Julien Cayla | Nanyang Technological University (original) (raw)

Papers by Julien Cayla

Journal of Marketing

Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find... more Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find this central aspect of their work emotionally draining. But what if some customer interactions could emotionally regenerate service employees? This ethnographic research demonstrates that several factors influence emotional energy in service interactions, including staff copresence with customers, mutual focus, shared mood, and barriers to outsiders. In addition, service employees' experience of autonomy and status in interactions plays an important role in influencing their emotional energy. Based on these insights, this study advances a framework for service organizations to manage a crucial asset: the emotional energy of frontline service employees.

The Straits Times, 2024

The concept of emotional energy offers a valuable lens for understanding consumer behavior and or... more The concept of emotional energy offers a valuable lens for understanding consumer behavior and organizational dynamics. Shared experiences, as evidenced by large-scale events, demonstrate the significant impact of emotional energy on both individual and collective actions. This analysis explores how emotional energy is generated and sustained, providing insights into enhancing consumer engagement and workplace motivation. By strategically managing emotional energy, organizations can foster deeper employee commitment and customer loyalty, drawing lessons from real-world phenomena that effectively harness this powerful, yet often overlooked, resource.

Journal of Business Ethics, 2023

The rising prominence of consumer sovereignty, wherein businesses prioritize customers as kings, ... more The rising prominence of consumer sovereignty, wherein businesses prioritize customers as kings, presents complex ethical dilemmas. This paper delves into the ethical implications of consumer sovereignty by examining the lack of recognition to which service workers are subjected in their interactions with customers. Applying the sensitizing lens of recognition theory, we investigate how the relational domination inherent in the service industry ultimately results in four main recognition gaps: visibility, status recognition, affective recognition, and capacity recognition gaps. These gaps considerably hinder an employee's ability to experience workplace dignity. Our findings enrich the business ethics literature by providing a more holistic analysis of the ethical challenges raised by consumer sovereignty. We introduce recognition theory as a framework to address these concerns and offer recommendations for managers to better support their service employees in overcoming the absence of customer recognition.

Journal of Marketing

Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find... more Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find this central aspect of their work emotionally draining. But what if some customer interactions could emotionally regenerate service employees? This ethnographic research demonstrates that several factors influence emotional energy in service interactions, including staff copresence with customers, mutual focus, shared mood, and barriers to outsiders. In addition, service employees' experience of autonomy and status in interactions plays an important role in influencing their emotional energy. Based on these insights, this study advances a framework for service organizations to manage a crucial asset: the emotional energy of frontline service employees.

Journal of Business Research, 2022

Given that commercial friendships between luxury salespeople and customers tend to elicit great l... more Given that commercial friendships between luxury salespeople and customers tend to elicit great loyalty from customers, it is relevant and timely to study how luxury salespeople manage these relationships. We build on ethnographic fieldwork in luxury stores, focusing on the interaction between salespeople and habituated luxury customers, to offer an analysis of commercial friendships in these settings. Our findings suggest that luxury foregrounds the importance of secrets and gifts in commercial friendships. Furthermore, the luxury context brings out the darker, more challenging side of commercial friendships. As intimacy develops between salespeople and customers, another kind of relationship emerges in which salespeople are often at the beck and call of their wealthy customers, leading them to fall into the intimacy trap. We propose some pathways to help salespeople manage these critical relationships and to avoid the intimacy trap.

Journal of Retailing, 2022

When designing luxury retail experiences, luxury managers are often encouraged to focus on a sing... more When designing luxury retail experiences, luxury managers are often encouraged to focus on a single logic: the logic of distinction. Evidence suggests, however, that multiple logics influence the field of luxury retailing. In this paper, we explore the implications of such multiplicity, focusing particularly on logics coming into tension with one another. Our research questions are: 1) What are the logics that come into conflict in luxury retail settings and 2) How can luxury retail managers navigate conflicts between logics to facilitate positive customer experiences in luxury retail settings? Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the luxury field, we find conflicts mainly between three logics: distinction, pragmatism, and hedonism. We show that each logic is underpinned by different values, different linguistic practices, and different focal objects. We further find that conflicts between the logics tend to become acute during specific interactions during the customer journey. Our findings also suggest that since luxury boutiques are by and large designed to enforce the distinction logic, luxury retailers at times struggle to accommodate and navigate the conflicts that occur between these logics. We identify three interrelated sets of practices, collectively referred to as experiential hybridization, that effectively allow luxury retailers to address the challenge of logic complexity. Theoretically, our research helps illuminate institutional logics as a factor that informs customers' experiences in contemporary retail fields such as luxury. Managerially, we suggest ways for luxury retailers to manage logic conflict and deliver superior customer experiences.

European Journal of Marketing, 2022

Purpose-This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct th... more Purpose-This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct their lives. Design/methodology/approach-The authors followed five brand devotees over several years, using various data collection methods (long interviews, observations, videos, photographs and secondary data) to study how they reconstructed their lives with a brand. Findings-Consumers transform their existence through a distinctive form of brand appropriation that the authors call brand magnification, which unfolds: materially, narratively and socially. First, brand devotees scatter brand incarnations around themselves to remain in touch with the brand because the brand has become an especially positive dimension of their lives. Second, brand devotees mobilize the brand to craft a completely new life story. Finally, they build a branded clan of family and friends that socially validates their reconstructed identity. Research limitations/implications-The research extends more muted depictions of brands as soothing balms calming consumer anxieties; the authors document the mechanism through which consumers remake their lives with a brand. Practical implications-The research helps rehabilitate the role of brands in contemporary consumer culture. Organizations can use the findings to help stimulate and engage employees by unveiling the brand's life-transforming potential for consumers. Originality/value-The authors characterize a distinctive, extreme and unique form of brand appropriation that positively transforms consumer lives.

Qualitative Market Research, 2018

Purpose-This paper aims to examine the notion of escape, which is central to the consumer experie... more Purpose-This paper aims to examine the notion of escape, which is central to the consumer experience literature, yet remains largely undertheorized. By surfacing the multi-dimensionality of escape, the authors develop a more fine-grained conceptualization of this notion. In addition, this work helps shed new light on past consumer research findings that mobilize the notion of escape. Design/methodology/approach-The paper is based on a review and interpretation of literature referring to the notion of escape in consumer research. Findings-This paper's first contribution is to extend the concept of escape based on the Turnerian framework of structure/anti-structure, by establishing a key difference between objects to "escape from" and the major themes of "escape into". A second contribution is to identify other forms of escape that are mundane, restorative and warlike, and that mobilize the self in different ways. Practical implications-The paper provides a more precise conceptualization of escape to motivate further research on this particularly important concept for understanding consumer experience. Social implications-Escape from one's own self has become an important feature of contemporary life. Consumer experiences may be ways of crafting identities, but they also form the means of escaping the pressures that come with the burdens of identity. Originality/value-This paper goes beyond past research on escape by identifying other types of escapes, which have not really been theorized in consumer research. The authors especially note the importance of ephemeral moments where people temporarily suspend their reflexive self, which the authors conceive as a new type of escape route.

Consumption Markets & Culture , 2019

How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym trainers in India, see their ... more How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym
trainers in India, see their jobs? In this paper, we build on extensive
fieldwork in gyms and coffee chains that cater to the emerging Indian
middle classes. Our research highlights the importance of respect and
recognition in making service interactions more meaningful for new
service workers. Generally hailing from the lower middle classes, new
service work offers important opportunities to interact with and learn
from English-speaking upper middle-class customers and clients. Besides
the opportunity to interact and learn, the acknowledgement they
receive for their skills and (bodily) accomplishments make such
professions attractive as well. Even if this holds the potential for upward
socioeconomic mobility, our findings also point at the resilience of
social hierarchies. Drawing on literature on service interactions and new
middle-class formation in India, this paper provides important insight
into how young Indians navigate and negotiate the opportunities and
pitfalls that come with the country’s changing socioeconomic landscape.

How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumer... more How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographi-cally study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Through sensory intensification, pain brings the body into sharp focus, allowing individuals to rediscover their corporeal-ity. In addition, painful extraordinary experiences operate as regenerative escapes from the self. By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness. Finally, when leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, market operators play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.

Language is at the heart of service interactions and a crucial element influencing the relationsh... more Language is at the heart of service interactions and a crucial element influencing the relationship between service provider and customer. As a specific form of symbolic capital, language can also be used to exclude and dominate. Our research looks at the role of language in shaping the power dynamic between service providers and customers in the Indian context. This study builds from extensive fieldwork conducted in the area of " new services " , following Indian gym trainers and coffee shop baristas as they interact with elite English-speaking clients. The findings detail how English operates as an invisible boundary in service settings, by excluding Indians who do not speak it with fluency. However, when used to develop expert knowledge, language also becomes an opportunity for lower middle class Indians to resist and invert the domination of the elite.

Marketing will transform us into modern beings. Or at least that is the underlying assumption tha... more Marketing will transform us into modern beings. Or at least that is the underlying assumption that lurks behind many conversations occurring in corporate boardrooms. Underlying the academic texts of international marketing and embedded in the everyday practices of marketing departments are the same fundamental ideas: that exposure to more market choices emancipates
individuals and that the unavoidable development of markets worldwide will transform us all into modern consumers. This paradigm, which places Western consumers at the end of history and people from non-Western nations at the beginning, is at the core of marketing’s social imaginary—that is, the set
of values, institutions, and symbols that animate the practice and teaching of marketing. Yet this social imaginary is rarely examined or questioned. This is all the more problematic because of the increasing reach of marketing discourse, tools, and techniques all over the world.

What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whos... more What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizational
fetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasimagical
fascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about.

Sloan Management Review, Dec 19, 2013

Ethnographic stories offer executives an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and p... more Ethnographic stories offer executives an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and play through gritty and detailed descriptions. What you learn from ethnographic stories may surprise you — and change your company’s strategy.

Journal of Marketing

Although ethnography has become a popular research approach in many organizations, major gaps exi... more Although ethnography has become a popular research approach in many organizations, major gaps exist in the field's understanding of the way it operates in the corporate world, particularly in how ethnography facilitates market learning. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography, the authors describe how
ethnographic stories give executives a unique means of understanding market realities. By working through the rich details of ethnographic stories infused with the tensions, contradictions, and emotions of people's everyday lives, executives are better able to grasp the complexity of consumer cultures. Overall, this research should help
managers leverage the catalytic effects of ethnographic storytelling in their efforts to learn about and understand market contexts

Journal of Marketing

While organizational identity can be a powerful tool for mobilizing and directing organizational ... more While organizational identity can be a powerful tool for mobilizing and directing organizational members, the authors’ findings demonstrate that it can also constrain the process of foreign market adaptation. Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, where they followed several multinational companies, they show how well-entrenched and enduring identities can obstruct the learning and strategic adjustments that are necessary to appeal to consumers in a new market environment. By explaining how organizational identity comes into play as a frame of reference and guiding principle, orienting managers in their efforts to preserve the character of their firm
as it expands and globalizes, this research offers new insights into foreign market learning and adaptation. The authors extend this analysis to provide valuable recommendations to managers for making organizational identity a more explicit component of global marketing strategy.

Journal of Consumer Research

We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are atte... more We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are attempting to forge new webs of interconnectedness through the construction of a transnational, imagined Asian world. Some branding managers are creating regional brands that emphasize the common experience of globalization, evoke a generic, hyper-urban, and multicultural experience, and are infused with diverse cultural referents. These types of regional Asian brands contribute to the creation of an imagined Asia as urban, modern, and multicultural. Understanding this process helps one to appreciate the role of branding managers in constructing markets and places.

Journal of Marketing

Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find... more Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find this central aspect of their work emotionally draining. But what if some customer interactions could emotionally regenerate service employees? This ethnographic research demonstrates that several factors influence emotional energy in service interactions, including staff copresence with customers, mutual focus, shared mood, and barriers to outsiders. In addition, service employees' experience of autonomy and status in interactions plays an important role in influencing their emotional energy. Based on these insights, this study advances a framework for service organizations to manage a crucial asset: the emotional energy of frontline service employees.

The Straits Times, 2024

The concept of emotional energy offers a valuable lens for understanding consumer behavior and or... more The concept of emotional energy offers a valuable lens for understanding consumer behavior and organizational dynamics. Shared experiences, as evidenced by large-scale events, demonstrate the significant impact of emotional energy on both individual and collective actions. This analysis explores how emotional energy is generated and sustained, providing insights into enhancing consumer engagement and workplace motivation. By strategically managing emotional energy, organizations can foster deeper employee commitment and customer loyalty, drawing lessons from real-world phenomena that effectively harness this powerful, yet often overlooked, resource.

Journal of Business Ethics, 2023

The rising prominence of consumer sovereignty, wherein businesses prioritize customers as kings, ... more The rising prominence of consumer sovereignty, wherein businesses prioritize customers as kings, presents complex ethical dilemmas. This paper delves into the ethical implications of consumer sovereignty by examining the lack of recognition to which service workers are subjected in their interactions with customers. Applying the sensitizing lens of recognition theory, we investigate how the relational domination inherent in the service industry ultimately results in four main recognition gaps: visibility, status recognition, affective recognition, and capacity recognition gaps. These gaps considerably hinder an employee's ability to experience workplace dignity. Our findings enrich the business ethics literature by providing a more holistic analysis of the ethical challenges raised by consumer sovereignty. We introduce recognition theory as a framework to address these concerns and offer recommendations for managers to better support their service employees in overcoming the absence of customer recognition.

Journal of Marketing

Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find... more Existing literature has concluded that employees who regularly interact with customers often find this central aspect of their work emotionally draining. But what if some customer interactions could emotionally regenerate service employees? This ethnographic research demonstrates that several factors influence emotional energy in service interactions, including staff copresence with customers, mutual focus, shared mood, and barriers to outsiders. In addition, service employees' experience of autonomy and status in interactions plays an important role in influencing their emotional energy. Based on these insights, this study advances a framework for service organizations to manage a crucial asset: the emotional energy of frontline service employees.

Journal of Business Research, 2022

Given that commercial friendships between luxury salespeople and customers tend to elicit great l... more Given that commercial friendships between luxury salespeople and customers tend to elicit great loyalty from customers, it is relevant and timely to study how luxury salespeople manage these relationships. We build on ethnographic fieldwork in luxury stores, focusing on the interaction between salespeople and habituated luxury customers, to offer an analysis of commercial friendships in these settings. Our findings suggest that luxury foregrounds the importance of secrets and gifts in commercial friendships. Furthermore, the luxury context brings out the darker, more challenging side of commercial friendships. As intimacy develops between salespeople and customers, another kind of relationship emerges in which salespeople are often at the beck and call of their wealthy customers, leading them to fall into the intimacy trap. We propose some pathways to help salespeople manage these critical relationships and to avoid the intimacy trap.

Journal of Retailing, 2022

When designing luxury retail experiences, luxury managers are often encouraged to focus on a sing... more When designing luxury retail experiences, luxury managers are often encouraged to focus on a single logic: the logic of distinction. Evidence suggests, however, that multiple logics influence the field of luxury retailing. In this paper, we explore the implications of such multiplicity, focusing particularly on logics coming into tension with one another. Our research questions are: 1) What are the logics that come into conflict in luxury retail settings and 2) How can luxury retail managers navigate conflicts between logics to facilitate positive customer experiences in luxury retail settings? Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the luxury field, we find conflicts mainly between three logics: distinction, pragmatism, and hedonism. We show that each logic is underpinned by different values, different linguistic practices, and different focal objects. We further find that conflicts between the logics tend to become acute during specific interactions during the customer journey. Our findings also suggest that since luxury boutiques are by and large designed to enforce the distinction logic, luxury retailers at times struggle to accommodate and navigate the conflicts that occur between these logics. We identify three interrelated sets of practices, collectively referred to as experiential hybridization, that effectively allow luxury retailers to address the challenge of logic complexity. Theoretically, our research helps illuminate institutional logics as a factor that informs customers' experiences in contemporary retail fields such as luxury. Managerially, we suggest ways for luxury retailers to manage logic conflict and deliver superior customer experiences.

European Journal of Marketing, 2022

Purpose-This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct th... more Purpose-This paper aims to detail how consumers can harness the power of brands to reconstruct their lives. Design/methodology/approach-The authors followed five brand devotees over several years, using various data collection methods (long interviews, observations, videos, photographs and secondary data) to study how they reconstructed their lives with a brand. Findings-Consumers transform their existence through a distinctive form of brand appropriation that the authors call brand magnification, which unfolds: materially, narratively and socially. First, brand devotees scatter brand incarnations around themselves to remain in touch with the brand because the brand has become an especially positive dimension of their lives. Second, brand devotees mobilize the brand to craft a completely new life story. Finally, they build a branded clan of family and friends that socially validates their reconstructed identity. Research limitations/implications-The research extends more muted depictions of brands as soothing balms calming consumer anxieties; the authors document the mechanism through which consumers remake their lives with a brand. Practical implications-The research helps rehabilitate the role of brands in contemporary consumer culture. Organizations can use the findings to help stimulate and engage employees by unveiling the brand's life-transforming potential for consumers. Originality/value-The authors characterize a distinctive, extreme and unique form of brand appropriation that positively transforms consumer lives.

Qualitative Market Research, 2018

Purpose-This paper aims to examine the notion of escape, which is central to the consumer experie... more Purpose-This paper aims to examine the notion of escape, which is central to the consumer experience literature, yet remains largely undertheorized. By surfacing the multi-dimensionality of escape, the authors develop a more fine-grained conceptualization of this notion. In addition, this work helps shed new light on past consumer research findings that mobilize the notion of escape. Design/methodology/approach-The paper is based on a review and interpretation of literature referring to the notion of escape in consumer research. Findings-This paper's first contribution is to extend the concept of escape based on the Turnerian framework of structure/anti-structure, by establishing a key difference between objects to "escape from" and the major themes of "escape into". A second contribution is to identify other forms of escape that are mundane, restorative and warlike, and that mobilize the self in different ways. Practical implications-The paper provides a more precise conceptualization of escape to motivate further research on this particularly important concept for understanding consumer experience. Social implications-Escape from one's own self has become an important feature of contemporary life. Consumer experiences may be ways of crafting identities, but they also form the means of escaping the pressures that come with the burdens of identity. Originality/value-This paper goes beyond past research on escape by identifying other types of escapes, which have not really been theorized in consumer research. The authors especially note the importance of ephemeral moments where people temporarily suspend their reflexive self, which the authors conceive as a new type of escape route.

Consumption Markets & Culture , 2019

How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym trainers in India, see their ... more How do employees in “new services”, such as coffee baristas and gym
trainers in India, see their jobs? In this paper, we build on extensive
fieldwork in gyms and coffee chains that cater to the emerging Indian
middle classes. Our research highlights the importance of respect and
recognition in making service interactions more meaningful for new
service workers. Generally hailing from the lower middle classes, new
service work offers important opportunities to interact with and learn
from English-speaking upper middle-class customers and clients. Besides
the opportunity to interact and learn, the acknowledgement they
receive for their skills and (bodily) accomplishments make such
professions attractive as well. Even if this holds the potential for upward
socioeconomic mobility, our findings also point at the resilience of
social hierarchies. Drawing on literature on service interactions and new
middle-class formation in India, this paper provides important insight
into how young Indians navigate and negotiate the opportunities and
pitfalls that come with the country’s changing socioeconomic landscape.

How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumer... more How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographi-cally study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Through sensory intensification, pain brings the body into sharp focus, allowing individuals to rediscover their corporeal-ity. In addition, painful extraordinary experiences operate as regenerative escapes from the self. By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness. Finally, when leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, market operators play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.

Language is at the heart of service interactions and a crucial element influencing the relationsh... more Language is at the heart of service interactions and a crucial element influencing the relationship between service provider and customer. As a specific form of symbolic capital, language can also be used to exclude and dominate. Our research looks at the role of language in shaping the power dynamic between service providers and customers in the Indian context. This study builds from extensive fieldwork conducted in the area of " new services " , following Indian gym trainers and coffee shop baristas as they interact with elite English-speaking clients. The findings detail how English operates as an invisible boundary in service settings, by excluding Indians who do not speak it with fluency. However, when used to develop expert knowledge, language also becomes an opportunity for lower middle class Indians to resist and invert the domination of the elite.

Marketing will transform us into modern beings. Or at least that is the underlying assumption tha... more Marketing will transform us into modern beings. Or at least that is the underlying assumption that lurks behind many conversations occurring in corporate boardrooms. Underlying the academic texts of international marketing and embedded in the everyday practices of marketing departments are the same fundamental ideas: that exposure to more market choices emancipates
individuals and that the unavoidable development of markets worldwide will transform us all into modern consumers. This paradigm, which places Western consumers at the end of history and people from non-Western nations at the beginning, is at the core of marketing’s social imaginary—that is, the set
of values, institutions, and symbols that animate the practice and teaching of marketing. Yet this social imaginary is rarely examined or questioned. This is all the more problematic because of the increasing reach of marketing discourse, tools, and techniques all over the world.

What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whos... more What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizational
fetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasimagical
fascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about.

Sloan Management Review, Dec 19, 2013

Ethnographic stories offer executives an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and p... more Ethnographic stories offer executives an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and play through gritty and detailed descriptions. What you learn from ethnographic stories may surprise you — and change your company’s strategy.

Journal of Marketing

Although ethnography has become a popular research approach in many organizations, major gaps exi... more Although ethnography has become a popular research approach in many organizations, major gaps exist in the field's understanding of the way it operates in the corporate world, particularly in how ethnography facilitates market learning. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography, the authors describe how
ethnographic stories give executives a unique means of understanding market realities. By working through the rich details of ethnographic stories infused with the tensions, contradictions, and emotions of people's everyday lives, executives are better able to grasp the complexity of consumer cultures. Overall, this research should help
managers leverage the catalytic effects of ethnographic storytelling in their efforts to learn about and understand market contexts

Journal of Marketing

While organizational identity can be a powerful tool for mobilizing and directing organizational ... more While organizational identity can be a powerful tool for mobilizing and directing organizational members, the authors’ findings demonstrate that it can also constrain the process of foreign market adaptation. Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, where they followed several multinational companies, they show how well-entrenched and enduring identities can obstruct the learning and strategic adjustments that are necessary to appeal to consumers in a new market environment. By explaining how organizational identity comes into play as a frame of reference and guiding principle, orienting managers in their efforts to preserve the character of their firm
as it expands and globalizes, this research offers new insights into foreign market learning and adaptation. The authors extend this analysis to provide valuable recommendations to managers for making organizational identity a more explicit component of global marketing strategy.

Journal of Consumer Research

We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are atte... more We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are attempting to forge new webs of interconnectedness through the construction of a transnational, imagined Asian world. Some branding managers are creating regional brands that emphasize the common experience of globalization, evoke a generic, hyper-urban, and multicultural experience, and are infused with diverse cultural referents. These types of regional Asian brands contribute to the creation of an imagined Asia as urban, modern, and multicultural. Understanding this process helps one to appreciate the role of branding managers in constructing markets and places.

Writing is how we communicate our ideas. Writing is how we establish our research reputation. At ... more Writing is how we communicate our ideas. Writing is how we establish our research reputation. At the same time, writing can become a source of angst for academics, especially for doctoral students and junior faculty. Writing anxiety sets in precisely because academics are expected to write and publish regularly. Yet very few doctoral programs offer formal training in this domain. This oversight is problematic, given the importance of good writing for academic success.