Archives for category: Uncategorized
« Older Entries

Consumer Fetish

September 29, 2023 //
0

Definition of the term

The magical fetish anthropologists describe is a unique object, produced in a particular situation and intended to produce a particular effect. Consumer fetish has two meanings.  One meaning refers to the objects that consumers fetishize. The other meaning refers to organizations’ treatment of consumers as fetishes. Common to these uses is the idea of singular, material objects that are animated, are not under human control, and which can ‘deflect the course of human traffic’ (Pels 1998, 95). Both are linked to the commodity, the primary fetish object of consumer culture.

Scholars argue that the fetish mediates incommensurate worlds (Ellen 1999; Pietz, 1985, 1987) whether between humans and a transcendent environment (Pels, 1998), between the sphere of market and morality (Meyer, 1999; Pietz, 1985, 1987), or between a person and the elusive object of erotic desire (Freud 1977/1927). According to Pietz’s (1985) genealogy of fetish, Portuguese traders used the word in early cross-cultural contexts to address the power and awe that certain objects exerted on colonized African populations. Such objects did not conform to the expected utilitarian expectations in commodity exchanges and challenged the Europeans rational calculations of value.

In parallel, Karl Marx (1976/1884) used the term to describe the alienating power of commodities on workers in industrial societies. According to Marx, the commodity masks its trajectory and the labour involved in its production. It appears to have intrinsic value supposedly revealed through market exchange in relation to all other commodities. The consequence is that workers cannot recognize themselves in the product of their own labour and are alienated from their own agency. However, Marx does not really deal in any detail with the use-value or meaning of consumer goods.

In the work of both Marx and Freud the idea of the fetish involves attributing properties to objects that they do not ‘really’ have and that should correctly be recognised as of human origin. Freud’s examination of the fetish as a desired substitute for a suitable sex object explores how ordinary things—a shoe, a stocking, an undergarment– become objects of fantastical desires. Drawing on both Marx and Freud, Baudrillard breaks with their analyses of fetishism as demonstrating a human relation with unreal objects, i.e., commodity and token. Instead, he argues that in consumer culture both object and meaning are reduced to signs. Value in consumer culture is realized through the exchange of sign values. Collections and their market power epitomize the conspicuous consumption and exchange of sign values (Dant 1996). To summarize, the key qualities of the consumer fetish. First, it concretizes an abstract concept. Second, the fetish is animated; it is agentic. Third, the fetish conflates the object with its abstract properties; they share a mnemonic relationship. Fourth, ambiguity of control refers to the blurring of agency between person and object. Fifth, each fetish is uniquely authentic, rather than a symbol it is taken to be the thing itself.

Key Findings & Insights

Fetishized consumer goods: brands and collections

“The fetishism of commodities…is the fascination…of the system of differences, the code of signs that the object or good represents” (Dant 1996, 505). At the same time, fetishized consumer goods are concretized, animated, and agentic. Thus, the woman’s handbag creates a subjectivity, marks life cycle transition, hides within crucial identity making tools, signals social status, and propels its owner from home to office; its lack is unimaginable (Rosenberg, et al 2020).

Fetishization as process depends upon magical thinking either contagious magic or imitative magic, or both. Original designer fashion with an indexical link to the designer or touted by stars, models, and influencers, partakes of both. Through contagion, the wearer imbibes the aura of designers themselves (Dion and Arnould 2011), and is empowered to be like the influencers, stars, and models who display such fashions. Imitative magic transforms the wearer of signature athletic shoes into an athlete like Ronaldo or Coco Gauff, or the player of a signature guitar into the iconic player themselves. Contagious magic empowers the iconic holy water consumers purchase at Lourdes (actually, you buy the bottle, the water is “free.”). In short, in consumer culture, iconic brands are very like fetishes. Like the commodity in general, the dual fantasy of the brand as fetish is that “commodities are created without human agency…and the purchase and use of the commodity will result in a magical transformation for the consumer” (Duncombe 2011, 373).

Consumer goods taking the form of collections meld Marxian and Freudian concepts of the fetish with that of Baudrillard. Collections generally mask the origin of the object as a commodity produced and sold in the market behind other sign values such as character (Balthazar 2016), patina (McCracken 1986) or authenticity (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011), all signifying uniqueness. Through these attributes consumers identify a certain erotic charge or magical aura to the collected goods. This erotic charge singularizes the collected objects, and denies their utilitarian exchange value.

An important quality of fetishized consumer objects is their transformative power, sometimes mnemonic stimulating the creation of a valued past, sometimes indexically linking consumers to an imagined place and time, and sometimes linking consumers to an imagined self. These effects are however indeterminate. As Keane (2006: 201) has argued: “They form the grounds for subsequent modes of action whose limits, if any, are in principle unknowable.”

The stories that consumers tell about favored brands or collections whether linked to personal memory, to historical people, events or places, or to future oriented identity projects tend to the mythical. That is, these stories often reflect the various functions of consumer myth. Consumers can easily project themselves into archetypal roles in these stories, e.g., the hero, the rebel, the trickster, the temptress, etc., and feel that the object allows them take on some of those desired characteristics. Thus, through narrative brands act like fetishes; that is, these powerful magical objects permit consumers to internalize mythic qualities. For example, collectors of rock n’roll memorabilia, such as an autographed guitar report that they feel empowered by the object’s magical aura (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011).

The Freudian fetish is not absent in consumer culture. Freud’s theory argued that fetishized objects provided male fetishists with external evidence of their own sexual virility threatened by castration anxiety, that is, physical disempowerment, loss of agency, or alienation. Women may consume fetish objects as well. Research shows fetish ware is agentic; it heightens internalized sensual awareness, thereby combating physical alienation. Worn publicly, fetish wear commands attention; it is empowering. Through fetish fashion, women may communicate their confidence and comfort with their own sexuality, and thus assume roles in mythic stories like Diana (the huntress, aka Wonder Woman), Xena (the lesbian warrior princess), Pandora, Lillith, or Judith (re Holofernes) (O’Donnell 1999).

In sum, “fetishes facilitate [consumers’] privately and publicly imagined, but emotionally vivid, imaginary fantasy self-transformations” (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011, 292).

The Consumer as Fetish

Just as the sixteenth-century Portuguese feitiço was a device for making sense of exotic trading practices on the Guinea Coast of Africa (Pietz, 1985, 1987), so too, is consumer as fetish a sensemaking device. Following Latour’s (2010) discussion, we know that organizations mitigate uncertainty through practices that render uncertainty manageable. Market research focused on segmentation and targeting is one such practice. Research reveals four moments in the fetishization of consumers: (1) through the construction of target market persona, a widespread practice in market-oriented and design ethnography, fetishized persona become material embodiments of the target market; (2) the fetishized consumer persona becomes a boundary object that mediates between the organization and an imagined marketplace; (3) through story boarding AI generated imagery, and even physical mockups, the consumer-fetish is enlivened into a sensuous object; and finally, (4) once so materialized and codified, the consumer-fetish assumes an agentic role within the organization as it incentivizes employees to design market offerings and communications to control [sic] the consumer fetish’s interaction with the organization.

Images and avatars of consumers constitute a way of knowing about markets. The manufactured sensuous, material immediacy of consumer fetishes produces their power. Consumer fetishes make the target market appear as if it is objective and manageable. Just as the commodity fetish obscures its origins in human labor consumer fetishes obscure their discursive origins in market research (Latour 2010; Marx 1976/1884; Pels 1998).

Outlook

While the commodity is as Baudrillard argued an empty signifier. Fetishism fills it with content. Consumer activists often aim to de-fetishize the commodity in ways that rely on truthtelling. Their revelatory strategy aims to reveal the ‘real’ socio-political history that lies behind every commodity; the labor practices which produce it, and the resources expended in its production and consumption. This is the tactic adopted by Adbusters. The restorative strategy aims to restitute the real: to restore the imagined “natural-socio-connections between nature, people, and products” (Duncombe 2012, 361). This is the tactic enshrined in Buy Nothing Day. But activists misunderstand that a fetish is empowering; truth-telling is a weak weapon against the fetish.

The consumer is not the only fetish detectable in the corporate world. Techno-utopians (Kozinets 2008) imagine that ever-evolving technical gadgets (cryptocurrencies, algorithms, AI) will allow them to beat the market, predict and control customer behavior, or even solve the crises of the Anthropocene. When uncontested and allowed to exert agency, these gadgets become fetishes. Similarly, economic growth concretized in a variety of economic measures, e.g., ROI, CLV, GDP, or stock price are examples of factishes (Latour 2010), the mathematicised version of the fetish.  When the accuracy and sophistication of numeric calculation is valued more highly than the phenomenon, they are meant to describe, statistics become free-floating signifiers in Baudrillard’s sense. And when organizations or governments treat statistical measures as true and incontrovertible, they can achieve fetishlike, magical control over social problems.

Perhaps social science can deconstruct organizational fetishes through analyses of their construction, the assumptions, and interpretative discourses in which they are embedded, and the tactics of their display. However, in a post truth world, if activists wish to combat both the fetish in consumer culture and the consumer as fetish, what is needed is to leverage the feitiço in terms of its entymological origins as something imagined and uniquely made to suit a particular purpose. In short, activist research should search out new empowering mythic imaginaries.

Key References

Arnould. E.J. & Cayla, J. (2015). Consumer fetish: commercial ethnography and the sovereign consumer. Organization Studies, 36 (10), 1361-1386.

Dant, T. (1996). Fetishism and the social value of objects. Sociological Review, 44(3), 495-516.

Fernandez, K. V. & Lastovicka, J. L. (2011). Making magic: fetishes in contemporary consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 38(August), 278–99.

Rosenberg, L., Turunen, L. M., Järvelä, S-M. & Arnould, E. (2022). The handbag, Consumption Markets & Culture, 25(April), 187-194.

Other References

Balthazar, A. C. (2016). Old things with character:  the fetishization of objects in Margate, UK. Journal of Material Culture, 21(4), 448–464.

Carlon, D. M., Downs, A. A. & Wert-Gray, S. (2006). Statistics as fetishes: the case of financial performance measures and executive compensation. Organizational Research Methods, 9(October), 475-490.

Duncombe, S. (2012). It stands on its head: Commodity fetishism, consumer activism, and the strategic use of fantasy. Culture and Organization, 18(December), 359–375.

Ellen, R. (1988). Fetishism. Man, n.s., 23(June), 213-235.

Freud, S. (1977/1927). “Fetishism.” In On Sexuality, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Keane, W. (2006). Subjects and objects: Introduction. In C. Tilley (Ed.), Handbook of Material Culture (pp.197–202). London: Sage.

Kozinets, R. V. (2008). Technology/ideology: how ideological fields influence consumers’ technology narratives. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(April), 865-881.

Latour, B. (2010). On the modern cult of the Factish gods (Trans. C. Porter & H. MacLean). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marx, K. (1976/1884). Capital: A critique of political economy, Vol. 1 (Trans. B. Fowkes). London: Penguin.

Meyer, B. (1999). Commodities and the power of prayer: Pentecostal attitudes towards consumption in contemporary Ghana. In B. Meyer & P. Geschiere (Eds.), Globalization and identity: dialectics of flow and closure (pp. 151–176). Oxford: Blackwell.

O’Donnell, K. A. (1999). Good girls gone bad: the consumption of fetish fashion and the sexual empowerment of women, Advances in Consumer Research, 26, 184-189.

Pels, P. (1998). The spirit of matter: on fetish, rarity, fact and fancy. In P. Spyer (Ed.), Border fetishism: material objects in unstable spaces. (pp. 91–121). London: Routledge.

Pietz, W. (1985). The problem of the fetish, I. Res; 9, 5-17.

Pietz, W. (1987). The problem of the fetish, II: the origin of the fetish. Res; 13, 23-45.

Tags , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Consumer Mythology

September 29, 2023 //
0

My colleague Craig Thompson did some heavy lifting on this entry. Hats off to Craig.

Definition of the Term

According to Barthes (2013/1957: 230-231), “a myth is a depoliticized speech that evacuates the contingent, historical, and socially constructed quality of what it seeks to signify, rendering it under the clarity of an inherently indisputable nature.” Myths transform imaginatively construed historical events into facts, where intentions and implications are not necessarily concealed or falsified but naturalized. Simply put, myths are powerful stories. the narrative power of whose central themes shape values, meanings, and ideals through which people make sense of their world. Myths comprise a culture’s stock of hereditary stories. Myths symbolize preferred modes of conduct (means) and life goals (ends). They conform to four main forms: comedic, romantic, tragic, and ironic (Stern 1995). In addition, myths perform four primary functions in society—cosmological, psychological, sociological and ideological, with examples given in the sections that follow.

Psychologist Carl Jung (1928) proposed that humans create and interpret symbols and situations in ways consistent with inherited cultural predispositions, which he called archetypes. According to Jung, these archetypes are expressed in three primary, symbolically charged forms. First are archetypal events, such as birth, death, initiation, achievement, and marriage, for example that populate mythic stories. In consumer culture each of these archetypal event gives rise to major consumption activities fueling demand for products, service, and experiences. For example, luxury products have become important signaling devices in online dating apps where people seek out marriageable partners in pursuit of idealized romantic outcomes (Chen, Wang & Ordabayeva 2023). Similarly, Bonsu and Belk (2003) have shown how in Ghana s social exchanges during death rituals are imbued with symbolic representations that allow the living and the dead to vicariously consume relevant products as expressions of their aspirational selves.

Second, are archetypal characters who populate mythic stories, such as the hero, the outlaw/rebel, the Earth mother, or the caregiving good father (discussed below). Finally, there are archetypal motifs, such as the great creation, the deluge (e.g., Noah’s flood), and the apocalypse. The latter has been the subject of much recent, creative consumption activity as for example in the popularity of disaster films (Bradshaw and Zwick 2016), and doomsday preparedness.

Key Findings & Insights

Studies have illustrated the pertinence of mythic archetypal persona to consumer behavior. These archetypes provide blueprints for action.  For example, Stern (1994) showed that advertisers rely on the short-hand provided by stereotypical figures and plots to convey advertising meanings succinctly. In Japan, Hello Kitty’s enigmatic, comedic cuteness successfully pushes trendy products in the market while mediating psychological tensions between utopian consumerist freedom and control manifest in a kind of theatricalized innocence (McVeigh 2000).

Holt and Thompson (2004) showed that popular media products in the US make use of two alternative stereotypes to portray manhood. Mass market films are filled with one of these, the heroic man-of-action who uses violent means to single-handedly defeat villainous forces and win acclaim, adulation, and often romantic love. Another is the good father stereotype. The good father stereotype has been a staple of American television comedies for decades beginning in the 1950s (Cantor 1990).

Dion and Arnould (2016) showed that the creative directors in luxury brands develop profiles that draw systematically from two mythic archetypal persona that of the artist and that of the magician.  Additionally, their mythologized life stories often feature elements of tragedy as in personal self-denial necessary to achieve artistic excellence.

A final example of a compelling romantic archetypal narrative is the Cinderella fairy tale. Its core theme is that those possessing an impeccable moral character will eventually receive their just (romantic) rewards. The familiar European version of this fairy tale has been retold through numerous films that update the source material and incorporate contemporary variations on its core theme. Versions of the myth that feature high school age heroines, like A Cinderella Story, also recognize the angst of being misunderstood that so many teenagers experience.

Myths assume four functions in society. The cosmological function of myth explains the origins of existence and humanity’s relationship to supernatural forces. For some, religious stories provide this function, but in secular, consumer culture, science fiction mobilizes the cosmological function of myth in media products like Star Trek, Battle Star Galactica, Dune and the like (Kozinets 2001).

The psychological function of cultural myths is to provide normative guidance, inspiration, motivation, and hope. The Cinderella myth provides this, for example.  However, cosplay provides a recent consumer driven example. Cosplay refers to costumed role performance based on fantasy world characters (e.g., Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, Lady Dimitrescu, or Batman). Research shows cosplayers seek to embody coveted personal attributes represented by the character, such as confidence, strength, or sex appeal (Seregina and Weijo 2017).

The sociological function of myth helps a social group maintain a sense of solidarity and cohesion; a function discussed further below. In a detailed examination of a myth that serves a sociological function, Coskuner-Balli (2020) shows that American presidential communications have emphasized different aspects of the enduring American dream myth in response to varying historical contingencies to mobilize the citizenry and to legitimize their own personal brands.  Presidents have also cast the citizen-consumer as a responsible and active moral hero on a hero’s journey to achieve American Dream. The American Dream myth portrays America as an exceptional nation, blessed by divine grace, which offers its citizens boundless opportunities for happiness and personal achievement through consumer abundance.

The ideological function of myth refers to all the naturalized, taken for granted beliefs and values, often politicized, that constitute a cultural worldview. For example, feminist scholars point to the myth of the “good mother,” a variation on Carl Jung’s caregiver archetype that has historically encouraged women to see the domestic sphere as their “natural” place and, in turn, to be accepting of gender inequities in education, political life, and employment.

Studies have shown the relevance of mythology to consumers’ enduring preferences. Illustrating the psychological function of myth, Avery (2012) showed how controversial was the launch of the family targeted Porsche Cayenne to traditionally male owners of Porsche sports cars for whom German high-performance engineering and male gender identity were deeply entwined. Another good example of how brands can harness the power of myth is found in the success of the Incredibles animated films due in part to the effective blending of the male man-of-action and good father stereotypes in the person of Mr. Incredible, not to mention the reimagining of the Earth mother archetype (Stern 1995) in the person of Elastagirl (Ms. Incredible).

Holt (2004) notes the role of myths in offering identity value and proposes that certain brands tap into national myths to become iconic. Illustrating the ideological function of national mythology Luedicke, et al. (2010) showed how Hummer mobilized the ideological myth of American exceptionalism in fostering demand. Similarly, Press and Arnould (2011) showed that the success of the Community Supported Agriculture could be attributed in part to the systematic evocation of competing myth of American pastoralism, a vision of harmonious cultivation of the “garden” by entrepreneurial craftspeople. Jones and Arnould (n.d.) suggest that doomsday preppers in the UK and the US draw on a shared pastoralist myth in imagining post-apocalyptic futures and stockpiling the consumer goods necessary to achieve it. At the same time these authors show that the American sociological myth of regeneration through violence fuels the penchant of some American preppers to amass firearms for an apocalyptic cleansing.

In general, brands compete in broad myth markets (see Holt 2004) that extend beyond immediate rivals in their product category. A myth market is constituted by all the brands and cultural goods that seek to win consumers’ loyalty through effective enactments of enduring mythic stories. For example, Nike has successfully utilized the hero’s journey myth to compete in a crowded market for athletic wear. Its “Just Do It” campaign mythically reframes the idea of striving to achieve one’s athletic potential as a hero’s journey where protagonists overcome various challenges in pursuit of greatness. This campaign builds upon the biographies of elite athletes, such as Serena Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo, or Simone Biles.

Holt (2004) also suggests that opportunities to create new versions of cultural myths occur when there is a shift in national ideology. During these times, brands with rich historical and cultural significance can deliver myths that not only repair the culture but even shape it, since they can “put existing cultural materials to new purposes in order to provoke audiences to think differently about themselves.” Thus, Marvel has profited from positioning Captain America first to galvanize support for World War II, second, to defend American democracy from Soviet communism during the Cold War, and thirdly, portraying him as a jaded hero, who goes rogue to pursue his own moral code in the tumultuous political present.

Using Barthes theory of myth in a granular discussion of mythic change based on the transformation of China’s national ideology from a hardline communist one to a consumerist one, Zhao and Belk (2008, 240) show how “social change at the symbolic level is to a large extent the construction and reconstruction of [signs and meanings]. The new [meanings] (e.g., the pursuit of consumer goods) are elevated through the displaced old [signs] (e.g., the communist icons used to justify the consumption of a Citizen [brand] watch). The old [meanings] are interpreted through new [signs] (e.g., modernization is built through the consumption of the latest consumer goods).”

Outlook

It should be fruitful to examine marketing communications in many cultural and historical contexts and times using mythic analysis. The transformation of Ramadan from a religious holiday into a consumerist holiday in the Islamic world, or the return of commercialized yoga to India as a practice of personal potentiality building rather than a spiritual discipline, for example would benefit from such a treatment for example. More generally, the tools of mythic analysis offer a useful framework from which to deconstruct both local and global consumer imaginaries as the international examples cited above suggest as well as to imagine alternative ways to construct and legitimate alternative new social orders and consumer subjectivities.

Key References

Barthes, R. (2013/1957), Mythologies. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Holt, Douglas B. (2004), How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Luedicke, M., Thompson, C. & Giesler, M. (2010). Consumer identity work as moral protagonism: how myth and ideology animate a brand-mediated moral conflict,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (April), 1016–32.

Thompson, C.J., Arnould, E. & Veresiu,E (2023). Market mythmaking and consumer culture. In Consumer Culture Theory, 2e, Arnould, E. J., Thompson, C.J., Weinberger, M. & Crockett, D., London: SAGE Publications, 273-300.

Other References / Further Recommended Literature

Avery, J. (2011). Defending the markers of masculinity: consumer resistance to brand gender-bending. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 29(December), 322-336.

Bonsu, S. K. & Belk, R. W. (2003). Do not go cheaply into that good night: death-ritual consumption in Asante, Ghana. Journal of Consumer Research, 30(June), 41-55.

Bradshaw, A. & Zwick, D. (2016). The field of business sustainability and the death drive: a radical intervention. Journal of Business Ethics, 136(June), 267-279.

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cantor, M G. (1990) Prime‐time fathers: A study in continuity and change. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7(3), 275-285,

Chen, Q., Wang, Y. & Ordabayeva, N. (2023). The mate screening motive: how women use luxury consumption to signal to men. Journal of Consumer Research, 50(August), 303-321.

Coskuner-Balli, G. (2020). Citizen-consumers wanted: revitalizing the American dream in the face of economic recessions, 1981–2012. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(October), 327-349

Dion, D. & Arnould, E. (2016). Persona-fied brands: managing branded persons through persona, Journal of Marketing Management, 32 (February), 121-148.

Holt, D. B., & Thompson, C. J. (2004). Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (2), 425–40.

Jones, H. & Arnould, E. (n.d.) How reflexive modernization and optimistic doomsday fantasies pattern tragically individualized consumer responsibilization. Espoo, FI: Aalto University School of Business.

Jung, Carl G. (1928), Contributions to Analytical Psychology, New York: Harcourt Brace.

Kozinets, R. V. (2001), “Utopian enterprise: articulating the meanings of Star Trek’s culture of consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (June), 67–88.

Luedicke, M., Thompson, C. & Giesler, M. (2010). Consumer identity work as moral protagonism: how myth and ideology animate a brand-mediated moral conflict,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (April), 1016–32.

McVeigh, B. (2000). How Hello Kitty commodifies the cute, cool and camp ‘consumutopia’ versus ‘control’ in Japan. Journal of Material Culture, 5(July), 131-245.

Press, M. & Arnould, E. (2011). American Pastoralism: Linking Post-War Suburbia and Community Supported Agriculture, Journal of Consumer Culture, 11(2) 168–194.

Seregina, A. & Weijo, H. A. (2017). Play at any cost: how cosplayers produce and sustain their ludic communal consumption experiences. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(June), 139-159.

Slotkin, R. (2000). Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Stern, B. B. (1995). Consumer myths: Frye’s taxonomy and the structural analysis of consumption text. Journal of Consumer Research, 22(September), 165-185..

Zhao, Z. & Belk, R. W. (2008). Politicizing consumer culture: advertising’s appropriation of political ideology in China’s social transition. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(August), 231-244.

 

Tags , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Consumer Culture: A Concise Definition

September 29, 2023 //
0

Definition of the term

The term consumer culture is a multi-faceted one. In consumer culture theory, consumption refers to acts of acquisition, use and disposition of goods, services, ideas, and experiences in ways that produce both desired use values and values in the normative sense. Arnould and Thompson (2005, p. 868) describe some of its key components in the following way:

The consumption of market-made commodities and desire-inducing marketing symbols is central to consumer culture, and yet the perpetuation and reproduction of this system is largely dependent upon the exercise of free personal choice in the private sphere of everyday life… The term “consumer culture” also conceptualizes an interconnected system of commercially produced images, texts, and objects that groups use—through the construction of overlapping and even conflicting practices, identities, and meanings—to make collective sense of their environments and to orient their members’ experiences and lives. These meanings are embodied and negotiated by consumers in particular social situations, roles and relationships. Further, consumer culture describes a densely woven network of global connections and extensions through which local cultures are increasingly interpenetrated by the forces of transnational capital and the global mediascape.

Consumer culture, therefore, encompasses elements that are grounded in a specific sociocultural context and others that flow through the global circuits of corporate capitalism. Consider, for instance, that East Asian consumers snap up Finnish Marimekko fashions and souvenirs of the animated Moomin characters, while LVMH promotes a mythic image of French luxury desired across the world. Disney films globalize idealized models of girlhood, while Bollywood diffuses happy dancing gender stereotypes, and exported Latin American soap operas animate local debates about family values to consumers in Africa. Importantly, consumer culture is fundamentally shaped by processes of “glocalization,” whereby local and global elements are merged into unique cultural forms in different parts of the world so that for example, branded and franchised “hot yoga” bears little resemblance to the South Asian religious discipline from whence it originated. Thus, consumption activity can take on vastly different meanings in various local contexts (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006).

A consumer culture, then, is a dynamic network of material, economic, symbolic, and social relationships or connections that functions both as an interpretive sense-making device and a cultural template for action (McCracken 1986). Regarding sense-making, consumer culture provides a system of meanings, values, ideals, and norms that influence consumers’ perceptions of what is desirable or undesirable and frames consumers expectations and understandings of the “good life.”

As a blueprint, consumer culture provides behavioral scripts and formal and informal rules that guide and organize action, motivating us to work in order to consume, to extol personal entrepreneurship, even to migrate in search of resources to satisfy consumer desires back home. Consumer culture provides templates for international tourism, for shopping in a mall, for posting on social media, and even when and what to give on the many gift giving occasions that punctuate each year and our life cycles.

Owing to the diversity and complexity of global flow of products, images, meanings, and information, consumer culture is not a unified system. Instead, it is heteroglossic. That means it incorporates a diverse and nested repertoire of meaning systems –personal, domestic, situational, national, and international. These systems are differentiated by social affiliations such as generational cohorts, gender, social class, caste, ethnicity, and so on, themselves expressed through distinctive patterns of consumption. Consumers draw on templates for action and sensemaking repertoires to guide their actions and give sense to what they do. Like a game where individuals improvise within the rules and the limits of their economic, social, and intellectual resources (Bourdieu 1984), consumer culture frames consumers’ horizons of conceivable action, feeling, and thought, making certain patterns of behavior and sense-making interpretations more likely than others and others unimaginable.

Key Findings & Insights

Over the past forty years consumer culture theorists have contributed insights to four main areas of understanding. The first is consumer identity work. This research offers an extended inquiry primarily into Western conceptions of identity, and the implications of these concepts for consumption. This research highlights the ways that identity can be an important source of meaning, stress, or anxiety for consumers, and how it is on this basis that companies and brands often seek to forge connections with them. The market reinforces a narrow sense of a dominant consumer identity but also has the power to represent and shift definitions of legitimate, normalized identities. Similarly, families draw on the market to produce a sense of shared identity through their consumption practices, experiences, and memories as well as how family should be performed. This research also provides a critical perspective on consumer identity work, casting doubt on the rational, agentic consumer depicted in much economic research. Instead, markets promote dominant consumer identities that align with widely accepted normative standards and cultural ideals and subordinate consumer identities that deviate from dominant norms and may be associated with stigmatized demographic or cultural characteristics. 

The second area of insight concerns marketplace cultures. Marketplace cultures refer to distinct systems of meanings, practices, values, and social relationships that are anchored by shared consumption interests. These collective groupings can form around a galvanizing brand, such as the brand communities that arose around the old East German Trabant automobile or the failed Apple Newton tablet, or a consumption activity such as surfing, running, or CrossFit, that become the focal point of consumption community, and which develops their own jargon, rituals, and status hierarchies. Consumer culture is crosscut with subcultures, tribes, communities, and publics.  Research shows that these forms of social life develop distinctive relationships to market offerings, and how in turn these relationships inevitably affect what marketers bring to the marketplace. Recent research rounds out these perspectives by exploring the importance of spirituality and religion in consumption. Not only have contemporary religious movements adopted some of the trappings of spectacular consumer culture, but consumers have elaborated new and renewed forms of spiritual practice such as pilgrimages, while making use of consumer goods and services.

The third stream of research deals with the socio-historic patterning of consumption. It focuses on the interrelationships between the capitalist market and gender, ethnicity, and class. It describes how these social categories, themselves produced by the distribution of resources through markets, pattern consumption; how consumers work to defend or transgress the boundaries between them; and how discrimination across categories is often expressed through consumption. However, this research stream also addresses how contemporary socio-political and cultural transformations, many of them linked to globalization, have undermined socio- cultural patterns and divisions giving rise both to new, and to more fluid social groupings. The research shows that every society makes use of socio-historically patterned categories to organize economic and social life. Culturally constructed beliefs and practices concerning them are often deeply ingrained. But researchers remind us that in consumer culture these categories are always in flux. Researchers discuss the ways in which consumption is implicated in the enactment, resistance to, and reformulation of socio-historical categories. In addition, research shows that globalization accelerates the movement of people, products, ideas, and images, not to mention money, which can dramatically upend local social structures, producing also more liquid relationships to consumer goods, services and experiences.

Finally, research on consumer cultures explains the role of ideology in shaping consumer behavior, and that, in turn, is shaped by consumers’ creative employment of commercial resources. Ideology refers to the cultural meanings which serve the interests of corporate capitalism and that help to maintain the socio-economic status quo. Research highlights that neither the social category nor the identity of the “consumer” is a natural and unchanging one. Rather, the consumer has emerged with the development and global expansion of the capitalist system and its ever-evolving socio-technical infrastructure.

Some research explores the topic of consumer resistance. Resistance means standing against a power, an influence, or attempts to act upon one’s conduct. Marketing practice and communications inculcates norms, prescribes behaviors, and conveys ideologies that consumers resist. Consumer resistance can be transformative, mobilizing for change in marketplace meanings, practices, and power relationships. Sometimes consumer resistance takes organized form in social movements that seek to transform aspects of consumer culture that are inequitable, exclusionary, or environmentally damaging. Groups marginalized, excluded or neglected via gender, race, ethnicity, religious background, cognitive abilities, or passion have organized to demand markets respond to their distinctive desires by transforming existing systems of consumption practices, modes of production, and market exchange, and in some cases by creating alternative markets.

Outlook

The scientific goal of cultural research on consumption is to develop a thorough understanding of consumption, as well as to critique consumer culture and its social impacts. In the future, this research program must build aggressively on recent studies that explore consumer cultures in the global South and throughout the world.

Consumer culture research can inform organizational strategy and social policy. Understanding consumer cultures can help organizations find “different alternative ways of viewing the world, as well as representing themselves and others” (Moisander et al. 2009, p. 333). It provides organizations with the tools to understand the significance of brands, objects, media, services, and market mediated experiences in consumers’ lives (Cayla and Arnould 2016). By understanding how consumption is used for identity construction and contestation, the performance of family, status signaling, community building, and relationship work, some organizations can better align their offerings with consumers’ goals and desires.

Consumer culture research can uncover shortcomings in public policy or provide support for changes in such policies. Insights from this research can influence strategy about sustainability, housing, and food insecurity in profit-oriented businesses, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and among policymakers. For example, studies of eco-villages illustrate the opportunities and challenges consumers face in trying to craft lifestyles that diminish the role of market exchange in meeting consumers’ desires (Casey, et al. 2020).

Key References

Arnould, E. A. & Thompson, C. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (March), 868-882.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cayla, J. & Arnould, E. (2013). Ethnographic Stories for Market Learning. Journal of Marketing, 77(July), 1-16.

Casey, K., Lichrou, M. & O’Malley, L. (2020). Prefiguring sustainable living: an ecovillage story. Journal of Marketing Management, 36(December), 1658-1679.

Kjeldgaard, D. & Askegaard, S. (2006). The glocalization of youth culture: the global youth segment as structures of common difference. Journal of Consumer Research, 33 (2), 231-247.

McCracken, G. (1986). Culture and consumption: a theoretical account of the structure and movement of the cultural meaning of consumer goods. Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (June), 71-84.

Moisander, J., Valtonen A. & Hirsto, H. (2009). Personal interviews in cultural consumer research – post‐structuralist challenges. Consumption Markets & Culture, 12 (4), 329-348.

Other References / Further Recommended Literature

Arnould. E.J. & Cayla, J. (2015). Consumer fetish: commercial ethnography and the sovereign consumer. Organization Studies, 36 (10), 1361-1386.

Arnould, E. J., & Price, L. L. (1993). River magic: extraordinary experience and the extended service encounter. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(1), 24-45.

Arnould, E. A., Thompson, C. J., Weiberger, M. & Crockett, D. (2023). Consumer Culture Theory, 2e. London: SAGE Publications.

Askegaard, S., & Eckhardt, G. M. (2012). Glocal yoga: Re-appropriation in the Indian consumptionscape. Marketing Theory, 12(1), 45-60.

Belk, R. W., Ger, G. & Askegaard, S. (2003). The fire of desire: a multisited inquiry into consumer passion. Journal of Consumer Research, 30(December), 326-351.

Higgins, L., & Hamilton, K. (2019). Therapeutic servicescapes and market-mediated performances of emotional suffering. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(6), 1230-1253.

Muñiz, A. M., Jr., & Schau, H. J. (2005). Religiosity in the abandoned Apple Newton abandoned brand community. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4), 737-747.

Ritzer, G. & Jurgenson, N. (2010). Production, consumption, prosumption: the nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10 (1), 13-36. 

Sherry J. (1991). Postmodern alternatives: the interpretive turn in consumer research. In Handbook of Consumer Behavior; eds. Thomas Robertson and Harold Kassarjian, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 548-591. 

Skålén, P., Pace, S. & Cova, B. (2015). Firm-brand community value co-creation as alignment of practices. European Journal of Marketing, 49 (3/4), 596-620. 

Üstüner, T.& Holt, D.B. (2007). Dominated consumer acculturation: The social construction of poor migrant women’s consumer identity projects in a Turkish squatter. Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (1): 41–55.

Varman, R., Sreekumar, H., Belk, R. W. (2022). Money, sacrificial work, and poor consumers, Journal of Consumer Research. 49(December), 657-677.

Tags
Categories Uncategorized

Mutuality

October 24, 2022 //
0

Mutuality can be understood as generalized reciprocity. It is action that assumes that another party would act toward the first party in a similar, mutual, fashion if circumstances were reversed, as guaranteed by their mutual inscription in a common sociality, and vice versa, which is to say, such behavior constructs that sociality. It is the mechanism by which strangers and enemies are transformed into pacific acquaintances and potential allies or even affines in the absence of state intervention (Mauss, 1990/1923-24). It is also the element that renders formal precepts and external force unnecessary in the successful management of common property resources (Netting, 1981) and the astonishingly smooth quotidian operation of the corporation (Alter, 2009).

The extension of mutuality or mutual sociality—so often articulated through commensality—is the mechanism by which strangers are transformed into peaceful neighbors or even affines.

The logic of mutuality is also definitional of almost any in-group; certain things will be shared or made freely available within the group and other things will be expected to be provided by any member to any other on request (Graeber, 2011).

Mutuality “is particularly acute in both the best of times and the worst of times: during famines [and disasters], for example, but also during moments of extreme plenty” (Graeber 2011, p.178). Translated into role-related terms, travelers and social scientists have long commented upon the generosity of the poor; the habit of the wealthy of converting their riches, however ill-gotten, into good works is equally ubiquitous.

There is considerable conceptual groundwork laid by Sahlins (2012) in the development of mutuality as a sociological force of sociality. These points, encapsulated nicely in Mauss’ three obligations—to give, to receive and to reciprocate—and elaborated in a broad and deep tradition of anti-utilitarian social science, should be a fine starting point for discussions of mutuality going forward.

References

Alter N (2009) Donner et Prendre. La Coopération en Entreprise. Paris: Editions la Découverte.

Graeber D (2011) Debt. The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville Publishing.

Mauss M (1990/1924-25) The Gift, The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London and New York: Routledge.

Netting RMcC (1981) Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sahlins M (2012) What Kinship Is—And Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Categories Uncategorized

How Firms Shape Brand Dynasties to Manage Human Brands

September 15, 2022 //
0

Co-Authored with Delphine Dion

Chanel may be the most famous French brand in the world. Coco Chanel, its founder, is one of France’s most recognizable icons—its perfume, No. 5, the world’s best-selling scent ever. And Karl Lagerfeld, its designer of 19 years, is perhaps the most quoted personality in the fashion business. (…) Lagerfeld was hired in 1983… His mandate was to resurrect the label. And while, season after season, he continues to design contemporary clothes, the root of each collection is the cardigan jacket suit that Chanel herself created in 1925. In the last decade, Chanel has continued to grow, introducing new perfumes, a sports collection, a watch line and a fine jewelry collection. (…) Designers will come and go, and Chanel will always be Chanel.[i] (New York Times, February, 2002; emphasis added.)

What is the implicit marketing strategy driving Chanel’s success? Behind this question lies another, about the management of a human brand, that is, a brand created around a person, here Coco Chanel. Marketers face two distinct strategic challenges linked to the corporality that distinguishes human from product brands. First, the people who anchor the human brand inevitably die; the loss of the founding human presence threatens the brand’s continuity. Second, the humans who personify brands may lose the performative edge (charisma, skill, creative spark) that produces their success (Luo et al. 2010). Therefore, two questions arise about the human brand. How should a human brand be managed over time, and in particular, how should it be managed as a human brand beyond the founder’s lifetime? These questions resonate with concerns about how to manage the succession of charismatic leaders. The latter, unresolved problem is noted in marketing and research about family companies (see Del Giudice 2017; Mehrotra, et al. 2011). In this study, we draw on medieval political theory and performativity theory to address the question of how to manage human brands over time.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic work, we examine human brand management in luxury, services, and mass-market goods. First, we extend the theory on branding by providing a new understanding of human brands and their management. Our conceptualization of human brands goes beyond the conventional marketing interest in celebrities whose lifestyles and biographies are mass mediatized. We redefine a human brand as one where the brand identity is a narrative construction developed around a charismatic person. We extend branding theory by investigating how management may prolong a human brand over time and transcend its founder’s lifespan. Theorizing human brand management as a temporal challenge extends existing branding theory. We show that, similar to monarchies, firms configure brand dynasties that enable firms to overcome the constraints of the human lifespan. A brand dynasty consists of a brand persona, a narrativized and mythologized construct built around the founder, and brand heir, who performs the brand, a couple whose performances are repeatedly  validated by qualified cultural intermediaries.

Second, we contribute to the literature on branding in a more comprehensive way by investigating brand performativity. Similar to the performative turn in strategy (Mintzberg and Waters 1985) we promote the concept of “brand as performance.” The performativity concept can help researchers develop a dynamic view of how brands are produced and performed in context. That is, we show that the brand heir performs the brand drawing on the cultural and material resources associated with the brand persona and while introducing meaningful variation into profile of the brand. This is a citational practice, to employ the language of performativity theory.

Finally, this research identifies new ways to manage human-centered brands at the strategic and operational levels. We highlight the contingencies governing success and failure in managing human brands. All the details  available on demand:

Eric Arnould, Aalto University Business School, eric.arnould@aalto.fi

[i]http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/the-power-behind-the-cologne.html. Accessed November 10, 2016.

Categories Uncategorized

Brand dynasty: managing charismatic legitimacyover time

September 15, 2022 //
0

The exceptional personal quality, the capacity to inspire a following, and the charismatic
‘aura’ characteristic of charismatic leaders are well known (Weber, 1915/1947). This
‘quality’ charismatics embody is of course ‘socially inscribed’ (Wieser et al., 2021, p. 8).
Following Weber, Kallis (2006) remarks charismatic legitimacy is based on followers’
voluntary subscription to a mobilising myth, that is, an ‘emotional belief in the leader’s
capacity to epitomise, further and pursue it’ (p. 31). Charisma is thus a relational concept,
an emotional attachment of followers to a persuasive figure, which Wieser et al. (2021)
term ‘entrainment’. Through the performance of charismatic authority, some charismatic
person brands induce ‘awe and inspiration’ (Fleck et al., 2014, p. 87) and a communal
relationship based on a high degree of entrainment (Dion & Arnould, 2011; Loroz & Braig,
2015; Wieser et al., 2021; Wohlfeil et al., 2019).

Like Wieser et al. (2021), Reh et al. (2017, p. 500) show that charismatic aura is
a synergistic effect of leaders’ behavioural signals. They also argue that ‘individuals
may . . . develop specific prototypes [persona] of charismatic leaders. In general, such
a prototype could encompass not only rhetorical qualities, but also physical characteristics
(i.e. embodied signals)’. In this vein, Hackley et al. (2012) analysed Simon Cowell’s
‘trickster’ persona. Similarly, Dion and Arnould (2011) showed that creative directors’
charismatic persona resides in a combination of qualities associated with the magician
(self-sacrifice, discipline, shape shifting, transformative capabilities) and modern artist
persona (aesthetic innovation, code-breaking capabilities), to which Parmentier and
Fischer (2021) add that creative directors are assessed on commercial effectiveness.
Unlike other forms of legitimacy, charismatic legitimacy depends upon the charismatic
person’s serial performances (Conger, 1993; Weber, 1915/1947; Wieser et al., 2021).
Consequently, prior research points to routinisation, hubris or narcissism, and overcommercialisation
as sources of charisma’s fragility (Cocker & Cronin, 2017; Fournier &
Eckhardt, 2019; Parmentier et al., 2013; Weber 1922/1978).


Most research on charismatic leadership and person branding focuses on individuals
where idiosyncrasy and instability are well documented (e.g. Carruthers, 2006; Fournier &
Eckhardt, 2019; Knittel & Stango, 2014). However, as Parmentier and Fischer (2021) also note
some luxury brands feature successful successions of charismatic brand heirs. Consider Dior,
Chanel, Gucci, Lanvin, St Laurent or Balenciaga to name a few. Dion and Arnould (2011,
p. 2014) showed that some (but not all) luxury brand strategies stand or fall on charismatic
creative directors’ legitimacy. But previous research on charismatic person brands has not
investigated whether and how firms manage to sustain the charismatic legitimacy of
successive charismatic heirs after death or loss of distinction.

Our analysis identifies three general managerial practices that together transfer
and sustain brand charismatic legitimacy (see Figure 1).
First, managing brand charismatic legitimacy over time entails crafting the brand
persona, that is, the cluster of symbols, objects, images, meanings, and myths created
around the brand founder. Management transforms the brand founder’s biography into
a web of specific cultural representations related to the brand founder. Management and
brand heirs actively craft the founder’s brand persona.

Second, the brand persona is reiterated and reinterpreted over time through brand
heirs’ repetitive performance of the brand persona. This position parallels Kantorowicz
(1957/1997 arguments about the challenges facing the royal dignitas, the living heir to
the monarchy. To maintain charismatic legitimacy, heirs perform the brand persona
creatively rather than routinely reproducing the founding brand persona’s style.

Third, brand dynasties rely on what Wickert and Schaefer (2015) term the ‘microengagement’
of myriad brand stewards who certify and promote the performance and
spread emotional commitment. In contrast to Suchman’s (1995) perspective, we maintain
that charismatic legitimacy is an institutional process requiring management to craft the
founder’s persona, guide brand heirs’ performances, and manage brand stewards’ assessment
of brand heirs’ performances. Consistent with previous research (Becker, 1982;
Hewer et al., 2013; Wieser et al., 2021), we argue that performance evaluation is intrinsic
to charismatic legitimacy.

Our analysis revisits the brand persona concept. Some recent research critiques the perspective that the human brand is a narrative construct. For instance, Wieser et al. (2021, pp. 10–11) argue that human brands ‘are real persons with human abilities and challenges’. Our position is that the concept of persona is crucial to understanding the intergenerational transmission of charismatic legitimacy from a brand founder to a brand heir. While brand founders were real living persons, previous scholarship makes it
clear that the myths build up around person brands like Picasso, Warhol, Heini Staudinger, or Martha Stewart were crucial to their legitimacy. Similarly, the myths built up around a deceased founder are as critical to the brand heir’s performances as is the assertion of the latter’s artistic and magical credibility (Dion & Arnould, 2011, p. 2014; Parmentier & Fischer, 2021). The charismatic legitimacy of the brand heir and the founder is a cocreated performance.

In sum, the charsimatic human brand persona like other brands is a performance in which material manifestations, stakeholder performances, and myths are combined through active agencies.

Co-authored with Delphine Dion.

.

Categories Uncategorized

New publication: How Restaurant Day became the worlds largest food carnival

March 8, 2018 //
0

From its origins in 2011, the world’s largest food carnival, Restaurant Day, has spread to more than 70 countries. RD is a consumer movement that aimed to provoke market change. Researchers from Emlyon business school, Lyon, and Aalto University, Finland believe it was so successful because it operated in a completely different way from new social movements in general. Usually, the leaders of a movement determine what a movement is and does, and then try to convert others to their cause. Restaurant Day, however, invited everyone to take part in an opportunity to be as creative as they wanted, say the researchers.

The original aim of the carnival was to revolutionize restaurant culture by cutting unnecessary, bureaucratic red tape. The idea behind the original event was that anyone could set up a restaurant of their liking anywhere for one day without acquiring the necessary permits. According to the organisers, Restaurant Day was a protest against the constraining regulation of restaurants and a way to let off steam regarding the effects of regulation on gastronomic exploration.

‘The participants found setting up a restaurant of their own a personally meaningful and ambitious project. It inspired people to participate and try something new each time the event was held. The movement’s leaders were not essential – instead, every participant was. Moreover, many participants in Restaurant Day did not see their involvement as political activism, which further lowered the threshold for participation’, says Henri Weijo, Assistant Professor in Marketing from the Aalto University School of Business.

‘What started as a small hipster movement rapidly grew into a popular festival where everyone, both old and young people as well as native Finns and immigrants, prepared food in perfect harmony,’ Weijo explains.

Restaurant Day invited people to test the limits of their creativity, regardless of their age and background. This attracted all different kinds of people to the movement with widely varying agendas from immigrants keen to share their cultural pride, to girl scouts funding a field trip.

Originating in Helsinki, Finland, the carnival celebrated restaurant culture and gastronomy in over 2,000 pop-up restaurants in some 75 countries, on average four times a year.

Researchers at Aalto University and EMLYON say that the revolution was carried out in a very Nordic way.

“Nordic societies tend to consensual political processes that espouse societal change through dialogue among civic group interests. Protest movements end up marginalised if they fail to capture ideas of inclusivity or popular benefit, and with that the support or sympathies of the political parties. In the beginning, political authorities, the press, and restaurant industry vocally opposed Restaurant Day. However, in the end it attracted such a wide range of participants and became a significant tourist attraction, such that opposition turned to support”, says Eric Arnould, Adjunct Professor in Marketing at EMLYON.

Organisers decided to discontinue Restaurant Day in its original form last year in 2017. However, the movement for pop-up restaurants that can be set up anywhere, without permits will be celebrated on the anniversary of the first event, which is the third Saturday in May.

The study in question has just been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the world’s most important scientific journal on consumer research. The study on Restaurant Day is the first article in the publication based entirely on Finnish material.

For more information:
Eric Arnould
Visiting Professor in Marketing
Aalto University  Business School
eric.arnould@aalto.fi

Article:
Weijo, Henri A.; Martin, Diane M.; Arnould, Eric J.: Consumer Movements and Collective Creativity: The Case of Restaurant Day. Journal of Consumer 2018. DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucy003

Categories Uncategorized

Small Steps in Sustainable Value Chains

March 14, 2017 //
0

Thinking about sustainability in the B2B space evokes a key word, engagement. This word translates the systemic nature of the sustainability journey into a more human term. A lot of case studies show that sustainability happens through engagement of actors at different levels in the organization, such as executives and production experts “on the shop floor”, across departments such as those responsible for HVAC, water, and waste management and engineering, and between internal actors and really diverse sets of external stakeholders such as NGOS, activist groups, and certifying institutions.  In the context of the sustainability journey, competitors may also become collaborators particularly when trying to set and or meet new industry standards. Engagement is effective when it endures over time. Engagement is empowering especially when it is linked to small incentives for useful innovations. Engagement thrives when low hanging fruit, medium and long term goals are achieved and celebrated.  Because sustainability is a systemic journey with multiple cascading effects, it is empowering to celebrate what appear to be even small steps in a more sustainable direction. In the B2B space, there is a lot of process design, dashboarding, messaging, and applied social science to be done

Categories Uncategorized

Conservative Sustainability

March 14, 2017 //
0

When considering B2C markets, sustainability products, services and messaging need to mobilize myth markets and symbols as with any branding. But to make these products, services, and message resonate we need to make use of the cultural resources that figure into ongoing life projects.  Too much of the sustainability marketing has targeted middle and upper middle class consumers with an aspirational future oriented discourse steeped in the ideology of modernity and paternalistic ideas about our relationships to nature. Think charismatic mega fauna (whales, polar bears pandas, etc) and the cultural construction of nature as a fragile web of life. Farmers in Nebraska and Wyoming, for example, are keen to adopt organic techniques and agricultural inputs if they can be positioned around tradition, stewardship, independence (from creditors & debt), hard work, preserving the family farm, science, “sound” business sense.  Ranchers generally have no trouble with installing large wind turbines on their ranches as they enable ranchers to exploit a previously unexploited natural resource, the turbines, don’t bother the cows, and the income helps to preserve the integrity of the ranch. Spoiling the view or disrupting the birds is not their concern. Working class people in Wyoming are keen to adopt energy saving technologies such as insulation and windows and lightbulbs if they are positioned around ideas of protecting the family and everyday frugality, the waste-not, want-not, DIY ideology they grew up on in farms, ranching and mining communities. Middle class rural Wyomingites are very keen to adopt small scale solar and wind power if it promises freedom and independence, not to mention the just in case notion that an apocalypse may be coming.  In the B2C space, there is a lot of NPD, design, messaging, and applied social science to be done.Fehringer11

Categories Uncategorized

ResearchGate

February 28, 2017 //
0

Find my publications on ResearchGate:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric_Arnould2

Categories Uncategorized
« Older Entries