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Based on analysis of 23 interviews, this paper examines how social media and online content is implicated in the collective, resistant and transnational media experiences of Black women in Britain. It contributes to scholarship concerning race and the virtual marketplace by examining tensions between the countercultural, communal and commercial qualities of Black women’s online experiences. Drawing upon theorising of the oppositional spectator gaze of Black women, and narratives of technology consumption, we unpack how Black women’s digital activity can enable them to navigate the hegemony of US content, their marginalisation in British mass-media, and situate them within a Black experience that transcends Britain’s borders. Our work illustrates how Black women’s online encounters can be a source of resistance, Black digital commentary and community, as well as being subject to corporate co-optation. We conceptualise such online experiences as being shaped by transnational dimensions of the relationship between race, media and markets.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore social dynamics around food and clothing provisioning for young families and how involvement in environmental concerns shapes those dynamics and presents challenges and opportunities to in terms of evolving consumer tastes. Through collecting and analysing narratives of mothering, the authors explore the influence of children on decision making in household provisioning; in particular, how their education into sustainable concepts through the European initiative of eco-schools impacts provisioning. Design/methodology/approach The exploratory research design specifically sought the demographic profile identified in extant literature as engaging with sustainability issues to explore how they were interpreted into familial consumption. This resulted in 28 unstructured interviews exploring a range of related topics with a group of highly educated working mothers with a profession. Findings The study finds that family consumption behaviour is mediated by relations towards environmental concerns and taste positions taken by both parents and children. It illustrates how care for children’s safety, social resilience and health and well-being is habitus informed as well as being the subject of wider institutional logics including educational interventions such as school eco-status and participation in mother and child activity groups. However, tensions arose surrounding the children’s socialisation with peers and space was provided to help the children self-actualise. Research limitations/implications The exploratory goal of the study limited the scope of its empirical work to a small group of participants sharing consumer characteristics and geographical location. Practical implications The research provides ideas for retailers, brands and marketers to better position their product offering as it relates to growing family concerns for ecological issues and sustainable consumption, as well as what motivates sustainable behaviours, from both the child and mothers perspective. Social implications The research identifies the immersion of sustainability into family households when there are no financial implications, influenced through campaigns, schools and society. This provides examples of what motivates sustainable behaviours for retailers and marketers to develop strategies that can be capitalised on. Originality/value The originality of the research emerges through examining how children influence sustainability within households and decision making, moving beyond health implications to educate children to be responsible consumers through play and authentic experiences.

The paper seeks to recuperate autonomy within debates around identity as the discursive construction of self through exploring the ‘greening’ of intensive mothering discourse and the emergence of new subject positions and practices of accountability. It argues that facets of ideologies of ethical and sustainable consumption are inscribed within this discourse, authorising identity work and furnishing everyday provisioning routines with significance and urgency; and that related social practices that are marked for ‘greening’ diligence or negligence are not merely situated and productive, but transformative of mothering identities, roles and norms. We report the findings of a study of a group of professional working mothers as they negotiate competing and conflictual spaces of doing ‘green’ mothering. This opens an analytical window on the diversity of signifying practices that characterise how informants play with boundaries and ambiguity in creative ways, using images of responsible consumption a...

It is almost 30 years since Tom Wolfe first ‘celebrated’ the sinful vanities of greed, class and racism lurking behind Wall Street successes of the 1980s. Since then the excess of city traders and bankers has hardly moderated; nor has the media lost its appetite for reproducing such excess as moralising narratives of avarice, corruption and claims of cynically manipulative practices informing neoliberal market capitalism. Beyond commentary on a culture of high-profile moral posturing set to sell anything and everything as media product, one detects two trenchant and defining insights born of nascent informational capitalism (Castells, 2001). The first relates to the immersion of identity in ‘vast incalculable circuits’ of connectivity; not merely of the conventional media of Wolfe’s era, but of the vast global enterprise of networked society and its computer-mediated worlds where, as predicted, selfdom is indeed experienced as being ‘multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections; it is [indeed] made and transformed by language; sexual congress is [indeed] an exchange of signifiers; and understanding [indeed] follows from navigation and tinkering rather than analysis’ (Turkle, 1997, p. 15). The second relates to the ongoing explosion of new technologies of reproduction in that the identification of the commodity with its image as media content occurs under conditions governed by the ‘systematic production of messages, not from the world, but from the medium itself’ (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 125); and that the interplay of connectivity as mediatised sociality animates symbolic circulation to the point where everyday interactivity consists in a ‘mass medium at the level of the brand’ (Baudrillard, 1998, p. 125). These insights suggest Lury’s (2004, p. 51) exposition of the brand as an ‘interface: a frame that organises and connects as a site of interactivity with its own recursive logic independent of context’. Indeed, in writing that ‘the brand is an image instrument, a medium of translation, a new media object’, Lury (2004, p. 49) not only restates the view of Douglas and Isherwood (1980, p. 62) that ‘the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense’, to make meaning, to think with: she anticipates the underlying concern of this special issue that brands function as distributed cultural intermediaries; and that this is most apparent empirically at the level of the celebrity brand.

This paper contributes to theories of brands as sites of identity work and convergence. It takes as its subject relations of belonging and participation as they shape communal ‘scenes’ out of which spring intimations of spaces of cultural production as branding ecosystems. To illustrate ways in which this line of thought ignites discourses on branding as a mode of relational being, we explore the social environment fomented around Warhol's court, ‘The Factory’, that iconic symbol of the mediated logic of his oeuvre. Drawing on archival accounts of Factory life, we explore cultural production as illustrative of brands and branding as social technologies exciting the imaginary and its theater of possibility. And to understand how collective consumption of relations of connectivity nurture conditions suggestive of new branding forms, we consider the existential logic of ‘branding being’, of thinking ‘spaces’ made available through branding as a mode of relational being.

This article explores the production of the ‘Nigella’ celebrity brand through forms of gendered talk performed by means of online community forums. The complexity and appeal of celebrity culinary brands forces us to turn to particular contexts to explore the passions, concerns and enthusiasms that they elicit and excite. As a context for the exploration of such hyper-mediated brands it is useful to explore the social interactions and associations harboured and sheltered within the collective canopy of the forum, in our case the Food Forum of Nigella.com. The emotional fabric of celebrity culinary brands has much to do with the fact that they are created and sustained through a range of multimedia platforms. One such critical stage is that of the online forum, which we explore as a site wherein feminine identities are performed and reimagined; where notions of ‘doing gender’ within culinary landscapes are worked and reworked through networks of affiliation and shared sentiment.

The Call for Papers for this special issue asked authors to step back and look at the fundamental processes at work in the globalization of the “very idea of marketing.” This is itself a version of a powerful Western doctrine, the totalizing cultural narrative of objectivity and transcendence, of orderings and distances: various avenues suggest themselves. The following commentary seeks to contribute to this project by considering the insertion of this discourse of vantage points and perspective into the narrow cultural consciousness of marketing through exploring one trail: the role of the research community in the production of the research subject.

The paper takes as its subject celebrity and consumption and the cultural logic of the celebrity brand. It introduces the concept of celebritisation as the engine of celebrity culture, discussing ways in which celebrity brands operate as ‘map-making’ devices which situate consumers within networks of symbolic resources. We construct particulars via an investigative narrative that draws critically upon published accounts of the life and work of Andy Warhol, generating observations of signature practices and technologies of formation of Celebrity Brandhood. Within an inductive architecture we modulate to celebrity brands as transmediated marketing accomplishments which trade upon allure, glamour and charisma, constructed around rituals of transition, belonging, intimacy, and affect. We suggest that at the heart of the machinery of the cultural logic of the Celebrity Brand is the mediated spectacle as a field of social invention and transformation. In this way, the paper opens up pathways toward fur...

This paper explores the social dynamics by means of which market forces are enacted at the level of everyday consumption. In particular, it draws on Holt's (2002) notion that as ‘unruly bricoleurs’, consumers kick-start processes of market adjustment and innovation through improvising ways to negotiate the demands of daily life. In this way, consumers can become active players in realising new possibilities for identity construction and empowerment that involve the creative re-appropriation of marketer-based meaning. To investigate those issues, we turn to a virtual community in the empirical setting of car customisation. Over an eight-month period, an internet-based methodology generated textual observations of online posting activity on five internet newsgroups attracting those interested in the particular pursuit of car modification. Participants used those web-forums to share information, passions, and enthusiasms. Analysis shows that grounded aesthetics function as vehicles for creativity an...

The paper introduces the ideas that have inspired this special issue on the production of disciplinary space. It locates those ideas with regard to contemporary themes within the cut and thrust of disciplinary institutions in marketing and the practices they authorise, particularly those that shape the production and distribution of knowledge product. In the spirit of critical inquiry, we frame the discipline reflexively. This helps us to understand marketing academia as a shifting confederation of 'communities of practice' (Wenger 1998), recursively organising itself around negotiated visions of how an invisible, yet representative and influential academic institution reveals itself to itself, through conducting our academic conduct. It introduces the papers and arranges them in a contingent order. This is achieved through imputing to the papers practices that seek to expand available conceptual space, making it available for further development.

The paper contributes to the 25th anniversary celebrations by inviting readers to share a journey back to the early 1980s when the future of Marketing as an academic discipline remained unclear. At this time the author's academic future in marketing was also unclear. He was working in the area of Technology Forecasting, a highly specialised field, not only within social policy and techno-economics, but within the then emerging field of strategic marketing and its subaltern, environmental scanning. In the spirit of "The lessons of history" (Baker 2006) the paper revisits scenarios generated by the author 25 years ago regarding technological futures in the offshore oil and gas industry. It draws on the premise that understanding can be gained by taking a forecast, a knowledge claim, whose tenure is now over, and revisiting it in the light of the present which at the time of making the forecast was, of course, the future. In the arts this historicising approach to a subject is a necessary conjunction to the ...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue that critically examines topics informing long‐standing disputes concering the status of theory and practice in management studies. Contributions explore the character of the imputed relationship between theory and practice.Design/methodology/approachThe editorial introduction sets the discussion of topics in the context of institutional change influencing the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge products in the economy of relevance and reputation. It also presents an overview of the papers included in the special issue.FindingsThe main themes addressed in the papers represent a call for change; a call to radicalize the approaches to understanding ways of knowing; a call to re‐evaluate relations with practitioners; and a call to reimagine ways of representing knowledge to various constituencies, including fellow academic practitioners, management practitioners, students, and policy‐makers and other opinion‐formers.Research limitations/implicationsThe key message is one of the importance of encouraging broad discussions concerning the direction and impact of flows of knowledge and the various products in which that knowledge is embedded. It calls for a more market‐oriented approach to understanding the knowledge economy and the mediating role of various institutional players, including the academy, in the circulation, creation and destruction of knowledge products.Practical implicationsThat a more‐market oriented approach to arrangements for the distribution of research resources in management studies calls for the development of more market‐oriented institutions capable of shaping relationships of collaboration, involvement and accountability.Originality/valueContributions expand the understanding of the problems and opportunities of imputing links to theory and practice.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to introduce the topic of poster presentation as legitimate area of academic study and practice within the marketing discipline.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents the output of one part of a research project that reviewed the state of knowledge and practice within poster presentation as a dissemination medium for research information. The results of the literature search are presented as an annotated bibliography.FindingsThe literature search reveals a sizeable body of material on the use of poster presentation as a dissemination media, indicative of a set of key themes that guide good practice in poster design, construction and presentation. It also includes material that has studied the use of poster design and presentation exercises as pedagogical devices.Research limitations/implicationsThe research on which the paper is based is limited by virtue of not offering a more complete survey of contemporary poster presentation practice across the sciences. It draws observations from the author's attendance at several marketing and management‐related conferences where poster presenters have been interviewed and examples of poster presentation have been collected. However, in the sciences, especially the medical sciences, poster practice is well‐established and in some cases moving towards digitisation.Practical implicationsThe aesthetics of poster design remain unclear in the case of poster design for the dissemination of scientific information. However, a set of templates has been produced based on the close study of a database of over 600 poster designs and ten years' experience of using posters as teaching tools for research training. A methodology for poster design has also been developed known as “The Block Architecture Method of Poster Design”. It uses the software Powerpoint and Photoshop to develop poster design electronically.Originality/valueThe bibliography will help interested teachers and students explore the various issues surrounding poster design, construction and presentation. It will also help to understand some of the advantages of using poster‐design exercises as creative and critical devices in a pedagogical context.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore recent arguments about the nature of the marketing discipline, to state a point of view, and to stimulate debate.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes the approach of a response to recent viewpoints, with implicit permission to think aloud.FindingsMarketing's “identity” crisis is alive, well and profitable, and has manifested itself most recently as the “critical” movement within contemporary marketing scholarship. The reasons are firmly embedded in conventionalized scholarly tradition and the silent institutions that support it, whereby marketing scholars mobilise convenient rhetorics to shift goalposts and build declarative statements that often confuse ontology with tautology.Research limitations/implicationsThe integrative work that the discipline requires will be facilitated by a clearer understanding of the evolving institutional horizon, and how it defines acceptable knowledge‐making practices.Practical implicationsAn improved understanding of the functions of institutions in defining admissible knowledge‐making practice will help reform structures by means of which academic practitioners relate to the subjects they research, puncturing over‐inflated and unhelpful debates about relevance, or theory and practice. This will benefit students, consultants, planners, strategists, and everyone in general.Originality/valueThe paper presents a glimpse of oneself, if one is a marketing academic, and how one makes marketing “marketing” in a world of increasing specialization and the canonization of minutiae.

Nowadays managerial culture is an increasingly critical ingredient of successful knowledge production. For some scholars and practitioners the apparent disconnect between funders, users and researchers as sites of production and consumption comes with costs to the marketing academy and its various stakeholder communities. Closing the perceived gap between theory and practice assumes the proportions of a heroic struggle between the sacred and the profane; between the abstract high-mindedness of theory and the lowly but useful deeds of practice. Various perspectives are offered by way of analysing the origins of this gap, as illustrated in the recent special issue of Marketing Intelligence and Planning (2004). The academy organises itself as if systems of accountability and accessibility in knowledge making are clearly understood and enforceable through the construct 'relevance'. We argue that the academy needs to better understand the inescapable part it plays in circulating unhelpful discourses of marketi...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the virtual consumption communities which cohere around the object of the car. Focusing upon the cultural practice of debadging, the paper intends to reveal forms of connectivity and resistance within communities of car customization.Design/methodology/approachA netnography in the form of non‐participant observation is used to explore the talk of caraficionadosaround issues of customization and affiliation.FindingsThe paper discusses the importance of internet discussion boards as forums for the exchange of information and advice, but also as a site to express their passion for cars and their affiliation with like‐minded others. The research reveals that the question of aesthetics is a significant one for caraficionados. This enables us to theorize such consumers as akin to designers for whom the discussion boards exist as key reference points.Research limitations/implicationsThis is an exploratory study and its primary limitation is one of scope and method. Netnography provides access to web‐based communication. In this sense, a novel channel of access to new forms of expression and ways of doing social relations is employed. Clearly, the insights generated from this study are mediated by the character of the empirical site and the limits of non‐participatory netnography.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper resides in its attempt to theorize the significance of the cultural practice of debadging as a key constituent in community‐formation.

1. Thinking 'Communities of Academic Practice': on space, enterprise and governance in marketing academia Douglas Brownlie Paul Hewer and Mark Tadajewski 2. Parallel universes and disciplinary space: the bifurcation of managerialism and social science in marketing studies Chris Hackley 3. Working the limits of method: the possibilities of critical reflexive practice in marketing and consumer research Shona Bettany and Helen Woodruffe-Burton 4. Reframing critical marketing Avi Shankar 5. Hidden consumers in marketing - the neglect of consumers with scarce resources in affluent societies Karin M. Ekstrom and Torbjorn Hjort 6. Praxis or performance: does critical marketing have a gender blind-spot? Pauline Maclaran, Caroline Miller, Elizabeth Parsons and Emma Surman 7. Veblen and Darwin: tracing the intellectual roots of evolutionism in consumer research Georgios Patsiaouras and James A. Fitchett 8. Critical brand poetics: "from The M at the End of the Earth" Roel Wijland and Cliff Fell 9. Towards a critical political marketing agenda? Mona Moufahim and Ming Lim 10. How far can we push sceptical reflexivity? An analysis of marketing ethics and the certification of poverty Daniel Neyland and Elena Simakova 11. Service marketing and subjectivity: the shaping of customer-oriented employees Per Skalen 12. Disciplining the discipline: understanding postcolonial epistemic ideology in marketing Rohit Varman and Biswatosh Saha 13. Marketing theory: Breaking the siege of incrementalism Nikhilesh Dholakia 14. Beyond critical marketing A. Fuat Firat 15. The critical participant Jeff B. Murray and Julie L. Ozanne 16. Modes of engagement for critical marketing: oppositional, revivalist and therapeutic Michael Saren 17. Figuring knowledge and desire in critical marketing: Lacan's four discourses John Desmond 18. And the beat goes on! Critical marketing for community development Lisa Penaloza

The marketing audit is widely regarded as a valuable diagnostic device in marketingplanning. In theory it should be the starting-point for any considered course of managerial actionin marketing. In practice there is often confusion about how to translate the principles ofmarketing auditing into tangible outcomes. The article clarifies the role of marketing auditing asan intervention that facilitates learning and transformation towards a culture of sustainablecontinuous improvement. In doing so it draws clear links between the means of marketingauditing, i.e., diagnosis, and its end, i.e., incremental organisational change. The author sets outan approach to process and practice in marketing auditing that places benchmarks andbenchmarking at its centre.

That a sizeable and expanding chunk of economic activity is generated by the consumption of goods and services related to caring for animal companions is well understood. That animal companions can bring pleasures that enrich the lives of their human companions is understood. That the relationship between companion animals and humans is an important prism through which humans come to define themselves, express their identity to others, and otherwise make their life meaningful is gaining recognition. That the companionship between humans and animals is a potentially rich consumption context by means of which to advance consumer culture theory is not that well understood. As this commentary discusses, a close reading of Mosteller's (2007) paper raises all those points and more.

In mapping out the twists and turns of the evolving research agenda in strategic marketing, some of the diversity and energy brought to discussions of process and practice in the area, has been captured in recent discussions. This paper sets out to bring the idea of ‘managerial judgement’ to those discussions. In doing so, it draws on work which argues with some foresight that there is a need to examine processual aspects of marketing management and develop appropriate analytical tools for achieving this. The paper considers the value of managerial judgement as such an analytical tool and finds that it provides a useful way of focusing on marketing managers’ creative accomplishments, rather than their rational limitations in the face of inadequate or inconsistent information. In doing so, it reasserts the value of the word ‘policy’ in marketing, at a time when it has almost disappeared from our vocabulary to be replaced by the word ‘strategy’, with its connotations of instrumentality, functionality and li...

This article argues that R&D activity may be used creatively to enhance marketing. It specifically considers the activities of R&D and marketing in small high technology firms where there are insights to be gained about organizing for flexibility. It is argued that the R&D process can be approached not only as a technical exercise, but as a social interaction. The discussion provides managerial suggestions and outlines a research agenda for the investigation of organizational issues influencing the R&D-marketing interface.

‘Relevance’ is a quality widely attributed to research that closes the gap between theory and practice. It is an attribute well worth attracting these days. For some marketing scholars and practitioners closing this gap has assumed the proportions of an heroic and perennial struggle between the high-mindedness of marketing theory and the low deeds of marketing practice. Many different perspectives are offered by way of an analysis of the origins of this particular species. Yet, despite our best efforts to the contrary, the beast continues to prosper and to defy understanding. Through critically appraising the social location of marketing management and its ensuing rhetoric, this paper provides an alternative understanding of this gap and the ‘slings and arrows’ we suffer in our quest to achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of closure. This understanding implicates the marketing academy in the perpetuation of the belief that the gap exists ‘out there’ and that it should and can be closed. Controversially, we suggest that, despite the marketing academy's declared quest for ‘relevance’ through providing clues to better marketing practice, perhaps it is in the academy's own interest to continue to perpetuate this particular marketing myth. We argue that if this is so, then the marketing management discourse is in danger of being trapped in the aspic of its own prejudices. The paper maps out the contours of this danger.

This paper is about marketing accounting. It is about reading marketing writing and writing marketing reading and what calls them into being. It is about our “ab‐outing” practices; those signifying practices by means of which we week to capture a piece of the world and show it off, wrapped in a suitable tale of discovery, in a cabinet in the museum of marketing knowledge. You may wonder why should we bother, since without those representation practices and textual conventions how could we be sure that the objects on display were real, not fakes; that our representations were true images of objects in the real world, not mere simulations of simulations? Do you find comfort in the view that marketing discourse organizes in such a way as to sustain the convention that objects in the marketing world “out there” are antecedent to our images of them? And does it discomfort you to recognize the ideas of Garfinkel (1967) being used to suggest that marketing accounts are constituent features of the settings we make observable? Whatever your answers, how textual organization persuades and makes real is a point worth considering. I think this is a timely project, as we warm to qualitative methods, especially ethnography, on the (mis)understanding that they can reveal truer, deeper, thicker insights into the real world. For it is not possible to avoid the problem of representation in this way, as Geertz (1973) reminds us in his invitation to reflexive ethnographic inquiry.

The marketing audit has a long and distinguished provenance as a diagnostic device in marketing planning. Indeed, as any good marketing student will tell you, the marketing audit should be the starting‐point for any considered course of managerial action in marketing. Yet, in practice there is often confusion about how to conduct a marketing audit to good effect. This paper argues that confusion does not arise out of uncertainty about what to do, for there is a wealth of accessible literature setting out the steps. Rather, this confusion is seen to be a product of an implicit bias towards means rather than ends in the existing literature. This bias manifests itself in a clear emphasis on the content of marketing audits, i.e. the checklists and questionnaires which facilitate diagnosis. However, the purpose of the marketing audit is not merely to diagnose, but to facilitate collective action in the light of that diagnosis. Thus, if the end of the marketing audit is learning and change, then the auditing pr...

The technique of marketing auditing has a long and distinguished heritage as a diagnostic device in marketing management and planning. Indeed, the marketing audit should, in theory, be the starting-point for most considered courses of managerial action in marketing. Yet, in practice there is often confusion about how to conduct a marketing audit and on what issues it should focus. There is also confusion about the thinking processes that underpin the audit methodology. In this study, the author sets out an approach to the process of marketing auditing that places benchmarks and benchmarking at its center. In doing so, the author attempts to shed light on various points of confusion that in his experience impede the conduct of marketing audits. A set of considered guidelines is provided, which will help make the audit process more effective.

Portfolio analysis has been subjected to considerable scrutiny in recent years. This paper describes an attempt to recast portfolio analysis in the light of past criticisms and the growing importance of expert systems to marketing decision making. It introduces a data driven approach to the analysis of competitive effects that has at its heart a portfolio-based model. Inputs to the ‘stratlogic’ model include data on the competitive structure of a product-market and measures of the marketing ambition and positioning of the players in it. The authors go on to outline the various steps that should be taken to develop an expert system based on the stratlogic approach. By deliberately exploiting management's creativity and insight, the authors argue that the expert system approach facilitates the strategic thinking that would be constrained where a predefined set of general propositions was imposed.

(1995). On the commodification of marketing knowledge: Opening themes. Journal of Marketing Management: Vol. 11, No. 7, pp. 619-627.

Marketing is still widely perceived as simply the creator of wants and needs through selling and advertising and marketing theory has been criticized for not taking a more critical approach to the subject. This is because most conventional marketing thinking takes a broadly managerial perspective without reflecting on the wider societal implications of the effects of marketing activities. In response this important new book is the first text designed to raise awareness of the critical, ethical, social and methodological issues facing contemporary marketing. Uniquely it provides: The latest knowledge based on a series of major seminars in the field The insights of a leading team of international contributors with an interdisciplinary perspective . A clear map of the domain of critical marketing A rigorous analysis of the implications for future thinking and research. For faculty and upper level students and practitioners in Marketing, and those in the related areas of cultural studies and media Critical Marketing will be a major addition to the literature and the development of the subject.

Environmental scanning is one of the cornerstones of strategic marketing. A plethora of normative literature argues that it plays a key role in bringing information about the external environment to the attention of decision‐makers in order that they can make better informed decisions. This literature also provides a rich source of ideas about how to go about environmental scanning, particularly dealing with the collection of data and the various techniques that can be used to analyse that data. Yet, empirical findings point strongly to the view that the low deeds of environmental scanning practice, diverge in some important respects from the high‐minded prescriptions of the normative literature. Various explanations can be put forward for this. This paper considers those explanations. Specifically it explores the assumptions and premises about the constructs of organization and environment which inform the strategic marketing literature. It argues the case for alternative images of organization and envir...

Portfolio analysis has been subjected to considerable scrutiny in recent years. Describes an attempt to recast it in the light of past criticisms and the unyielding importance of competitive considerations to marketing decision making. It does not introduce another new portfolio matrix. Rather it describes a broadly based approach that gives users more control over portfolio design and analysis. Describes a data‐driven approach to the analysis of competitive position that has its origins in a portfolio‐based methodology previously described by Moutinho in 1987. The Stratlogic approach is not driven by a pre‐specified portfolio model and its derived matrix. Instead it involves users in a procedure that combines multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. Inputs include empirical data on the scope and resourcing of marketing strategies as well as the performance of players in a defined competitive set. Describes the proposed methodology. It also draws attention to some technical and managerial issues that arise from the flexibility and control that the stratlogic approach affords the user. This work is part of a programme of funded research into the development of expert systems for areas of strategic marketing decision making.

Summary The paper discusses the constitution of the consuming subject in lifestyle practices of belonging and difference, taste and choice in the material circumstances of everyday living. It considers how lived moments of mundane activity can be understood, not simply as sites of social reproduction and unknowing regulation, but as fields of invention, transformation and reflexive struggle. In particular we unpack the contribution to be gleaned from a thoughtful return to De Certeau et al. (1998) , a theorist of practice whose lucidly insightful works, we claim, remain largely silenced within contemporary debates over the turn to practice in consumer research ( Schau, Muniz, & Arnould, 2009 ). It is argued that current conceptions of practice within management and marketing find themselves corralled by the authoritative legacy of the works of Bourdieu, 1977 , Bourdieu, 1984 , Bourdieu, 1990 which has the effect of marginalizing other traditions of practice theorising: here consumption practices are formatted into logics of rational calculation. We suggest that the work of de Certeau offers an alternative to reductive discursive accountings, revealing the emergent and material character of mundane sense and deed, where the ordinary is figured as the realm par excellence of improvised vernacular consumption practices. In seeking to repair mechanistic underpinnings by linking practices and structure in the everyday lifestyle work of consumers, we hope to turn our gaze towards the moral and political character of that which practice theory calls forth. Born of necessity such practice laughs in the face of Bourdieu's dismissal of the ‘choice of necessity’.

This paper unpacks the iconicity of brand Nigella. In doing so, we show that the cultural logic of the economic space occupied by this brand springs from signifiying networks of interpenetrating positions generated within discourses, not only of food, family, and cuisine, but of sex, gender, and sexuality. We argue that the core appeal of brand Nigella has as much to do with the recipes it makes available for "thinking" feminine identities, as it does the information it provides as a culinary instruction manual about the preparation of food.

A day rarely passes without there being discussion of the major changes which organizations in both the public and private sectors, are undergoing to become more effective. The case for change is often said to be driven by the imperatives of an increasingly demanding marketplace; and this case is often expressed in a seductive rhetoric which utilizes maxims and metaphors drawn from the ideological resource of the marketing concept. The authors believe that the current penchant for couching change initiatives in the language of marketing exposes some of the limitations of the marketing concept. Discusses these limitations and addresses the problems which constrain the use of the marketing concept as an ideological resource.

The paper contributes to scholarship theorising the sociality of the brand in terms of subject positions it makes possible through drawing upon the generative context of circulating discourses, in this case of masculinity, cuisine and celebrity. Specifically, it discusses masculinity as a socially constructed gender practice (Bristor and Fischer, 1993), examining materialisations of such practice in the form of visualisations of social relations as resources for 'thinking gender' or 'doing gender'. The transformative potential of the visualisations is illuminated by exploring the narrative content choreographed within a series of photographic images positioning the market appeal of a celebrity chef through the medium of a contemporary lifestyle cookery book. We consider how images of men 'doing masculinity'are not only channelled into reproducing existing gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality in the service of commercial ends, but also into disrupting such enduring stereotyping through subtle reframing. We acknowledge that masculinity is already inscribed within conventionalised representations of culinary culture. In this case we consider how traces of masculinity are exploited and reinscribed through contemporary images that generate resources for rethinking masculine roles and identities, especially when viewed through the lens of stereotypically feminised pursuits such as shopping, food preparation, cooking, and the communal intimacy of food sharing. We identify unsettling tensions within the compositions, arguing that they relate to discursive spaces between the gendered positions written into the images and the popular imagination they feed off. Set against landscapes of culinary culture, we argue that the images invoke a brand of naively roughish "laddishness" or "blokishness", rendering it in domesticated form not only as benign and containable, but fashionable, pliable and, importantly, desirable. We conclude that although the images draw on stereotypical premeditated notions of a feral, boisterous and untamed heterosexual masculinity, they also set in motion gender-blending narratives.

The emerging area of 'critical marketing' claims that the value of importing critical social theory lies in its capacity to interrogate the basic assumptions and conventions that guide research and teaching practice and collective institutional development within the marketing discipline. In her reviews of the character and status of critical marketing, Burton (2001, 2005) bemoans the slow development of critical discourse in marketing, attributing it to "[a] lack of a theoretical tradition and relatively poor knowledge of theoretical developments in other social sciences" (2001:737). She broadly asserts that emancipation from the structures and strictures that bind marketing scholars to normalised institutionalised logics, such as performative means-ends calculus and naïve scientism, should be the goal of a critical marketing project that seeks to redress the lack of critical theoretical discourse within the discipline. This paper considers the claimed liberatory potential of critmar, arguing that notions of emancipation are not only situated and utopian in character, but undermined by the politics of representation: this is another way of saying that if we are to realise the reflexive, de-naturalising goals of critmar, we must theorise social contexts of marketing knowledge production. The paper discusses how it might be that self-consciously motivated critical theorising in marketing could make it possible to see and say different things than we are accustomed to; to interrogate our understanding anew, perhaps revealing new insights, or reminding us of past insights now forgotten. In this way the paper explores critmar's aim to open up collective disciplinary space for new voices and new sources of disciplinary capital, encouraging a theoretical pluralism within marketing that draws on the wider social sciences.

In Levi-Straussian terms cooking marks the "transition between nature and culture". Yet the study of cookbooks as placed cultural artefacts is largely neglected by consumer researchers. This essay seeks to address this oversight, setting out to explore the potential contribution of a turn to cookbooks for enriching our understanding of the character of contemporary consumer culture. It weaves a line of argument that asserts the value of treating cookbooks as cultural products, as objectifications of culinary culture, as constructed social forms which are amenable to textual analysis. In this respect it declares that, rather than simply being understood as reflections of contemporary consumer culture, cookbooks should be understood as artefacts of cultural life in the making. That is, cookbooks contain not only recipes but inscribed cultural tales which can be understood as productive of the culinary culture that they pretend only to display, and performative in their attempt to do things with us. We reveal cookbooks to be sites of aestheticised consumption.

First paragraph: In celebration of Morris Holbrook's lifetime contribution to the advancement of marketing scholarship, we have produced an aural portrait of the man that seeks to convey some of the vitality, intelligence and generosity of his famed persona. We have compiled our portrait from interviews and recording sessions made during a week-long immersion with Morris the thinker, writer and musician in his Upper West apartment in New York's Manhattan and at his desk in nearby Columbia University.