Marketing Theory

This paper explores inauthenticity in the context of the Gems TV shopping channel using existential phenomenology. Objectively, subjectively and performatively Gems TV fails to convincingly stage a sense of authenticity. This is a televisual format featuring clearcut commercialism, obscure gemstones and opaque verification. Insincere screen performances are not only entertaining, but shoddiness and unpredictability of programming provides backstage glimpses that paradoxically stimulate fantasies of authenticity. Moments of intrapersonal and interpersonal connection arise around viewing. Accordingly, research into the neglected side of the authenticity-inauthenticity dialectic demonstrates that the latter may be a miasma of meanings as complex, contradictory and evocative as the former.

This paper addresses the question of the resources that consumers rely on when faced with products that communicate very little. When consumers purchase items from Christian abbeys, this question is particularly significant given that these organizations, while sharing a common history, are spatially dispersed. Through qualitative interviews with purchasers of monastic products, our research confirms the contagion process from products’ origin to consumers, and proposes the new concept of World of Origin (WOO), a cloud-like representation serving as an extrinsic source of meaning and acting as a substitute for strong brand narratives. Distinct from Country of Origin, terroir, brand aura, and heritage, WOO is an addition to the marketing conceptual toolbox, facilitating a thinner grain analysis of consumption phenomena. The contagious power of WOO enriches the research on the context’s influence and enables a discussion of the consequences of consumers themselves creating embellished or even false inventions of the past.

This article tackles an underexplored topic in the Market Studies literature—the enactment of exchange practices in overlapping markets. Based on an ethnographic study, the article examines a contested market space in which sustainable and conventional coffee buyers compete to enact exchanges with farmers. At the center of this competition are farmers, whose subsistence challenges heavily influence the choice of market(s) they operate in. An Exchange Entanglements framework for analyzing overlapping exchanges is developed, which accounts for market concerns, calculative power asymmetries, and the (re)configuration of market entities. The article builds our understanding of how exchanges are enacted to account for concerns in overlapping markets, and develops a characterization of overlapping market exchanges. It questions the extent to which dominant market actors can address farmers’ subsistence challenges, and highlights the problematic challenge of enacting concerned markets that serve marginalized market actors.

This article combines the theoretical lenses of bridal identity and liminal consumption to illustrate the processes of problem-solving, negotiation and reconciliation through which the bride creates her bridal identity, in the Global South context of Nigeria. Most wedding ritual studies typically emphasise the processes of creating and negotiating a successful bridal identity, but few acknowledge the possibilities of failure and its effect upon the liminars. In addition, within liminal consumption studies, the role of liminars’ mentors is often under-theorised. Thus, we contribute to the field by expanding on the concept of ‘liminal gatekeepers’ as the individuals and institutions who control and enforce certain norms associated with the liminal experience. Following an interpretivist approach, the article also advances our understanding of the ways in which the demands of liminal gatekeepers affect the liminars’ experiences and identifies three novel bridal identity outcomes, namely, (i) Embedded Bridal Identity; (ii) Synthesised Bridal Identity; and (iii) Marginalisation. In this way, we advance marketing research around how a liminal consumer identity such as bridal identity is co-constructed between liminars and gatekeepers.

In this paper, we study the formation of a new market actor, the digitalised marketer, which emerges at the boundary between strategy- and data-driven marketing. Building on constructivist market studies, we draw attention to the notion of agencing as boundary work and the range of boundary workers in the agencement of which the marketer is part. Drawing on 63 interviews with marketing professionals from multiple contexts, we reveal the difficulties to keep a pace with the plethora of digital marketing tools and highlight the emerging ‘market for digital marketing’ as a key device in the agencing of the digitalised marketer. We present two modes of agencing work, prosthetic and habilitative, to conceptualise how digitalised markets and platforms concurrently enable and captivate marketers’ agency, but also how marketers and their peer networks contest these limits and expand the space for action. This contribution serves to extend the recognised need to reconnect marketing with markets, to also acknowledge how markets are connected to the shaping of marketing and its actors. Implications for theory, practice and marketing education are discussed as we seek to capacitate marketers to operate in an increasingly digitalised environment.

Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of habitus and field have been deployed to theorise the unreflexive consumption practices characterising much of consumers’ everyday lives. Less is known, however, about the disruptive experience when habitus and field suddenly misalign – which Bourdieu terms ‘hysteresis’. We address this lacuna by studying smalahove (sheep’s head) consumption involving participant observation at a Norwegian smalahove farm – an unsettling space within the food consumption field that may challenge many consumers’ habitual ways of seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting meat. Our core contribution lies in introducing a dynamic conceptualisation of hysteresis, demonstrating how it fluctuates in consumption environments; intensifying and diminishing in intensity as the gaps between habitus and field open and close.

Marketing and consumer research has drawn attention to life transitions as critical sites of consumption but has insufficiently explored bereavement, a universal life transition that can involve (un)wanted inheritance, initiating a potential cycle of retention, reimagining or disposal. Life transitions represent potentially transformative moments of consumption when individual consumption can be more positively redirected towards sustainable choices. Using semi-structured interviews and qualitative data, this study critically investigates the cycle of inheritance consumption, informed by Evans’ understanding of consumption with an emphasis on both acquisition and disposal. The study uncovers three liminal stages: separation and detachment; instability, ambiguity and prolonged liminality; and stability and completeness. First, we expand the scope of empirical consumer research by conceptualising inheritance as liminal. Second, we illuminate the inheritance consumption cycle, showing liminal inheritance stages are critical transition moments that trigger complex positive and negative emotional responses, with implications for whether goods remain suspended or pass into further utility. Finally, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising bereavement as a liminal life transition, and call for researchers to study inheritance beyond acquisition, since how inherited goods are retained or divested in liminal moments can have implications for sustainability and may provide opportunities to steer more responsible and fulfilling consumption with an emphasis on limits rather than excess.

This commentary section presents a dialogical discussion on Appau’s (2021) ‘Toward a divine economic system’, an article in which he explores religious exchanges in the context of a Pentecostal Church in Ghana and proposes ‘the divine economy’ as an alternative economic system to interrogate and extend scholarship on the relationship between the market and religion. In a thought-provoking conversation, four commentators (including Appau) engage in a critical discussion aimed at generating new ideas on theorizing the complex relationship between the market, consumption, and religion.