Search results

This paper explores the contribution of marketing to Western politics. Moving away from traditional views of marketing located in means‐end relationships, it examines contemporary views of marketing that focus on consumption as a process of signification and representation. This more radical perspective offers contemporary insight into the many manifestations of political consumption, and the meanings the electorate ascribe to them, both individually and socially. This contemporary approach challenges critics’ claims that marketing encourages politics to be shallow. It offers far more in‐depth insight into the electorate and their appreciation, understanding and relationship with politics.

The aim of this paper is to identify the best marketing communications for policy messages that makes these messages acceptable and fair to the public. Within the context of the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax, this paper examines how framing messages through the alternative perspective of tribalism can increase individual support towards the corresponding policy.

The paper uses a mixed methods approach. Study 1 uses a qualitative content analysis process based on grounded theory to identify the themes that surround 331 public comments on a transportation policy. Study 2 follows with two 2x2 quantitative factorial experiments to test specific hypotheses.

If messages are framed to address the collective losses of the political tribe for collective good, then they generate more favorable attitudes towards the policy, as opposed to the self-interest perspective.

This paper focuses on two political tribes: the collective good and self-interest. Additional research needs to address the other socially symbolic political tribes to develop the empirical research on the theory of tribalism.

The marketing of public policy based on traditional segmentation is limiting. Policy messages can be more salient if they are framed for the political consumption of the socially symbolic tribe.

A key contribution is that the paper is the first to use a mixed methods approach, with two studies that examine the effects of framing policy from a tribalism perspective.

The purpose of this study is to provide insights into value creation within a newspaper consumption community, adding to current information research by demonstrating how an atypical consumption community can co-create value in ways different from those identified in extant research. The upheaval of the newspaper industry’s business model and value chain in the face of digitalisation has led to significant decreases in newspaper revenue. To stay successful in the modern digital climate, it is essential for newspapers to utilise the interactive features of Web 2.0 to find new value sources. To do so, it is necessary to focus not just on tangible financial value but also symbolic value. The study supports the notion that consumers collectively co-create value through consumption community practices.

Through the conduction of a netnographic exploration of active consumers on the Guardian website and interviews with passive consumers, the study’s aims of understanding co-creation in digitally facilitated newspaper consumption environment were achieved.

The findings have opened up new ways in which newspapers can harness value through consumption communities as well as suggesting the future scope of research. This study indicates that newspapers foster an atypical environment for the creation of a cohesive consumption community – something that has failed to be appreciated in extant information research – because their diverse content influences the formation of multiple community pools with members who do not always share the same beliefs. In addition, the study reveals that the Guardian’s online consumption community co-creates value without strict adherence to the prescribed contingencies set out in current literature. The findings uncover new patterns in community behaviour proving value to be created not just through their co-consumption but also through individual consumption.

This study contributes to discussions on how communities co-create value and how this differs with different article subjects (lifestyle and political and types of participants, both active and passive).

Consumption is a new central issue, globally, driven by more visible consumption concerns of citizens. For instance, entertainment and the environment rise as political issues, while workplace issues decline. To link individual choice with public and urban context, we outline a theory of consumption in specific propositions. They start with individual and personal influence characteristics in shopping and political decisions, then add socio/cultural characteristics. Three cultural types adapted from Elazar are Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditional – which shift individual patterns. For instance moralistic persons favor more environmentally sensitive consumption, even boycotting cars, TV, and paper towels, backing green groups and parties. Such protest acts via personal consumption are ignored by many past theories. Individualists instead favor more conspicuous, status-oriented consumption, à la Veblen, or the modernism of Baudelaire and Benjamin. For traditionalists, consumption reinforces the past, via family antiques and homes, ritualized and less individualized. The three types help interpret differences in consumption politics by participants in different social movements, cities, and countries.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an initial, exploratory and tentative theoretical construct related to the current consumption of landscape as a key symbolic and physical element in territorial representation and evocation, and for the deployment of place branding strategy. It constructs a line of argument to support what shall be referred to as “landscape branding”, that is, the paradigmatic role of landscape in place branding. It is, therefore, of interest to define the value of landscape as a social and cultural construction, which is why the paper awards importance to the specific analysis of their capacity for visual and/or aesthetic evocation within the context of a general branding strategy for geographical spaces.

To develop a sufficient proposal for sustaining “a theory of landscape branding”, the paper deploys a meta-analysis, that is, an extensive review and interpretation of the literature related to visual landscape and place branding, to propose a tentative initial approach to landscape-infused place branding theory.

The relationship existing between landscape images and texts and their possible situating and subsequent interpreting within the context of the political, cultural and economic logics of contemporary society give rise to a renewed analytical framework for cultural geographies (Wylie, 2007). At this point, place branding becomes a recurring argument for the consumption of carefully staged places, representing, to use Scott’s terms (2014), the arrival of a cognitive-cultural capitalism characteristic of post-Fordism.

From a practical perspective, the landscape branding approach provides several benefits. First of all, regardless of the fact that many commentators have argued that logos, slogans and advertising campaigns are relatively ineffective in place branding, practitioners still seem to be focussed on these visual design and advertising tools. The landscape branding approach facilitates an identity-focussed perspective that reconfirms the importance of linking reality with perception and hence reinforces the need to link place branding to policy-making, infrastructure and events.

Landscapes’ imageability facilitates visual storytelling and the creation of attractive symbolic actions (e.g. outdoor events/arts in attractive landscape and augmented reality or landscaping itself). This is the type of imaginative content that people easily share in social media. And, of course, landscape branding reiterated the importance of experience. If policymakers and publics alike understand this considerable symbolic value of landscape, it might convince them to preserve it and, hence, contribute to sustainability and quality of life.

The novelty lies not in the familiar use of visual landscape resources to promote places, but in the carefully orchestrated construction of gazes, angles, representations, narratives and interpretations characteristic of geographic space, which somehow hijack the spontaneous gaze to take it to a certain place. Everything is perfectly premeditated. According to this, the visual landscape represents a critical point as a way of seeing the essence of places through a place branding strategy. In this sense, that place branding which finds in visual landscape a definitive argument for the projection of aspirational places imposes a new “way of seeing” places and landscape based on a highly visual story with which to make a particular place desirable, not only for tourism promotion purposes but also with the intention of capturing talent, infrastructures and investment, among other objectives.

Conspicuous consumption refers to the competitive and extravagant consumption practices and leisure activities that aim to indicate membership to a superior social class. Studies examining the symbolic role of luxury brands and status symbols, and the importance of interpersonal relations and upward social mobility via consumption choices, have been widely discussed in the marketing and consumer behaviour literature. There is, however, limited research on how the all‐encompassing concept of “conspicuous consumption” has evolved since the introduction of the term by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 in The Theory of the Leisure Class. This paper seeks to review some of the issues.

Using a chronological periodization the paper examines and discusses the impact of wider institutional and socio‐economic forces on the evolution of conspicuous consumption phenomena. The paper adopts a historical framework related to economics and marketing.

The paper shows how the concept of “conspicuous consumption” has been reinvented with different terminology during the twentieth century by marketing and consumer behaviour theorists.

The paper discusses and examines the socio‐economic factors behind the changing consumption patterns of “conspicuous consumers” throughout the twentieth century. It is valuable for marketing academics, students and marketing practitioners interested in the evolution of status symbols.

In the last few years, signs of material excess by organizational and political leaders have often evoked public outcry. The paper aims to argue that there is insight to be gleaned from drawing together strands from the leadership literature with the literatures on moral economy and conspicuous consumption. The premise is that views of leader conspicuous consumption are shaped by their moral economy, the interplay between moral attitudes and economic activities. The paper seeks to juxtapose tales of Cleopatra and Antony's display of wealth with current media accounts to contribute to the leadership literature on ethics, specifically its intersection with power and narrative representation.

The paper adopts an analytic approach, with an international orientation and an interdisciplinary perspective. It acknowledges the role of narrative representation in shaping leadership and the psychological ambivalence with which societies approach their leaders' practices, focus here on desire-disdain and discipline-decadence. Cleopatra and Antony's conspicuous consumption generated a legacy of condemnation for millennia. Drawing from the retellings of their story, four moralizing representations – by Plutarch, Shakespeare, Sarah Fielding and Hollywood – are analyzed and juxtaposed with current media accounts. Altogether, the paper combines the interest in leadership across history with moralizing perspectives on the display of wealth by leaders.

The intersection of the literatures on leadership, moral economy and conspicuous consumption draws together several dynamics of relevance to leadership. First, evaluations of the display of wealth on the part of a leader are contextual: they change across time and place. Second, interpretations of conspicuous consumption involve aesthetic judgment and so sit at the nexus of morality and taste. Third, following tragedies, tales of leader conspicuous consumption offer critics another knife to dig into the fallen tragic hero. Fourth, views of conspicuous consumption are gendered. Last, conspicuous consumption by leaders attracts condemnation through support for social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper establishes a novel articulation between the literatures on leadership, moral economy and conspicuous consumption.