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This paper aims to explore consumer experiences of spiritual value and investigates whether it is distinct from ethical value within a large and growing private sector health-care setting. Understanding consumers’ experiences of spiritual value versus ethical value has important implications for corporate social responsibility as increasingly, consumers want their spiritual needs met.

The research adopts an exploratory case study approach using in-depth interviews with 16 consumers who use complementary and alternative medicine health-care services. Drawing on consumer value frameworks, a thematic analysis identified dimensions of spiritual and ethical values co-created during their consumption experiences.

From a consumer’s perspective, spiritual value is distinct from ethical value. The key finding is that participants talked about spiritual value predominantly in reactive terms (apprehending, appreciating, admiring or responding), whereas ethical value was referred to as active (taking action).

This paper enhances the understanding of spiritual value and provides evidence that people want their spiritual needs met in a private health-care context. Furthermore, this study provides insights into the consumption experience of spiritual value that can be considered, with further research, in other health-care and service contexts.

This paper offers a new view on corporate social responsibility by taking a consumer’s perspective, and identifying that consumer experiences of spiritual value are important and distinct from ethical value.

Consumer experiences of healthcare services are challenging for researchers to study because of the complex, intangible and temporal nature of service provision. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel longitudinal three-phase research protocol, which combines iterative interviewing with visual techniques. This approach is utilised to study consumer service experiences, dimensions of consumer value and consumer value co-creation in a transformational service setting: complementary and alternative medicine healthcare.

This research employed a three-phase qualitative longitudinal research protocol, which incorporated: an initial in-depth interview, implementation of the visual elicitation technique Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique and a final interview to gain participant feedback on the analysis of data collected in the first two phases.

Four key benefits derived from using the three-phase protocol are reported: confirmation and elaboration of consumer value themes, emergence of underreported themes, evidence of transformation and refinement of themes, ensuring dependability of data and subsequent theory development.

The study provides evidence that a longitudinal multi-method approach using in-depth interviews and visual methods is a powerful tool that service researchers should consider, particularly for transformative service research settings with sensitive contexts, such as healthcare, and when studying difficult to articulate concepts, such as consumer value and value co-creation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many consumers to pause and rethink the impacts of their consumption behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore changes to consumers’ preferences and shopping behavior in retail using a sustainable consumption lens to understand the long-term effects of the pandemic on retail services.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 participants to gain insights into shopping behaviors and preferences during the pandemic and to investigate changes in attitudes or behaviors toward sustainable consumption as a result of the pandemic. Data analysis involved an iterative inductive process and subsequent thematic analysis.

The results reveal a strong move toward sustainable and conscious consumption with three key changes occurring as a result of the pandemic, including changes in consumers’ ethos, move to purpose-driven shopping and drive to buy local and support national.

This paper reveals insights into consumer shopping behaviors and preferences that can potentially counter the collapse of “normal” marketplace activities in the face of the current global pandemic by providing a framework for how retail services can respond, reimagine and recover to move forward long term.

This study uncovers the importance of services marketing in endorsing and promoting sustainable consumption by shaping subtle shifts in conscious consumption as a way to recover from a global pandemic and move to a “new” service marketplace.

This article originated as a contribution to informed debate on public policy issues surrounding a review of New Zealand broadcasting policy. The issue, however, has implications well beyond the New Zealand market. Public debate on broadcasting has frequently centered on calls to: improve the quality of programming overall; improve children’s programming in particular; and ban advertising in children’s television programmes. This narrow focus ignores the impact of the wider viewing environment. A major focus of this article is on the potential detrimental effects on children of exposure to violence and negative values in the electronic media environment. The literature relating to this is reviewed; the presumed linkages between exposure to violence and the propensity for children to act aggressively are examined; the findings of a study of parental perceptions regarding the impact of violence and of negative values on their children are then reported. Concludes with a discussion of the role of marketing communication in this environment.

This research paper aims to examine the theoretical and practical applicability of integrated marketing communications.

Presents the findings from a two‐country qualitative study concerning the phenomenon. The research used survey methodology to assess the views of advertising agency members of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners (UK) and the Communications Agencies Association of New Zealand (CAANZ)

The findings show that practitioners appear to be constructing and applying IMC concepts that are situation‐specific. Nonetheless, a search for a single empirically testable theory of IMC ignores evidence that practitioners are committed to IMC concepts while at the same time resisting the development of “rigid rules”. Additionally, external factors may be forcing reconsideration of marketing communications and accountability.

The research is limited to a study of ad agency perceptions in two countries. While implications of the findings for other countries are discussed, a major direction for the future is the need for research to be conducted in organisations themselves, not necessarily the agencies which service their needs.

Practical implications include variability in terms of the application of IMC principles. This leads to the idea of differential application with – as stated above – some rejection of “rigid rules” in this dynamic area.

The value of the paper lies in its use of a comparative approach using members of clearly identifiable and relevant samples in two countries in relation to IMC. The notion of differentiation in relation to IMC application, the perceived rejection of rigid rules, and the need for further research to be focused in‐company (rather than in‐agency) assist in moving this emergent paradigm forward in an academic and practitioner sense.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that integrated marketing communications (IMC) must be used in social marketing, like it is in commercial marketing, by illustrating that IMC principles are effective in social marketing contexts within an education setting. Specifically, the paper provides evidence of IMC being successfully used in the communication of school‐based health promotion activities within health promoting schools (HPS).

Depth interviews with principals and teachers at three case schools were conducted to investigate the communication of health promotion programmes within HPS. In total, 19 people participated in this study.

A key finding was that IMC principles are evident in the HPS philosophy of health promotion. That is, the extent to which health concepts are customer focused and integrated into school life; and, communication which is synergistic and based on stakeholder needs, has a significant impact upon achieving desired health promotion outcomes.

This research explored communication within the specific context of HPS. To further explore the application of IMC in social marketing, the authors recommend that other social marketing contexts or cases be investigated.

The fact that IMC principles are relevant and effective when facilitating school‐based health promotion programmes implies that IMC would offer value to other social marketing contexts too.

The paper is unique in that we provide evidence of IMC used in a school‐based social marketing context. The context of an education setting for this research broadens existing understanding of how IMC can and should be used in social marketing. The research offers insights for social marketing practitioners seeking to improve their communications efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on a novel multi-modal enabling technique for contextualising brand consumption experiences.

A multi-modal interpretive narrative approach is presented as a means of investigating brands as experiential entities for use in consumer identity projects. It reports the strategic use of different modes of data collection: autobiographical narratives generated by solo participants to create a benchmark of identity and subsequent friendship pair guided discussion interviews. This offers a faster, cheaper and more convenient means of gaining access to consumer experiences of brands than traditional ethnographic methods, which require prolonged engagements within a community.

Consumer narratives of actual brand consumption and of mediated brand consumption are enhanced using this method. The consumer narratives generated provided rich insights into the role of brands in contributing to national identity. The contextualised use and function of identity narratives provided by brands were identified in addition to the identification of national community rituals of consumption.

The multi-modal use of friendship pair interviews with solo autobiographical interviews is shown to offer benefits to qualitative consumer researchers focussing on brand/identity issues. The combination of data collection methods allowed for greater reflexive, memorial and contextualised discussion in the friendship pair interviews about brand narrative consumption and generated responses that advance beyond socio-political conventions concerning brands. Consequently, contextualised brand consumption experiences can be accessed more effectively than in conventional depth interviews.

Despite the growing pressure to encourage new ways of thinking about research methodology, only recently have interview methodologists begun to realize that “we cannot lift the results of interviewing out of the contexts in which they were gathered and claim them as objective data with no strings attached”. The purpose of this paper is to provide additional insight based on a critical reflection of the interview as a research method drawing upon Alvesson's discussion from the neopositivist, romanticist and localist interview perspectives. Specifically, the authors focus on critical reflections of three broad categories of a continuum of interview methods: structured, semi‐structured and unstructured interviews.

The authors adopt a critical and reflexive approach to understanding the literature on interviews to develop alternative insights about the use of interviews as a qualitative research method.

After examining the neopositivist (interview as a “tool”) and romanticist (interview as “human encounter”) perspectives on the use of the research interview, the authors adopt a localist perspective towards interviews and argue that the localist approach opens up alternative understanding of the interview process and the accounts produced provide additional insights. The insights are used to outline the skills researchers need to develop in applying the localist perspective to interviews.

The paper provides an alternative perspective on the practice of conducting interviews, recognizing interviews as complex social and organizational phenomena rather than just a research method.