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The purpose of this study is to explore drug consumption from a cultural perspective, in the context of the consumer culture. It aims to identify if, through the branding process, cryptomarket vendors are attaching a sign-value to their products to facilitate the process by which consumers will recognize and appreciate it.

The study was done by performing a qualitative content analysis loosely inspired from semiotics on a sample of 40 seller pages from the Dream Market and samples of their listings, collected in 2018. The vendors who had over 1,000 successful transactions were selected, as they were considered to be the ones who have gained a certain level of trust on the cryptomarket and were considered to having to compete by differentiating their services through their brands of choice.

The results have shown that the sign-value attached to the drugs sold by the vendors from this sample can be divided in two different types of sign-systems: the popular culture and the drug cultures. The popular culture includes sign-value borrowed from established brands, popular media and media representations of crime worlds. The drug cultures include values from three types of subcultural systems: cannabis, party and psychonaut subculture.

The study is trying to stir the discussions around the regulation of the drug markets by looking at the market forces within them as rather a product of consumer capitalism and not as processes that happen outside the postmodern cultural and societal trends.

Drawing upon Baudrillard’s concept of sign-value, this study aims to investigate consumer behavior and sign perception in visitor attractions.

By adopting netnography, 133 customer-to-customer reviews sourced from TripAdvisor were analyzed regarding visitors’ online post-visit impressions.

The findings reveal that netnography contributes to a deeper understanding of sign consumption and sign promotion and examines how visitors attribute symbolic meanings to their experience in Titanic Belfast.

The findings show that the co-creation and reevaluation of the visitor experience through consumers’ online reviews should be taken into account by both managers and marketers. Furthermore, advertising should avoid creating excessive expectations to visitors to decrease the possibility of negative disconfirmation, which can be easily and instantly spread online. Another implication concerns the winning awards of visitor attractions, hotels and restaurants of a destination which may be used as a basis of co-branding marketing campaigns to enhance destination brand image.

This study continues the debate on the commodification of the visitor experience and the commercialization of visitor attractions.

This paper provides better understanding of sign-value, sign consumption and sign promotion in the visitor attraction sector.

The present study aims to investigate the impact of perceived quality, brand extension incongruity, involvement and perceived risk on consumer attitude towards brand extension across three product types, namely, FMCG, durable goods and service (FDS) sectors. More importantly, the study seeks to explore the importance of involvement profile comprising relevance, pleasure, sign‐value, risk importance and risk probability and perceived risk facets (financial, psychological and performance) in acceptance of brand extension across FDS.

Three questionnaire‐based surveys were conducted to collect the data for FMCG, durable and service brand extensions. Regression analyses and Chow test were computed to investigate differences in consumer evaluation across FDS.

Results revealed significant different effects of variables across the three product types. The impact of perceived quality was greater in the case of services than FMCG and durables. On the other hand, perceived risk and involvement had stronger influence on evaluation of durables and service than FMCG brand extensions.

The present study gives a comprehensive view of how consumers evaluate the service and non‐service brand extensions.

The major contributions of this study are: generalization of the findings related to brand extension incongruity in the service area; examination of the multidimensional role of involvement in terms of relevance, pleasure, sign value, risk importance and risk probability in brand extension context across FMCG, durables and service product types; and exploration of the role of risk facets, namely, financial, performance and psychological in determining consumers' attitude towards brand extension.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a conceptual framework specifying the multidimensional role of involvement and perceived risk in brand extension domain.

A survey research design was applied to test the proposed hypotheses. Three hypothetical extensions of a real brand were selected. A total of 101 respondents participated in the study. Regression analyses was conducted to examine the role of involvement and perceived risk dimensions in brand extension evaluation.

Results indicate that consumers evaluate brand extension more favorably when it is highly relevant, more pleasurable, and associated with less risk probability. In addition, each facet of perceived risk, namely, financial, performance and psychological, are found to be equally important in making decisions about brand extension.

This paper contributes to the growing body of literature of brand extension. The study provides a new direction to brand managers and marketers to understand the full dynamics of the relationship of consumers with brand extensions. To get more benefit from brand extension strategies, managers should pay attention to involvement and perceived risk associated with extension categories.

This paper is unique in that it identifies the importance of multidimensional nature of involvement and perceived risk to study consumer evaluation of brand extension.

The purpose of this study is to profile market segments using travelers’ decision-making styles (DMS) as segmentation bases and to identify similarities and differences between traveler segments regarding a series of psychographic and attitudinal characteristics.

Data are gathered from a sample of 426 travelers in Dubai and Shanghai via self-reported surveys. Analyses included factor, k-means cluster, discriminant and MANOVA.

Study findings reveal significant differences among the rational, adaptive and daydreamer decision-makers’ segments in their behavioral and attitudinal characteristics with respect to tourism involvement and destination images.

Findings provide important practical implications for generating effective marketing and positioning strategies based on the identified attitudinal characteristics of the traveler segments for destination marketing organizations.

A stream of recent tourism studies shows a strong relationship between tourism involvement and destination images, yet very little research has tackled the issue of how these critical variables can be affected by individuals’ decision-making styles. This study explores and tests the relationships among DMS, tourism involvement and destination image using a factor-cluster approach.

This paper aims to provide an adequate instrument to measure involvement, its antecedents and its impact on behaviours relating to ethical product consumption, using the case of fair trade.

Based on an in‐depth analysis of the involvement literature and the specificities of ethical products, a model is derived using a hypothetico‐deductive approach. It is then analysed using structural equation modelling.

The new construct specific to ethical products is a strong predictor of involvement. In addition, the involvement in the ethical aspect of products is much stronger than the involvement in the product category to explain selected consumer behaviours.

It is likely that highly involved consumers are more prone to participate in such a survey, which limits the representativeness of the sample.

Beyond the theoretical contribution for ethical consumption analysis, practical implications for fair trade marketing can be derived. A section of the article discusses how to improve fair trade products' communication, how to make those products more competitive, and who should distribute them.

Current generic involvement models are insufficient to apprehend ethical consumers, who constitute a market in constant expansion. This research fills this gap by providing an original instrument which distinguishes the product‐specific involvement from the involvement in the ethical values carried by the product.

This chapter builds on Georges Bataille’s analysis of waste as a constitutive element of social life. We argue that two separate but intertwined dimensions included in the idea of waste, waste as sacrifice and waste as competition, can enhance our understanding of the role of the lavish wedding in contemporary consumer society. We suggest four categories of waste as constitutive of the meanings of the wedding universe: pure waste, lavish waste, simulated waste and anti-waste.

We use a combination of netnography and long interviews to explore notions of waste in Danish weddings. The netnography was conducted in a Danish wedding forum, where informants for the long interviews were also recruited among the members.

We find that the four dimensions of waste suggested in our theorization are indeed found in the way consumers plan and enact their weddings. In particular, the notion of sacrificial expenditure – what we call “pure waste” in our context – is indeed present in contemporary weddings.

This research is undertaken in a Danish context, which represents a particular historical and cultural framing of the wedding ceremony and its types of expenditure. We encourage research in other cultural contexts to elaborate on our findings.

Without denying the fundamental symbolic character of consumption activities, we argue that, more generally, a Bataillean perspective on consumption and waste can further our understanding of the limits of the symbolic character in consumer research, since it underlines the more corporeal experience of certain consumption rituals.

The annual report has two parts, financial statements and narrative sections. Commentators have raised doubts about the harmony of the two parts. The financial statements are audited, therefore submitted to a form of control. The narrative sections are free style, open to confusion and manipulation. Users are potentially exposed to contradictory messages producing an effect of dissonance. We do not test the presence of dissonance for the users, but the presence of contradictory information prone to produce dissonant effect. We conduct a content analysis of the president letter and we build an index of the level of optimism contained in it. Then, we compare this index with the change in key numbers or ratios from the financial statements. Our results indicate a moderate level of divergence between the narrative sections and the accounting data. However, this level is sufficient to raise questions about the necessity to regulate the discourse accompanying the financial statements.

This study investigates consumers’ affective attachments toward products, based on generalizable and managerially relevant product attributes. Two surveys of 123 consumers found that high‐involvement, high‐meaning products tend to share ten common attributes. The managerial implications of each attribute are discussed, including specific ways that brand managers and new product development teams can engineer relationships between brands and customers.