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The purpose is to investigate the concepts of subculture, subculture of consumption and brand community with a view to better understanding these three groups and their distinct differences.

The method relies on a literature review and a case study of sporting subculture. Using commentary from the surfing community as an example of subcultural groups we see how they define themselves against consumption oriented groups.

Subcultures are completely different from brand communities (or subcultures of consumption) and while they can be said to share certain common traits the broad philosophical foci of these two groups are vastly incommensurate with one another.

Marketing discourse has perpetually conflated subculture with forms of consumption, i.e. brand communities, yet they are different. By acknowledging and interrogating the key differences marketers may better apprehend the needs, character and activities of subcultural participants and market more strategically.

By dissecting the differences between subculture, subculture of consumption and brand community, this paper offers a re‐conceptualisation of these terms in marketing discourse. In doing so, this paper seeks to dispel some fundamental misapprehensions in marketing and offer an entirely fresh perspective on the value and meaning of subculture.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects that local interpretation and the glocalisation of the Australian Hip Hop culture have on the consumption practices of members, exploring the reasons for such effects, and drawing marketing implications.

Three principal methods of ethnographic research were used: participant observation, informal conversations, and semi‐structured in‐depth interviews.

The findings suggest that symbolic representation within the Australian Hip Hop culture takes the form of consumption of brands congruent with the values of authenticity and self‐expression at the core of the Australian Hip Hop culture. Many mass‐produced Hip Hop brands originating in the USA were not perceived as authentic as their meanings were associated with commercialisation and artificiality by cultural members. Furthermore, members of the Australian Hip Hop culture appear to express authenticity by being true to themselves, refusing to imitate African‐American Hip Hop style and rejecting what they perceived as “black” Hip Hop brands. Finally, members of the Australian Hip Hop culture also represented their geographical place via consumption, and used symbolic consumption as a form of subcultural capital.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by providing a detailed analysis on the effects of interpretation and the glocalisation of the Australian Hip Hop culture on consumption.

This paper aims to explore how motivations to stand out and fit in through consumption affect consumers’ perceptions of subcultural and popular brand coolness. Importantly, how do perceptions of brand coolness affect consumers’ formations of hot, emotional brand attachments and their willingness to pay more?

This study incorporates survey data from consumers regarding cool brands. A structural equation modeling approach is used to assess the relationship between the variables of interest.

Susceptibility to influence is positively related to desire for unique consumption. While this desire may be fulfilled by both subcultural and popular perceptions of brand coolness, only subcultural coolness has a positive relationship with the willingness to pay more. The importance of an emotional brand attachment is established between both dimensions of brand coolness and price premiums.

This study is based on cross-sectional survey data. As brand coolness is often transitory, longitudinal research on trends focusing on different elements of brand coolness may shed light on the cool brand lifecycle.

Firms wanting to position brands as cool should emphasize how the brand can help consumers stand out. If a cool brand is already well-known, resources should be allocated to building hot, emotional attachments to command price premiums.

This research contributes to a nascent body of literature empirically exploring brand coolness. It builds on past literature that notes the tension between standing out and fitting in conceptualizations of coolness by assessing individual differences. Significantly, it examines specific attributes of cool brands to explore the differences in how subcultural and popular perceptions of brand coolness relate to important marketing outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how food is used to create identity and community for gamers during core rituals. These meanings are to be explored within the broader context of subcultural experience in an investigation of the motives and the self‐concept dynamics underlying this symbolic consumer behaviour.

This paper uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a multi‐method ethnographic approach that includes: netnography: multiple, in‐depth, ethnographic interviews; and prolonged participant observation. Interview informants are young Irish subcultural members aged between 18 and 23. Data analysis proceeds according to a constant comparative method.

The findings suggest that the social gaming ritual, when intersected with food, is closely linked to issues of identity, community, fantasy and escape, gustatory rebellion and prolonged hedonism. Commensality during the core social gaming ritual contributes to a sense of communitas, while the “junk” nature of the shared food products helps to manufacture the hedonism of the event. The social ritual then is sovereign and bound by its own subcultural parameters, which oppose mainstream culture's norms and dietary regulations. From its role in helping to create a Utopian and rebellious experience, food is then leveraged as part of the gamers' collective identity. Practitioner implications of the results are discussed.

This paper investigates contemporary food consumption behaviour within a postmodern community. The main contribution pertains to providing an insight into a previously neglected group of food consumers.

This paper aims to develop a theoretical framework for the conceptualization of customer experiential knowledge (CEK) by logically combining its different dimensions into one coherent explanatory concept. Drawing on the integration of the literature on customer experience, customer knowledge management and customer insights acquisition, supported by adequate empirical evidence, the framework provides a systematic, comprehensive and accurate understanding of CEK which, could contribute to the identification of relevant customer experience insights useful for customer knowledge management.

The analysis follows an inductive/deductive interpretative approach and it is based on a netnography of specialty coffee bloggers’ narratives in relation to their sustainability practices.

The paper identifies the following six types of CEK: normative, subcultural, epicurean, transcendental, subcultural and symbolic. Accordingly, CEK is defined as the knowledge tacitly possessed by customers in relation to how they live their consumption experiences according to a body of heterogeneous socio-cultural contextual factors (ethos, norms and symbols) and subjective influences (emotions, ingenuity, instincts and senses) deeply embedded into the narrative of a consumption experience.

While CEK has been largely observed and acknowledged, it has not been yet adequately addressed by existing research. The provision of a conceptual definition of CEK which emphasizes its different dimensions will be of use to both academics and practitioners to better identify and categorize the different manifestations of CEK when undertaking empirical observations or managerial decisions.

An effective means to promote optimal nutrition for any group of consumers is to expand nutrition professionals' understanding of the cohort's food choice processes. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the situated food choice influences of the videogames subculture; a known consumption enclave for calorie dense low nutrient foods. The investigation is conducted by application of an abbreviated version of Furst et al.'s model of the food choice process as a conceptual framework.

This investigation uses an interpretive research strategy and adopts a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis. In total, 14 purposively sampled semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews were carried out with members of the videogames subculture.

Informants' food choices and preferences during social gameplay were strongly influenced by beliefs related to appropriate food behaviour and ideal characteristics of foods suitable for grazing. All informants described some constraints imposed by the physical surroundings and environmental nature of gameplay such as issues of messiness and inability to eat with utensils while gaming. Social structure played an important role in informants' food choices, and much of this structure was built around the hedonic intersection of food and gameplay. Informants' food choices were also influenced by poor cooking abilities and unwillingness to devote much effort to meal preparation during gameplay.

Used in conjunction with theories of behavioural change, the insights gathered here should help inform interventions and communications strategies. Both commercial and social marketing domains have a role to play in positively influencing gamers' diets.

The paper offers social marketers insight into the influences that underpin unhealthful food choices within the videogames subculture and how to positively bring about change.

The purpose of this study is to focus on analyzing the role of music subcultures in the communication and promotion of conspicuous consumption practices. The object of study is the “altered movement” as the music style of the drug subculture in Mexico.

A qualitative content analysis of 78 lyrics and music videos of “altered movement” was carried out between August and December 2018.

The analysis of lyrics and music videos leads to the identification of four narratives (from poor to rich, power through violence, lavish lifestyle and power over women) and diverse symbolic markers (luxury brands mainly) that together, display messages aimed at promoting conspicuous consumption practices.

The current research expands the body of literature of music subcultures in the consumer research area by contesting the common conception of this phenomenon as a healthy source of self-identity formation and deepening into its role as a source of conspicuous consumption practices.

The purpose of the paper is to expand existing qualitative parameters in current marketing research discourse by integrating Barthesian theory into the study of subcultural marketplaces.

While essentially conceptual in nature, this paper adopts a comprehensive intertextual, semiotic approach which argues for the substantive investigation of the marketing text as a foundation for understanding consumption in a subcultural context.

To date, the integration of Barthesian intertextual theory has proved to be an effective method of interrogating subculturally‐oriented materials.

Marketers, in commercial contexts, will access a greater depth of insight into the subcultural market by applying an intertextual, semiotic framework as demonstrated in this paper.

While marketing discourse has taken interest in semiotics, this has typically occurred via the work of US semiologists, rather than the French school in their organic form. This is one of the first papers to locate Barthes within the marketing paradigm as a potential analytical framework. The paper suggests ways in which his influential theories may be applied as a viable analytical tool in qualitative research.

Studies of marketplace cultures emphasize the benefits of communal consumption and explain the ways that brand managers can leverage subcultures and brand communities. The ephemeral and often non‐commercial nature of consumer tribes means that they are more difficult to manage. This paper, aims to suggest that a necessary pre‐requisite for understanding how to engage with consumer tribes is to identify how consumers become members of tribes.

Data are drawn from a five‐year ethnographic study of the archetypical club culture tribe that utilized a variety of data collection methods including participant observation and in‐depth interviewing.

The paper identifies “learning to be tribal” as a communal practice that occurs through three interconnected processes of engagement, imagination and alignment.

This paper makes three contributions: it clearly distinguishes between the three main forms of communal consumption found in the marketing literature; it identifies how consumer tribes are formed; and it questions received wisdom and shows how tribal theory can guide managers to offer products and services as learning resources that facilitate tribal practices.

This study aims to explore how membership (initially as a consumer) in a given field shapes individuals’ entrepreneurial journey.

The research context is cultural and creative industries and, in particular, the independent (indie) music field in which unstructured interviews were conducted with nascent and established cultural entrepreneurs.

The authors introduce and justify their theoretical framework of consumption field driven entrepreneurship (CFDE) that captures the tripartite process via which the informants make the transition from indie music consumers to entrepreneurs by developing field-specific illusio, enacting entrepreneurial habitus and acquiring legitimacy via symbolic capital accumulation within the indie music field. The authors further illustrate how these entrepreneurs adopt paradoxical logics, aesthetics and ethos of the indie music field by moving in-between its authentic and commercial discourses to orchestrate their entrepreneurial journey.

This study holds several theoretical implications for entrepreneurship-oriented research. First is highlighted the importance of non-financial resources (i.e. cultural and social capital) in individuals’ entrepreneurial journey. Second, this study illustrates the importance of consumption activities in the process of gaining entrepreneurial legitimation within a specific field. Finally, this study contributes to consumption-driven entrepreneurship research by offering a detailed description of individuals’ consumption-driven entrepreneurial journey.

This study provides some initial practical implications for entrepreneurs within the cultural and creative industries. The authors illustrate how membership in a field (initially as a consumer) might turn into a source of skills, competences and community for entrepreneurs by mobilising and converting different forms of non-material and material field-specific capital. To acquire entrepreneurial legitimation, nascent entrepreneurs should gain symbolic capital through approval, recognition and credit from members of the indie music field. Also, entrepreneurs can acquire symbolic capital and gain entrepreneurial legitimation by either “fitting in” or “standing out” from the existing logics of the field.

This study contributes to the growing body of literature that examines entrepreneurship fuelled by consumption practices and passions with our theoretical framework of CFDE which outlines the transition from indie music consumers to indie music entrepreneurs.