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This paper aims to explain a celebrity’s deep resonance with consumers by unpacking the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning, the authors conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal.

Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis.

In rehumanising the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as the performer, the private person behind the public performer, the tangible manifestation of either through products and the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires, the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity.

Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers.

The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices.

While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.

This study aims to provide a practical strategy for customer service and salesforce from the basis of behavioral economics. When customers thought they missed a discount but eventually could get the deal, they perceived that they had obtained more value. This research defines such a conversion effect between gain and loss accounts, demonstrates its impact in marketing settings and provides the salesforce a tactic to increase sales and quality of customer service to improve the consumer experience in the social customer journey.

Three experiments were conducted in a behavioral lab and online setting. Participants were randomly assigned to 2 (gain vs loss) × 2 (converted vs simple) between-subjects designs in the first two experiments and 2 (gain vs loss) × 2 (converted vs simple) × 2 (high price vs low price) in the third experiment. Analysis of variance was conducted to analyze the data. Mediation and moderation analyses were also conducted to identify the mediator and moderator in the model.

The conversion between gain and loss mental accounts exists, and the converted gains are more likely to lead consumers to make purchases with a once-lost discount than simple gains. This conversion effect is mediated by consumers’ implemental mindset activated by the conversion and moderated by price.

This research shows that mental accounts of gains and losses can be dynamically converted to one another. It provides a managerial tactic for salesforces and customer service to lead consumers to make a purchase decision right away. This is especially important when they aim to enhance the consumer experience in the social customer journey.

A confluence of events has created an opportunity to rethink special education, including the lingering effects of the COVID-19 global pandemic, advances in technology, and changes in how special education is conceptualized and delivered. In this chapter, I discuss each of these in turn and then describe three possible futures for special education: maintain the status quo, revolutionize and revitalize special education, or abandon special education completely. The possibilities and implication of these alterative futures for students with disabilities are then considered.

This article examines single baby boom consumers on demographic and psychographic dimensions tested in a survey of 267 respondents. We found differences between singles and marrieds in social self‐image, age identification, nature and frequency of leisure activities, and shopping habits. Singles are characterized as “Social Seekers” because they socialize more and show more concern with their social image than marrieds. Marketing implications exist for a variety of products related to gender and marital status.

Accessibility design over the past several years has focused much of its attention on the development of a universal standard or a set of guidelines for delivering a diverse array of both content and instructional processes. Universal design for learning (UDL), for example, promotes providing multiple means of (a) representation, (b) action and expression, and (c) engagement for learners who have a wide range of disabilities as well as their typical peers. And while each instructional design element that represents a means of providing the differentiation required by the principle generally has a strong evidence-based support individually, it is difficult to assess any one of them within the larger ULD “multiple means” milieu of options. It is especially difficult to do this in regard to learners associated with any particular disability category. When it comes to targeted instruction, learner characteristics matter. It follows then that when it comes to developing an instructional design, that the learning characteristics of a targeted population be first and foremost considered as the point of departure in the design and development process. This chapter considers a wide range of instructional targets within the context of specific disability groups with a focus on learning goals, instructional design supports for those goals, and underlying cognitive processes that may help clarify the goals themselves as well as the instructional supports to achieve those goals.

In recent research, two views of the possible postmodern consumer have emerged. One view, advanced by Firat and Venkatesh, postulates that the consumer has increased expressive flexibility and is therefore liberated from prior ideologically‐created restraints. A second view, provided by Thompson and Hirschman and based on an empirical study of bodily‐related consumption, is less sanguine and argues that “long‐standing cultural narratives” continue to inhibit the consumer. To further consider these two contrasting perspectives, this paper analyses downloaded, discussion texts which express the emic views of consumers who participate in NetGirl, a gender and relationship‐oriented, online forum. The results provide some evidence supportive of both perspectives, i.e. the Net is more a mental, “hyperreal” and therefore more flexible phenomenon than the body, yet it also manifests the long‐standing need of people to tangibilize online phenomena in “real” terms. Implications are drawn which reflect this finding, as well as the idea that online cyber‐narratives and offline, real life narratives tend to mirror and be inscribed in each other.

The purpose of this paper is to periodize the history of the US senior market segment, a large, lucrative target market.

The paper uses a four‐step adaptation of an existing framework, periodizing the segment's history into three phases: independence phase, mid‐nineteenth century‐1935; growing affluence phase, 1935‐1965; and maturity phase, 1965 to present.

The senior market began with urbanization resulting from the industrial revolution. The growth of private pensions, two World Wars, a variety of governmental programs such as the GI Bill and Social Security and Medicare Acts, political power resulting from the establishment of groups such as the American Association of Retired Persons, and increasing stress on inclusiveness in marketing accelerated the growth of the market. As baby boomers age, the market is sure to grow in scope and market power.

Time and space limitations require that this paper focus on the senior market only in the USA, and analyze only broad activities, events, and trends.

This paper contributes to the study of marketing history and market segmentation in particular by analyzing the origins and growth of this very large and unique market segment – largely due to the fact that it currently represents about 12 percent of the US population, unique in that all Americans are or likely will be members. It illustrates the confluence of government policy, marketers' never‐ending drive to find new target markets via product differentiation, and the importance of demographic change.

Argues that all service encounters can be thought of as sharing common elements and common problems. Considers some common issues faced by a variety of personal service providers, maintaining that researchers and managers can understand consumer classification and evaluation of services by comparing functionally dissimilar services. Analyses data from a consumer survey on attitudes to 16different household and personal services. Uses cluster analysis of these services, showing two dimensions, Service Locus and Service Instigation. Examines the relative importance of service attributes across these clusters.

In the final quarter of the twentieth century, organizational management had been rocked by a theory more powerful than anything since the days of Taylor's theory of scientific management. The new theory was called Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM has largely been eclipsed by other management fads since such as Sigma 6 but none had such an explosive effect on business, schools, and government agencies as TQM (Juran, 1995). The gurus of TQM included J. M. Juran (2003), P. B. Crosby (1995), and even the sage of organizational theory, Peter Drucker (2008). No one, however, stood as tall among this class of gurus as did the notable W. E. Deming (1982). TQM has often been criticized over the years for failing in practice. Deming and his followers retort that it is because organizations seldom incorporated the entire 13 point program. The part so often left out were points that implicitly reflected moral commitments Deming thought organizations ought to have. What Deming relegated to matters of team spirit and other psychological commitments are accommodated in the most scientific sense by recent developments in biology and economics showing that there is an instinct driving evolution among herd animals such as humans to cooperate. This focus on instinct is captured in the most practical sense for organizational analysis in the present author's work on moral architecture. The concept of moral architecture will be sketched as a means for understanding and strengthening, schools, law enforcement agencies and prisons, and other correctional facilities.