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How do cultural and creative workers respond to racism and the politics of representation and respectability in the digital age? In what ways do they engage in forms of community-building and solidarity-making, while managing pressures to build digital presence and personal brands? This article seeks to address these questions via 30 in-depth interviews with Black, Brown and Asian (BBA) workers in the UK cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Focusing on the ambivalence of digital self-branding practices, our work builds on scholarship on inequalities in the CCIs, and on platformization and race. We organize our findings regarding the experiences and values of these workers into three main themes: the positive potential these workers find in the capacity of digital media technologies for forging community and solidarity; the benefits and limitations of using digital media technologies to communicate counternarratives, including exposure of discrimination in CCIs, and adapting and 'gaming' features such as recommendation algorithms; and how they experience and navigate felt pressures to self-brand in contemporary digital contexts. We find a marked ambivalence in the reported experiences of these workers, which generatively complicates existing accounts of digital technology, algorithmic struggles and the UK's CCIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on original qualitative data this article analyses fluid and shifting notions of symbolic capital within the Pakistani diaspora in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. Focusing on the South Asian concept of izzat (honour/prestige) it is argued that the field of local symbolic prestige is adapting to the macro context laid down by consumer culture as its mechanisms permeate the structural, cultural and everyday lives of this transnational community. This is partially and differentially influencing forms of cultural and symbolic capital accumulation in the community, as evidenced by subtle and varied changes in the appropriation and exchange of izzat. Izzat is a phenomenon which has been centrally embedded within Pakistani cultures and societies for centuries. Our key argument is that the context and nature of izzat among the Pakistani transnational community studied are being significantly shaped and altered by the role of consumer culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but that this simultaneously maps onto existing hierarchies and social differentiation within this transnational community, as well as contemporary discourse on and divisions over Muslim identity and piety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the circulation of climate content on social media, little longitudinal research has explored their relations with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Considering that individual behaviors, in conjunction with structural change, are critical to mitigate climate change, this two-wave panel study among 657 adolescents examined how social media interactions (i.e., exposure, liking, commenting, sharing and posting of climate messages) reciprocally related to adolescents' pro-environmental cognitions (i.e., descriptive and injunctive norms, attitudes) and behavior. The study showed transactional relationships between self-posting and sharing of climate content over time. Pro-environmental behavior at Wave 1 (W1) positively related to all cognitive variables at Wave 2 (W2), yet no reciprocal relationship occurred as none of the cognitive variables (W1) predicted behavior (W2) over time. Moreover, with the exception of the positive link between "liking" (W1) and attitudes (W2), no (reciprocal) relationships between social media interactions and adolescents' pro-environmental cognitions and behavior occurred over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the historical focus of customer value research has been on transactional values, it is important to also understand the non-transactional values co-created by customer online engagement behaviors. However, online engagement research in tourism has focused almost exclusively on experience sharing behaviors via online review websites. This research is purposed to develop a multi-dimensional measure of non-transactional values created via online brand community members' engagement behaviors. Focusing on Marriott Bonvoy Insider Brand Community members, scale development procedures were used to identify four dimensions of non-transactional value: influential-experience value, C-to-B innovation value, relational value, and functional value. The scale achieves good validity and reliability. Relationships with both antecedents (e.g., internal and external motivations) and consequences (e.g., brand attachment and brand loyalty) were examined to assess nomological validity. Tourism researchers and managers can employ this scale to diagnose the non-transactional values co-created by customer online engagement behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prescription brand substitution also known as generic substitution (GS)is a worldwide phenomenon. In the pharmaceutical industry, growth of the generic drug market implies growth in the number and types of substitutes for ethical (innovator) pharmaceutical products. This threat is relevant mainly due to the comparatively lower prices of these substitutes. Ultimately, prescription brand substitution renders the various marketing efforts and investments of the affected pharmaceutical companies fruitless. The efforts in the literature have focused more on cost as the reason but there seems to be more reasons than cost in developing countries like Ghana. The study examined the marketing-related impacts of prescription brand substitution at community pharmacies in Ghana. Utilizing the ideas of Porter's five competitive forces model, specifically the threat of substitute products and services, the study which is cross-sectional, deductive and descriptive survey in nature, used a mix of cluster sampling and purposive sampling to arrive at a final sample size of 50 pharmacies and 9 pharmaceutical companies,. Data collected were analysed using simple linear regression and descriptive statistics. Weak but statistically significant relationship between frequency of pharmacy calls and nature of drug substitution was observed. Also, prescription brand substitution is prevalent at community pharmacies in Ghana, and that ethical companies are the most affected. Pharmacy front line staff and patients played contributory roles in this phenomenon. It is recommended that Ethical pharmaceutical companies should acknowledge, plan and act in order to minimize the competitive effects of prescription brand substitution [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the concept of periphery fandom, a concept that is new in the debate on consumer culture, to interrogate global fan community productive experiences from various geographical locations. Periphery fandom is defined as a sub-ordinated fan community experience, where members are deprived of access to their objects of fandom. Periphery fandom also refers to a fan productive experience that is detrimental to the fan community ethos. This notion of periphery fandom is underpinned by insights from fandom studies, brand community scholarship, and core and periphery theories. Using adult fans of LEGO as an example, this article demonstrates the character of periphery fandom. By contrasting the data gathered from 2014 to 2019 during UK, Japan, USA, and Brazil LEGO fan events, this study reveals how fans' divergent productive practices and community experiences are influenced by their geographical location. Moreover, the fan productive experiences from the periphery further hinder their creative expressions and visibility, creating a more fragmented global brand fandom landscape. This study overall advances a contribution to the fandom debates by contrasting fan production and fan brand experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand engagement behaviors in online hospitality brand communities, the purpose of this research was to understand hotel customers' online engagement behaviors, associated cocreated nontransactional values, and the underlying drivers. Netnography analysis and qualitative surveys along with multiorder categorization analysis were used. The netnography results indicate that hotel customer engagement behaviors cocreate five types of value. Importantly, these values accrue in different levels to not only the customer, but also to other customers and to the firm. Analyses of a subsequent qualitative survey data validated the four factors driving these engagement behaviors and, importantly, found that the motivational drivers vary by type of engagement. A conceptual framework of value cocreation via customer engagement is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on work in communication and marketing studies to develop a theory of cultural participation as fundamentally contested, between cultural producers who aim to steer and manage the activity of participants via the brand community (participation from above) and participants who have the potential to resist and challenge the producers' direction (participation from below). It develops this theory empirically with reference to a cultural form in which audience participation plays a central part, professional wrestling. World Wrestling Entertainment aims to direct and contain participation within sanctioned parameters, both online and offline, while fans retain the capacity to develop and voice an effective critique of existing storylines through those same venues. By sampling and examining the key storylines building to World Wrestling Entertainment's marquee event, Wrestlemania, from 2014 to 2016, I show how the logics of participation from above and below interact, and how, ultimately, the production and reproduction of brand community are fundamentally contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one of the most cited studies in business and economics, Muñiz and O'Guinn established that a brand can serve as the basis of community. Their seminal fieldwork showed that through digital communication, consumers loyal to the same brand formed a community unbounded by geography and rooted in collective imagination. This article provides an alternative ethnographic account in which the relationship between brands and community runs in reverse: community serves as the input rather than output of a brand, with digital communication bringing forth a distinctly local and interpersonal brand story. Drawing on multi-year fieldwork conducted on- and offline with youth and outreach workers in Harlem, I illustrate how youth implanted the Marmot brand and its Mammoth "biggie" parka with street-level meanings total apart from the public image of the brand yet consistent with branding practices in the corporate sector. This article helps to reorient the sociological, media, marketing, and consumer literatures by demonstrating how place-based, face-to-face relationships may become more, not less, significant as brands, digital technology, and community converge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has three main objectives. Our first is to turn to sport as a particularly illuminating and revealing example of consumer culture in the making. Marketplace logic suffuses consumer culture, and exploring practices of fandom as performed thus becomes particularly revealing of the tensions and contradictions which are thrown up when passions collide with finance and branding strategies. Our second objective is to mobilise this insight to further research on brand communities through better situating social practices as entangled in this heady nexus of passions, power and cultural politics. Through a netnographic analysis of forum posts from Celtic Football Club’s notorious ‘Green Brigade’ ultras-style fan-group, we focus on how such social formations forge counter-identities, which act not in harmony with the larger brand ethos but serve to legitimate and affirm a counter-philosophy. As such, our final objective is to better understand the roles of brand agitator and brand heretic as key roles within this contested social formation. Fandom as dramatic ritual and social drama brings in its wake contradictions and tensions especially when it goes toe-to-toe with the forces of economics, branding and marketing strategy. Here, a counter-brand community as we reveal mobilises marketplace logic and appears to adopt their own practices of mimicking brand strategising for their own ends, or as they assert, ‘Let the people sing’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing maturity of many sectors of the tourism industry, providers have enhanced their efforts to develop loyal relationships with selected customers—a strategy that theoretically results in higher profits and a more stable competitive advantage. There is mounting evidence, however, that most loyalty programs are ineffective in generating psychological attachment to the provider. Therefore, the primary purpose of this article was to document the factors associated with the formation of ongoing, stable, and intimate (i.e., loyal) relationships between individuals and a provider of a cruise package. Data from 20 in-depth interviews with purposefully selected cruisers suggested that loyal relationships between customers and a cruise provider depended on the treatment customers received from the provider, the opportunities customers had to help the provider, and the bond they had with a larger community of cruisers. Implications for the integration and extension of loyalty theory are discussed, and suggestions for the development of effective loyalty programs are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]