as production rather than a structural change in social or economic organisation, as suggested by some consumer researchers.

To analyze and discuss the research on the public healthcare services (PHCS) through the lenses of coproduction/creation by systematizing the antecedents, the process enablers and the outcomes of coproduction/creation in terms of organizational and individual/patients factors.

A systematic review was performed based on 46 papers found in ISI Web of Science and Scopus databases following the Prisma Protocol for the search.

The results show that antecedents of coproduction/creation are connected to organizational/institutional capabilities (e.g. codesign of services or trust development) or patient/individual factors (e.g. physical and mental capabilities). The process of coproduction/creation relates with enablers, such as interactive and dynamic relationships between public care service providers and users. Finally, outcomes have diverse nature, namely quality of life, compliance, behavioral intentions, among others.

This study addresses the overlooked topic of coproduction/creation of value within PHCS. It contributes to public healthcare services literature wherein concepts of coproduction and cocreation of value are still on debate. It contributes to the transformative service research (TSR) by underlining that healthcare factors, processes and approaches may have a positive or negative (value codestructing) influence on the well-being. It yields crucial implications for PHCS.

It is the first attempt to systematize scientific knowledge on this topic, therefore conferring some novelty potential.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to the benchmarking literature by examining the historical emergence and evolution of benchmarking using the management fashion perspective as a theoretical lens.

The research approach followed in this paper can be characterized as explorative and theoretical. Insights from different data sources have been combined to provide a rich description of the emergence and evolution of benchmarking.

This analysis casts new light on several aspects of benchmarking’s emergence and evolution pattern. The characteristics of the benchmarking idea give it potential as a fashionable management tool. The widespread popularity and longevity of benchmarking can to a large extent be explained by the efforts of various actors to turn benchmarking into an institution.

The paper is explorative and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources.

Although some researchers have noted that benchmarking could be viewed as a management fashion, management fashion theory has, only to a very limited extent, been used as a theoretical lens in the context of benchmarking. This research paper demonstrates that management fashion theory can provide valuable insights for research on benchmarking.

Fetishism has been often linked to misrecognition and false belief, to one being “ideologically duped” so to speak. But could we think that fetishism may be precisely the very opposite? The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this at first sight counterintuitive notion. It locates the problem of fetishism at the crux of the problem of disavowal and argues that one needs to distinguish between a disavowal – marked by cynical knowledge – and fetishistic disavowal, which can be understood as a subcategory of the same belief structure of ideology.

This conceptual paper is based on literature review and utilizes examples from the author’s ethnographic fieldworks in India (2008-2013) and central Europe (2015-2019).

The paper provides a new insight into the structure of fetishism, relying on the psychoanalytic structure of disavowal, where all disavowal is ideological, but not all disavowal is fetishistic, thereby positing a crucial, often unacknowledged distinction. Where disavowal follows the structure “I know quite well how things are, but still […],” fetishistic disavowal follows the formula: “I don’t only know how things are, but also how they appear to me, and nonetheless […].”

The paper develops an original conceptualization of fetishism by distinguishing ideological disavowal from fetishistic disavowal.

Amidst the clamber to join the high‐tech world of e‐commerce, companies have neglected to apply common sense to their endeavours. It is arguably the lack of common sense rather than the lack of sophistication of e‐commerce security which potentially will scupper e‐trade development.

This paper aims to examine the concepts of gendered, entrepreneurial identity and fetishism through an analysis of images of Barbie entrepreneur. It draws on the literature of entrepreneurial identity and fetishism to examine how such identity is socially constructed from childhood and how exposure to such dolls can shape and influence perceptions of entrepreneurial identity.

Using semiotic analysis the authors conduct a visual analysis of the Barbie to make observations and inferences on gendered entrepreneurial identity and fetishism from the dolls and artifacts.

The gendered images of Barbie dolls were influenced by societal perceptions of what an entrepreneur should look like, reflecting the fetishisation of entrepreneurship, especially for women. Mirroring and exaggerating gendered perceptions, the dolls express hyper-femininity reflected in both the physical embodiment of the doll and their adornments/accessories. This includes handbags, high-heeled shoes, short skirts, haute-couture and designer clothes. Such items and the dolls themselves become fetishised objects, making context and culture of vital importance.

There are positive and negative implications in relation to how the authors might, as a society, present unrealistic gendered images and role models of entrepreneurship to children. The obvious limitation is that the methodology limits what can be said or understood, albeit the imagery mirrors socially constructed reality for the context examined.

This is original research in that no previous published studies have tackled gendered entrepreneurial identity in relation to fetishism. The value of the work lies in discussing the concepts and embeds them in the expanding conversation surrounding gendered entrepreneurial identities.

Impact of the digitalization on the production and service sector is a highly popular topic in these days and especially, new business models receive increasingly more attention. Under the light of digitalization, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, so-called Industry 4.0, and its impacts on all kinds of process is a promising topic in the academia and also beneficial for the practitioners. Since there are arguments from scholars that Industry 4.0 has an important and shaping effect on marketing, the concept of 7P's in marketing should be incorporated in Industry 4.0 elements. From this point of view, this study focuses on developing the understanding of 7P's based on contemporary perspectives of Industry 4.0.

In order to do that, different criteria related to integration of Industry 4.0 and marketing practices under each marketing-mix element are presented and one of the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods, the best–worst method (BWM) is used to prioritize the criteria for future implications.

Results indicated that product, process and physical evidence are the most affected marketing-mix factors by considering Industry 4.0. managerial implications which were also presented based on the numerical results.

An in-depth analysis of literature review related to Industry 4.0 revealed that changing and developing technologies are examined in detail mostly around a production perspective. In order to fulfill the gap in the knowledge, this study focuses on the examination of impacts of Industry 4.0 on the marketing-mix strategy. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which merges Industry 4.0 with the marketing mix.

This paper aims to examine the aspiration to world-class broadband in a number of countries.

This study includes a review of the various approaches taken by countries, consultants and intergovernmental organisations.

The term “world class” is used relatively vaguely, without any significant link to long-term improvements in national performance, rather to an aspiration to being close to the leaders.

The use of benchmarking in lobbying needs further study, as does the quality of lobbying.

Governments need to make explicit their policy aims in addition to any world-class headline and need to aim for design improvement in their governance systems.

This is the first review of benchmarking of broadband at the national level.