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PurposeContemporary branding transpires in a complex technological and media environment whose key contextual characteristics remain largely unexplained. The article provides a conceptual understanding of the elements of contemporary branding as they take place using networked platforms and explains them as an increasingly important practice that affects customer and manager experience.Design/methodology/approachThis article draws on a variety of recent sources to synthesize a model that offers a more contextualized, comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of how branding has become and is being altered because of the use of branded service platforms and algorithms.FindingsCore terminology about technoculture, technocultural fields, platform assemblages, affordances, algorithms and networks of desire set the foundation for a deeper conceptual understanding of the novel elements of algorithmic branding. Algorithmic branding transcended the mere attachment of specific “mythic” qualities to a product or experience and has morphed into the multidimensional process of using media to manage communication. The goal of marketers is now to use engagement practices as well as algorithmic activation, amplification, customization and connectivity to drive consumers deeper into the brand spiral, entangling them in networks of brand-related desire.Practical implicationsThe model has a range of important managerial implications for brand management and managerial relations. It promotes a understanding of platform brands as service brands. It underscores and models the interconnected role that consumers, devices and algorithms, as well as technology companies and their own service brands play in corporate branding efforts. It suggests that consumers might unduly trust these service platforms. It points to the growing importance of platforms' service brands and the consequent surrender of branding power to technology companies. And it also provides a range of important ethical and pragmatic questions that curious marketers, researchers and policy-makers may examine.Originality/valueThis model provides a fresh look at the important topic of branding today, updating prior conceptions with a comprehensive and contextually grounded model of service platforms and algorithmic branding.

Prior consumer research has tended to focus on identity-related stigma management of individuals toward their own stigma. However, little is known about the consumption-related identity work that stigmatized individuals undertake to discharge the courtesy stigma attached to close associates such as family members. Courtesy stigma refers to the discredit directed toward people who are closely associated with a stigmatized individual or group. Drawing on interview, ethnographic, and netnographic data on China’s ‘Leftover Women,’ our research analyzes the personal and, more centrally, the social identity work related consumption counternarratives that these women construct—through combinations of specific kinds of consumption and gift-giving practices—to counteract family and courtesy stigma. Counternarratives are the resistance stories that people tell and live to either implicitly or explicitly challenge the dominant cultural narrative. The findings of our investigation help to build an enhanced understanding of how stigmatized individuals act as consumers in the market and via digital channels to tackle the family identity challenges of courtesy stigma that have not been explored in extant studies of consumer stigma identity work.

This is a scripted adaptation of a conversational podcast interview between Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets about contemporary consumer activism and its relationship to media studies. After the interview, the conversants agreed to develop the transcript of the conversation in order to be more relevant to a scholarly audience who are interested in how Jenkins’ ideas apply to the understanding and investigation of consumer culture today. The conversation frames and synthesizes a range of thinking around activism, fan studies, brand management, and consumer culture theory. Couched in the American context but containing themes that may also relate to global culture in the current moment, it covers the theoretical as well as the pragmatic concerns of many of the stakeholders in the world of contemporary consumer activism, from the activists themselves to the brand managers who respond to their actions to the creators who write the stories that inspire them both. Topics include the relevance of participatory culture today, anti-racism and the role of media, consumer conflicts with brands and the corporations who police them, the importance of civic imagination to civic engagement, differences between brand managers and story creators, consumer activism in the workplace, activist and participatory approaches to civic research, the nature of contemporary consumer activist movements, the impact of intersectionality, and the prefigurative possibilities for change today.

Purpose This paper aims to strengthen the process of design thinking by aligning it with netnography, specifically auto-netnography, which this paper asserts is particularly suited to the task of studying and enriching the actions of “designerly types” who seek to fashion monetisable businesses. Design/methodology/approach This paper conducts an auto-netnography with a structure divined from established design thinking theory – that of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing – to afford an understanding of how a popular health food influencer designs a successful vegan restaurant. Findings This paper illustrates the empathetic relationship between a long-term audience member and an entrepreneur/designer/marketer. The intimate cultural analysis reveals the nature of their symbiotic entwinement. In a way that few other methods could, the method shows how this sense of reciprocity, deepens over time. Research limitations/implications Conducting an auto-netnography is a prolonged and difficult task. Nonetheless, by revealing the rituals, expectations, roles and routines of content creators, designers and followers, this paper illustrates exciting possibilities for the enactment and development of design thinking in the marketing field. Practical implications Designerly types such as marketers and content creators should closely study, listen to and interact with consumers by using a similarly staged process that draws equally from design thinking and auto-netnography. Originality/value Prior to this study, existing research has not previously linked design thinking with either netnographic or auto-netnographic research.

Dominant perspectives on technology adoption and consumption tend to be cognitive, instrumental, and individualistic. We offer a desire-centered, future-oriented, and culturally grounded alternative model called the Disenchanted Enchantment Model (DEM). Drawing on historical evidence and revised interpretations of theories of enchantment and disenchantment by Weber and Saler, we show that desire is at the heart of technology consumption’s enchantments, and how its fulfilment is temporary, skeptical, and ironic. We provide an important cultural counterbalance to models such as the Technology Acceptance Model, which replace wonder with reason. Instead we theorize the process that drives contemporary technology adoption as centering on desirous senses of wonderment and anticipation. We offer current and recent examples of the DEM process and discuss the implications this model holds for a new understanding of technology, consumption, desire, and broader consumer culture.

In this paper we disrupt established methodological boundaries in consumer research. We embark on a creative exploration to address the lack of an appropriate methodological toolkit. Graphic narrat...

Utopia is a complex and resilient concept. This article extends theory relating utopia to consumer culture and social media. After identifying two main schools of utopian consumer research, termed metopianism and wetopianism, the article inquires how social media discourses of utopianism challenge capitalism and what these challenges suggest about contemporary consumer activism. Sites of utopian discourse on YouTube concerning Walt Disney's original EPCOT plans, Jacque Fresco's Venus Project, and Elon Musk's Silicon Valley vision of the future are sources of netnographic data. The findings first focus on various discourses comparing political and economic systems, environmental effects, technology, and the reflexive, playful, imaginative, emotional, and engaged aspects of utopianist messages. Next, findings reveal worshipful attitudes towards the three charismatic utopian entrepreneurs and their visions. Utopian discourse on social media is clicktivism, but it is also an important and relevant social phenomenon that reveals the spectrum of forms of online political participation.

Consumer feedback platforms offer consumers tools to provide feedback on their market and consumption experiences. Beyond broad prior characterizations, little is known about the specific means by which platforms affect empowerment. Elements of empowerment identified in extant studies include voice, choice, justice, inclusion, catalysis, and consciousness-raising. We research a popular Brazilian platform to learn how platforms facilitate and constrain consumer empowerment. Our approach is immersive, a more-than-human netnography of the platform involving depth interviews with twenty-one of its consumer and corporate users. Findings show same-side and cross-side network effects driving the ability of the platform to offer consumers empowerment. Furthermore, affordances are critically important. Affordances provide opportunities for consumer choice, voice, justice, and inclusion. However, platforms’ cross-side network effects create economic considerations that limit those opportunities in theoretically and practically important ways. Although other feedback platforms might offer catalysis and consciousness-raising elements of empowerment, our focal platform does not. Earlier studies of consumer empowerment on the Internet may have been overly general and exuberant because they failed to recognize the constraining impacts of network effects, affordances, and algorithms. Consumer-citizenry, collective action, and consumer power are thoroughly transformed in the age of the platform, opening up new spaces for further investigation.

This chapter draws from a commercial netnography we conducted to explore Chinese cosmetics consumers’ changing notions of female beauty. Specifically, we were tasked with informing the new product development efforts of ArtCosmetics, an Italian B2B contract manufacturer operating in the global cosmetics market. We use the project to discuss how we used a team of researchers to collect, interpret, translate, and understand data about the central role of cultural codes of beauty in cosmetics tastes and routines. In response to the complexity involved in the project, we improvised a netnographic research design. As a result, our netnography with ArtCosmetics was a methodological and intellectual journey that challenged us in many ways: transnational and effective sampling, appropriately bricolaged research design, collecting and comprehending the nuance of foreign language and foreign culture data from new platforms, resolving heterogenous data, managing vast cultural complexity, and translating sophisticated ethnographic finding into pragmatic consumer, brand, and new product development insights. Today, Chinese notions of beauty and identity are firmly rooted in historical ethnic and national identities but are also fluidly global. Adapting netnography to this fluid transnational context allowed us to grasp a flow of beautyscapes, infoscapes, brandscapes, selfscapes, and usagescapes as shifting elements in a primordial process that oscillates between East and West, traditional and futuristic, and symbolic and functional.

Netnography today is more relevant than ever. Netnography researches technocultural contexts, especially relating to social media, and these connective media have become a major part of the human experience. Netnographers seek to understand technocultures, the systems of meaning, value, and power that accompany people’s interactions with one another through technologies and with technologies themselves. Netnography includes interviews, immersion, online traces, mobile, and livestream data, and it expands engaged observation into the technological environment, including platform interfaces, bots, and interpretations of the hidden effects of algorithms. Like all methods with a history, the story of netnography has been a story of adaptation. The book’s five sections and 19 chapters attest to the power of evolving netnographic approaches and present readers with a method that is more dynamic and open-ended than ever before. Together, these chapters illustrate the vast range of netnographic projects today, taking stock of netnography’s multidisciplinary past and present. This chapter also explores netnography’s promise as the methodological arm of a novel discipline of technocultural social media studies. Further, it suggests a critical axiology focused on exposing and overturning the systemic inequities structured into today’s media and technocultural contexts.

This chapter focuses on the intersections between gender, technology and computer-mediated communications in consumption-related online communities and proposes a methodology that enables researchers to explore better the nuances of gender effects online. It discusses the relationship between gender and technology, including how the impacts on communications technologies. The chapter suggests that a research agenda for future gender research in relation to online consumption-related communities. In respect of structural aspects, there are strong divisions of labour around technology both in its production and consumption. Women were often portrayed as the passive victims of technology, which was seen as embodying patriarchal and capitalist interests. User instructions suggested that the microwave was complex and high technology and it was sold in brown goods outlets along with video recorders and stereo systems. The focus on technical talk and the relative absence of people talk, expressiveness and social engagement cannot be viewed as a focus solely constructed by the users of the digital camera technology.

The basis of netnography is rather simple. It is grounded by the principle that the perspective of an embodied, temporally, historically and culturally situated human being with anthropological training is, for purposes relating to identity, language, ritual, imagery, symbolism, subculture and many other elements that require cultural understanding, a far better analyst of people’s contemporary online experience than a disembodied algorithm programmed by statistics and marketing research scientists.1 1. Of course, computer scientists are having their day, currently. And there is no doubt that there are many macro behaviours and precise measurements which are handled far better using statistical methods operating on large decontextualised data sets than they are by human participant-observers. But that really is not the point of netnography, of this paragraph or of this special section. View all notes The fundamental positioning of netnography as a research method, its marketing-oriented point of difference, relevant to digital humanities artists, library and information scientists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, marketing practitioners and consumer researchers alike, is also rather clear. It is that the knowledge we gain from machine understanding of human experience is often sorely limited, and the ethics of the investigatory situation fraught, no matter how large the data set, how cleverly programmed the machine learning algorithms or how extensive the public surveillance.

Lateral exchange markets (LEMs) are sites of technologically intermediated exchange between actors occupying equivalent network positions. To develop an enriched understanding of these markets, the authors develop a more broad-based and differentiated understanding of peer-to-peer, sharing, and access-based markets. They focus on two key axes: the extent of (1) consociality and (2) platform intermediation. Drawing on these attributes, the authors theoretically deduce four ideal types—Forums, Enablers, Matchmakers, and Hubs. Each type provides value in a different way: Forums connect actors, Enablers equip actors, Matchmakers pair actors, and Hubs centralize exchange. Twenty organizational cases reveal insights into the failure, adaptation, and success of LEMs. Lateral exchange markets shift responsibility for personal and exchange security to relevant personal actors, to institutions, or to the governing algorithms of technology platforms. Extending the general proposition that sociality increasingly infuses market logics, the findings suggest a new frontier in which social resources and software platform algorithms interact as operand resources whose negative consequences (e.g., opportunism) require careful management through assurances and institutional arrangements matched to the type of LEM operation.

This collection looks at the postnetwork television industrys heady experiments with new forms of interactive storytellingor wired TVthat took place from 2005 to 2010 as the networks responded to the introduction of broadband into the majority of homes and the proliferation of popular, participatory Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.Contributors address a wide range of issues, from the networks sporadic efforts to engage fans using transmedia storytelling to the production inefficiencies that continue to dog network television to the impact of multimedia convergence and multinational, corporate conglomeration on entrepreneurial creativity. With essays from such top scholars as Henry Jenkins, John T. Caldwell, and Jonathan Gray and from new and exciting voices emerging in this field, Wired TV elucidates the myriad new digital threats and the equal number of digital opportunities that have become part and parcel of todays post-network era. Readers will quickly recognize the familiar television franchises on which the contributors focus including Lost, The Office, Entourage, Battlestar Gallactica, The L Word, and Heroesin order to reveal their impact on an industry in transition.While it is not easy for vast bureaucracies to change course, executives from key network divisions engaged in an unprecedented period of innovation and collaboration with four important groups: members of the Hollywood creative community who wanted to expand televisions storytelling worlds and marketing capabilities by incorporating social media; members of the Silicon Valley tech community who were keen to rethink television distribution for the digital era; members of the Madison Avenue advertising community who were eager to rethink ad-supported content; and fans who were enthusiastic and willing to use social media story extensions to proselytize on behalf of a favorite network series.In the aftermath of the lengthy Writers Guild of America strike of 2007/2008, the networks clamped down on such collaborations and began to reclaim control over their operations, locking themselves back into an aging system of interconnected bureaucracies, entrenched hierarchies, and traditional partners from the past. Whats next for the future of the television industry? Stay tunedor at least online.Contributors: Vincent Brook, Will Brooker, John T. Caldwell, M. J. Clarke, Jonathan Gray, Henry Jenkins, Derek Johnson, Robert V. Kozinets, Denise Mann, Katynka Z. Martnez, and Julie Levin Russo

Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of the marketing discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by rigorous research. The authors propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or defaults regarding what consumer researchers study, why they study it, and how they do so. The authors identify these boundaries and describe how they can be challenged. By detailing five impactful articles and identifying others, they show that boundary-breaking, marketing-relevant consumer research can influence relevant stakeholders including academics in marketing and allied disciplines as well as a wide range of marketplace actors (e.g., business practitioners, policy makers, the media, society). Drawing on these articles, the authors articulate what researchers can do to break boundaries and enhance the impact of their research. They also indicate why engaging in boundary-breaking work and enhancing the breadth of marketing’s influence is good for both individual researchers and the fields of consumer research and marketing.

Consumer-generated ratings and reviews play an important role in people’s experiences of online search and shopping. This article applauds and extends the thought-provoking response of de Langhe, Fernbach, and Lichtenstein (2016, in this issue) to Simonson’s (2015) assertions about the topic and suggests an agenda for future research. Follow-up research into the topic should emphasize the diversity of consumers and the multiplicity of their needs. It should recognize that reviews and ratings are complex social conversations embedded in consumers’ multifaceted communicational repertoires. It should be cautious when using terms such as objective and rational when describing consumers and consumption. Being aware of the risks to external validity of studying average ratings may lead to frameworks with greater contextual integrity, and encourage collaborative communication between scholars from different perspectives working in this field.

Robert V. Kozinets and Manuela Nocker explain how data can be collected using online ethnography or netnography—unconventional in organizational research. A netnography is a specific set of related data collection, analysis, ethical, and research practices. The approach has been used to study online collaboration, and the conversations, languages, online behaviours, and symbolic repertoires of different groups. Online netnography is distinct from traditional in-person ethnography. Ethnography focuses on single field sites; netnography addresses the dispersed nature of online sociality. Prolonged field immersion is less meaningful in netnographic investigations. And the pace of internet technology development encourages a pace of research faster than that of traditional ethnography. As our social and corporate worlds become intertwined, widening access to personal information, ownership of that information is contentious, raising research ethics dilemmas. Ethnography and netnography are not value-neutral, and technology is encouraging us to question what we wish to achieve with our research.

Based on a review of the past 30 years of videographic research and outputs in the field of marketing, we highlight the key contributions that videography has made to the marketing literature and identify the key issues facing videographic research today. We develop a typology that identifies four ways that videography can contribute to theory development and verification, presenting new criteria for assessing academic videographies. We note that making theoretical contributions is one of the most difficult issues facing videographic researchers and that this is an area in need of significant developments to help the field progress. Finally, we envision what the future of videography might look like and consider the implications of new forms of videographies.

Selfies, digital images characterized by the desire to frame the self in a picture taken to be shared with an online audience, are important reflections of the contemporary self. Much extant psychological research on selfies has taken a pathologizing view of the phenomenon, focusing on its relationship to narcissism. Our investigation seeks to contribute to a holistic, contextualized and cultural perspective. We focus on the context of museums, places where art, history, education, and culture merge into the selfie taking behaviors of patrons. First, we explore theory salient to our topic of selfie taking, finding selfies to be an important way to construct ongoing series of narratives about the self. We use concepts of identity work, dramaturgy, and impression management to understand it in this light. We relate embodiment within the museum to the selfie’s performative acts and expand upon notions that emphasize and distinguish the aesthetic elements present in many aspects of everyday life. We also question the ability of the museum selfie to destabilize. We also explore the contextual effects of mimicry and social norms. After describing our ethnographic and netnographic method, we investigate the museum selfie phenomenon. We begin with some observations on the extent of selfie-taking in contemporary culture as well as its evolution. Then, we consider selfies as a type of dynamic art form. Our analysis identifies a range of different types of museum selfies: art interactions, blending into art, mirror selfies, silly/clever selfies, contemplative selfies, and iconic selfies. Considered and studied in context, the museum selfie phenomenon reveals far more than the narcissism of the sort explored by past psychological research. The museum provides a stage for identity work that offers an opportunity for the selfie to be used not only for superficial performances but also in the pursuit of more profound self-reflection and its communication. Our ethnographic exploration of the selfie sees it as more than a quest for attention but less than a genuinely destabilizing social force. Selfie taking is complex and multidimensional, a cultural and social act, a call for connection, an act of mimicry, and part of people’s ever-incomplete identity projects.

How is consumer desire transformed by contemporary technology? Most extant theory holds that technology rationalizes and reduces passion. In our investigation of networks of desire—complex open systems of machines, consumers, energy, and objects—we find technology increasing the passion to consume. Effects depend upon participation in the network, which can be private, public, or professional. Private participation tends to discipline passion into interests reflecting established cultural categories. Public and professional participation build new connections between extant desires and a wider network, decentering ties and deterritorializing flows that limit hungers to emplaced bodies. Public and professional participation drive consumption passion to transgressive extremes. We use ethnography and netnography to study online food image sharing, a broad field that includes everything from friend networks to food bloggers. Using and extending Deleuze and Guattari’s desire theory, we conceptualize desire as energetic, connective, systemic, and innovative. Critically examining the role of technocapitalism in the realm of consumption passion, we question the emancipatory possibilities of unfettered desire. Networks of desire create a passionate new universe of technologically enhanced desire, one that challenges the way we think about consumer collectives, capitalism, emancipation, and posthuman consumption.

Academics have always been in the business of producing and promoting ideas. The configuration of their identities or brands can play a central role in the successful realization of this ambition. This chapter uses the participative stance in netnography to discuss academic personal branding, but also interweaves advice, core principles, and a series of short inductive case studies about personal academic brands and fields. Featuring cases like those of Plato, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, and others, the chapter outlines a theory of personal academic branding, relating core identities to academic branding practices and purposes. In particular, this chapter suggests the relationship between thinking innovative thoughts, representing them to various audiences, and having one's idea shared and built upon by a network of interested others. Core to the successful realization of this endeavor are the following nine elements: unconventionality, creativity, internal and external audiences, segmentation, core constituents, co-branding, simplicity, uniqueness, and catchiness.

If “consumer brand engagement” is what happens in isolation, in a consumer’s own individual mind and thoughts, then “social brand engagement” is the diametrical opposite of this. Social brand engagement is a social act full of culture, meaning, language, and values. With social brand engagement, relationships widen from person-brand to person-person-brand. This can take different forms. While some consumers remain passive, others act more or less creatively in favor of or against brands. Some marketers are happy with the forms of evangelizing in which consumers simply spread brand messages. But the most authentic and believable form of endorsement, and therefore the optimal state, is marked by the creative expression and use of the brand. Here, people play positively and socially with the brand. They view it as a valued and valuable cultural resource and such social brand engagement has meaningful social, creative and productive outcomes. In successful social brand engagement, both consumers and producers play active roles, but one party has to take the lead. Companies have historically had major problems letting consumers take over some of their former responsibilities. For successful authentication to happen, however, putting consumers in the driver’s seat is sometimes—but certainly not always—necessary.

Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) does not travel as unidirectionally and straight as previously assumed. Rather, consumers are active co-producers of value and translate and transform marketing meanings. Word of mouth resulting from marketing communications can be anything from euphoric to resistant, and the discourse evolving around a product seeding has a strong impact on how this product is perceived. As messages become translated into meaningful, communally shared material, particular cultural restraints cause possibilities open up, rules to become less constraining, and the principles and guidelines for successful social branding engagement to become much more about human relationships than one-way communication. Social brand engagement is a genuine, natural interconnection between brand mentions and consumer-to-consumer social experiences. Therefore, simply observing the reach and valence of product mentions is too short sighted. To effectively attain social brand engagement, promotions need to seem authentic and congruent with people, media, other content and the offline or online context. A deep analysis of what is going on in the prospective environment of a message to be seeded is a precondition for the optimal design of a WOMM campaign and the accurate interpretation of its success.

Is the social media hype about being cool or about making money? For Adam Froman, the answer is easy: Marketers need to be very clear about how social media activity supports overall business strategy. Only if the digital experience fi ts into the whole customer journey will consumers become engaged and add value to the company … and only then will the social brand become cool.

This introspective poem seeks to capture the innermost enlightening and conflict-ridden intellectual and emotional experiences of the consumer research ethnographer. Through an implicit historical overview of the author's consumer research, the poem considers classic anthropological topics such as alterity, entree, going native, subjectivity versus objectivity, and crises of representation in the light enabled by the synthesis of introspection and poetic rhetoric. Suggesting that much remains hidden about the process and content of ethnography, the poem accretes around ‘real’ consumer research data: a field note excerpt, a poem, and, mainly, a progressive series of unpublished reflexive field notes and quotations of self-revealing researcher questions from interviews. The poem speaks with a disconcerting multitude of inner voices, contrasting the performance of consumer ethnography depicted enthusiastically as a mystical and spiritual journey with a cynical critical view of it as a tenuous, deceptive, energizing-yet-draining psychological balancing act.

This commentary emphasizes the networked nature of brands. Brands are identities, and identities are meanings. Meanings are always embedded in networks of association. Therefore, all understandings of brands are necessarily vast, complex, and incomplete, especially in the contemporary age of branding.