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The “Anti-Racism in my Pocket” case illustrates how collaborative entrepreneurial leadership can build on personal experiences, expertise and a desire to change the status quo to support racial equity. The case will support students’ critical thinking skills and further heighten their understanding of the contributions of women in leadership, anti-racism and the role of technology. Moreover, the case is motivating for students with aspirations of using business skills and knowledge to contribute to social equity.

After completing this case, students should be able to identify the role of marketing in the development, implementation and evaluation of a behavior change initiative, the Anti-Racism Action Nuggets anti-racism training program; analyze qualitative and quantitative data to assess the impact of the Anti-Racism Action Nuggets Pilot using a logic model; identify marketing opportunities, challenges and strategies to scale the Anti-Racism Action Nuggets series for a broader impact; and discuss the relationship of gender in strategic positioning and marketing leadership to the development of the Anti-Racism Action Nuggets (Optional).

This case charts the development of an anti-racism training series by two friends, Allison Plyer (she/her) and Valerie (Val) Uccellani (she/her), called Anti-Racism Action Nuggets. The two protagonists aimed to change individual behaviors to reduce structural racism through lessons that were delivered in text messages to participants. Once the course is completed, they conduct a test pilot with members of NOW, LOVE, a women’s organization in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the end of the case, students are provided with the qualitative and quantitative pilot data for their analysis to recommend next steps and important marketing considerations for the Anti-Racism Action Nuggets series.

Undergraduate, graduate and executive education

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CCS 8: Marketing

Purpose – We study weight loss communities to contribute to the understanding of how gifting, sharing, and the relationship between them allow individuals to pursue status transitions for a social identity.

Methodology – We employed archival netnography to capture emic experiences for a stigmatized circumstance in American society. We analyze data from four communities to obtain a broad range of consumer experiences within fee versus free communities.

Findings – We explain how individuals differentially employ sharing and gifting to create and sustain communities in support of status transitions within a social identity. Further, we describe roles of gifting, sharing, and prosumption, and their contributions to the transformative process of weight loss.

Research limitations/implications – The data comes from communities that may be viewed as stigmatized within the United States, one cultural milieu. Future research should examine these concepts across additional contexts and cultures.

Practical implications – Our analysis reveals the basis for virtual community development in support of status transitions. These results underscore the necessity to examine how consumers co-opt market resources to enact private, albeit life altering, goals.

Originality/value of paper – Most extant literature focuses either on gifting or sharing with little attention to how consumers employ community and membership to achieve personal goals. Our research articulates how individuals employ market resources to enact customized rituals and achieve individual goals within communities.

Grounded in experience of co-organizing a two-day photography-based workshop in Paris, this paper explores how photo-dialogues can facilitate anti-racist pedagogy and generative discussions about how race and racism function in marketplace contexts.

This paper draws on the authors' involvement in a cross-national and cross-disciplinary team of scholars who worked with local community stakeholders—including activists, artists and practitioners—to discuss, theorize and photo-document issues regarding race and racism in the Parisian marketplace.

This paper contributes to the literature on visual culture studies and critical race studies as it demonstrates the potentials of photography combined with dialogue to challenge the White supremacy over archiving and visuality in the context of urban spaces. This new methodology is an opportunity to reflect on archetypes of visuality that depart from the traditional Parisian flâneur to be consistent with and reinforce anti-racist stances.

Photography and visual methods often play peripheral roles in anti-racist education across various disciplines and research areas, including critical marketplace studies. This paper expands understanding of the potentials of using photographic methods as part of critical and anti-racist work related to racial and racist dynamics, including issues regarding power, White supremacy and public space. It outlines the use of photographic dialogues in a context (Paris, France) where discussion of race is regularly societally discouraged. Thus, this work shifts the focus away from decontextualized research that regards race as an object, to specifically foreground understandings of racialized experiences and how the photographic gaze produces and is produced by racialized viewers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship of dietary restriction and food well-being (FWB) in an under-researched population using a novel but growing approach to transition to healthier eating patterns.

This study uses individual interviews of African-American participants in a food detoxification program, a specific form of food restriction used to transition to healthier eating.

Results identify how food socialization and food literacy enable individuals to transform their relationship with food and enhance their FWB. Unlike prior research that focuses on food as the source of pleasure, this study finds that food is deployed as fuel, and this transition results in pleasure.

This research explains how a voluntary transition to healthier eating enables people to pursue FWB and extends the understanding of FWB (Block et al., 2011). In addition, this research contributes novel insights related to transformative consumer research efforts to motivate change. Findings have implications for marketing theory and practice, including the development of social marketing campaigns to support healthy eating patterns, especially for at-risk populations.

The author describes how he entered the marketing field and describes his contributions in four sections: articles written, books published, students nurtured, and executives consulted and trained. He describes his contributions to the marketing field in nine areas: marketing theory and orientations, improving the role and practice of marketing, analytical marketing, the social and ethical side of marketing, globalization and international marketing competition, marketing in the new economy, creating and managing the product mix, strategic marketing, and broadening the concept and application of marketing.

For one merit-based undergraduate scholarship program at Washington University in St. Louis (the University), discovery and dialogue have been essential to the program’s nearly 30-year existence. Named for Dr. John B. Ervin, the first African American Dean at Washington University in St. Louis, the John B. Ervin Scholars Program has attracted, recruited, retained, and graduated over 600 students deemed to exemplify extraordinary commitments to four pillars – scholarship, leadership, service, and diversity. Because the Program’s administrators have cultivated a community grounded in discovery and dialogue, the Ervin Scholars’ resolve to foster a more just and equitable society has deepened over time, perhaps preparing them for this time in which universities, this nation, and our world face crises over race. This resolve has manifested the last few years as Ervin Scholars have responded quickly to racial issues at Washington University in St. Louis and throughout the nation.

With its 30-year foundation, the John B. Ervin Scholars Program continues to develop, nurture, and support young people who advance discovery and dialogue. Drawing on a number of interviews, Program and University publications, and external publications, “A Legacy of Commitment,” the second installment of the Program’s history, demonstrates how the presence, contributions, and achievements of Ervin Scholars have changed Washington University in St. Louis. The Ervin Program has been an important part of the University’s efforts to be more diverse and inclusive, and it will continue to be integral to the University’s current and future plans.

This paper aims to examine the effect of intercultural accommodation efforts on service quality perceptions among ethnic minority consumers. Specifically, the paper postulates that during an intercultural service encounter, the impact of the service provider’s language and ethnicity on the consumer’s service quality perceptions is moderated by the level of service involvement, consumer acculturation and perceived discrimination, which, in turn, influence purchase intent.

A 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design with an online nationwide consumer panel of Hispanic consumers was conducted where 377 participants were randomly assigned to a series of service encounter scenarios in the banking service context to manipulate accommodation efforts (yes vs no) and the level of involvement with the service (high vs low).

When such language and ethnicity accommodations were offered, highly acculturated minority consumers regarded the service encounter less favorably than low acculturated minority consumers. Moreover, during low-involvement service encounters, intercultural accommodations positively impacted consumer’s service quality perceptions compared to situations involving high-involvement services. Also, minority consumers with perceptions of past discrimination had less favorable evaluations of the service quality than when such perceptions were nonexistent when intercultural accommodation efforts were made by the service provider.

The findings add to the sparse literature that examines the effectiveness of intercultural accommodation and focuses on the combined use of service provider’s language and ethnicity as a means to enhance service quality.

The study delivers cautions for service firms not to generalize the receptivity of intercultural accommodation efforts. Given the increasingly sizable segments of minority customers, this study offers insights for service providers to develop suitable recruitment strategies and training programs when devising effective ethnic targeting strategies.

This research is among the first to explain why the effect of target marketing is not homogenous by expanding the research on intercultural accommodations toward a new context considering service involvement levels among varied minority consumer groups.