Douglas Holt | University of Southern Denmark (original) (raw)
Papers by Douglas Holt
Journal of Consumer Research, 2004
Journal of Consumer Research, 2002
Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialec... more Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.
Advances in Consumer Research, 1997
Entrepreneurs must often compete against a powerful incumbent that dominates the market and comma... more Entrepreneurs must often compete against a powerful incumbent that dominates the market and commands far superior resources. Better-mousetraps models urge entrepreneurs to avoid direct challenges to
Cultural strategy can unearth significant opportunities in categories that have been dominated by... more Cultural strategy can unearth significant opportunities in categories that have been dominated by technological innovation. Companies doing business in such categories tend to act just as the better-mousetraps model recommends: they constantly push for the next big technological breakthrough that will create novel functionality in order to provide their brand with a substantial
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LI... more How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LICs)—those classes that have the spending power to participate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bour-dieu's status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we call the global trickle-down model, often invoked to explain LIC status consumption, is even more imprecise. We study the status consumption strategies of upper-middle-class Turkish women in order to revise three of Bourdieu's most important concepts—cultural capital, habitus, and consumption field—to propose a theory specific to the LIC context. We demonstrate that cultural capital is organized around orthodox practice of the Western Lifestyle myth, that cultural capital is deterritorialized and so accrues through distant textbook like learning rather than via the habitus, and that the class faction with lower cultural capital indigenizes the consumption field to sustain a national social hierarchy.
In the sociology of consumption, a core research issue is the symbolic expression, reproduction, ... more In the sociology of consumption, a core research issue is the symbolic expression, reproduction, and potential transformation of social collectivities through consumption. The two theoretical perspectives that have long dominated both consumer research and sociological investigations of this class of research ques-tions—what I term personality/values lifestyle analysis and object signification research—have become less useful in the postmodern era. In this study. I develop an alternative poststructuralist approach for analyzing lifestyles. I describe five core principles of poststructuralist lifestyle analysis that distinguish this approach from tbe two predominant paradigms. Drawing from a series of unstructured interviews, I argue that each of these five features allows for more nuanced description of lifestyles than the two predominant approaches. Poststructuralist lifestyle analysis can be used to unravel the social patterning of consumption according to important social categories such as social class, gender, race/eth-nicity, nationality, and generation in advanced capitalist countries in which post-modern cultural conditions make tracing these patterns difficult with conventional approaches.
This essay critically examines the North American sociological literature that has developed in r... more This essay critically examines the North American sociological literature that has developed in response to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, his tour-de-force study of consumer taste and social reproduction. I argue that theoretical and empirical challenges often misread Bour-dieu, recasting the theory as a variant of Lloyd Warner's social class theory. I use this evaluation to reformulate the theory to reflect socio-historical circumstances particular to the contemporary United States. In an interpretive study of cultural capital and patterns of taste motivated by this reformulation, briefly summarized here, I find six dimensions of taste that vary across cultural capital resources. Finally, I consider the implications of this interpretation of Bourdieu's theory for survey research concerned with patterns of taste and social reproduction .
Branding is often viewed as a form of ideological influence, but how brands impact ideology has n... more Branding is often viewed as a form of ideological influence, but how brands impact ideology has not been carefully specified. I use a genealogical study of the emergence of Jack Daniel's Whiskey as an iconic brand to specify the ideological role played by such brands in relation to other producers of ideological change, particularly the other culture industries. I demonstrate that brands play a distinctive role, quite different from that critics have described: brands act as parasites riding the coat-tails of other more powerful cultural forms, but then use their market power to proselytize these ideological revisions. Through ubiquity and repetition, brands transform emergent culture into dominant norms.
This article examines what people do when they consume. In recent interpretive consumer research,... more This article examines what people do when they consume. In recent interpretive consumer research, three research streams have emerged, each portraying how people consume through a distinctive metaphor: co'nsuming as experience, consuming as integration, and consuming as classification. The research reported here— a two-year observational case study of baseball spectators in Chicago's Wrigley Field bleachers—builds on this literature to systematically detail the universe of actions that constitute consuming. The resulting typology refines, extends, and synthesizes the three existing approaches to consuming and adds a fourth dimen-sion—consuming as play—to yield a comprehensive vocabulary for descnbing how consumers consume. The usefulness of the typology is demonstrated by applying it to develop an alternative conception of materialism as a style of consuming.
Expanded Programme on AQ1 Immunisation (EPI) vaccination rates remain well below 10 herd immunity... more Expanded Programme on AQ1 Immunisation (EPI) vaccination rates remain well below 10 herd immunity in regions of many countries despite huge international resources devoted to both financing and access. We draw upon service marketing theory, organisational sociology, development anthropology and cultural consumer research to conduct an ethnographic study of vaccination delivery in Jimma Zone, Ethiopia – one such region. We find that Western public health sector policies are dominated by an 15 administrative logic. Critical failures in delivery are produced by a system that obfuscates the on-the-ground problems that mothers face in trying to vaccinate their children, while instead prioritising administrative processes. Our ethnographic analysis of 83 mothers who had not vaccinated their children reveals key barriers to vaccination from a 'customer' perspective. While mothers value vaccination, it is a 20 'low involvement' good compared to the acute daily needs of a subsistence life. The costs imposed by poor service – such as uncaring staff with class hostilities, unpredictable and missed schedules and long waits – are too much and so they forego the service. Our service design framework illuminates specific service problems from the mother's perspective and points towards simple service innovations 25 that could improve vaccination rates in regions that have poor uptake. Designing the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) as a service Under the rubric of the EPI, a wide variety of Western governmental and non-governmental organisations in the global public health sector have worked intensively 30 over the past 40 years to improve routine vaccination rates in the world's poorest countries. Historically, poor vaccination rates in the EPI countries were linked to problems concerning geographic and financial access to the vaccines. Vaccines often spoiled due to malfunctioning cold chains, clinics suffered frequent stock-outs due to inadequate transportation networks and poor logistical planning, and the distance required 35 to travel to access points was often insurmountable for people in remote rural areas (Cheyne, 1989). In response, the global public health sector has worked with the health ministries in many of the EPI countries to make significant 'hard' infrastructure investments such as building rural health clinics, supplying and maintaining refrigeration units and funding missing transportation links in the supply chain. More recently, in the
Conventional psychological theories of branding have an Achilles heel that we should no longer ig... more Conventional psychological theories of branding have an Achilles heel that we should no longer ignore. Outside of certain technology- and service-driven categories, where brands are built largely through reputation effects, branding's big stakes are decided increasingly by cultural symbolism. Brand symbolism delivers customer value by providing culturally resonant stories and images that customers use to buttress their identities.
Journal of Consumer Research, 2004
Journal of Consumer Research, 2002
Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialec... more Brands are today under attack by an emerging countercultural movement. This study builds a dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding that explains the rise of this movement and its potential effects. Results of an interpretive study challenge existing theories of consumer resistance. To develop an alternative model, I first trace the rise of the modern cultural engineering paradigm of branding, premised upon a consumer culture that granted marketers cultural authority. Intrinsic contradictions erased its efficacy. Next I describe the current postmodern consumer culture, which is premised upon the pursuit of personal sovereignty through brands. I detail five postmodern branding techniques that are premised upon the principle that brands are authentic cultural resources. Postmodern branding is now giving rise to new contradictions that have inflamed the antibranding sentiment sweeping Western countries. I detail these contradictions and project that they will give rise to a new post-postmodern branding paradigm premised upon brands as citizen-artists.
Advances in Consumer Research, 1997
Entrepreneurs must often compete against a powerful incumbent that dominates the market and comma... more Entrepreneurs must often compete against a powerful incumbent that dominates the market and commands far superior resources. Better-mousetraps models urge entrepreneurs to avoid direct challenges to
Cultural strategy can unearth significant opportunities in categories that have been dominated by... more Cultural strategy can unearth significant opportunities in categories that have been dominated by technological innovation. Companies doing business in such categories tend to act just as the better-mousetraps model recommends: they constantly push for the next big technological breakthrough that will create novel functionality in order to provide their brand with a substantial
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LI... more How does status consumption operate among the middle classes in less industrialized countries (LICs)—those classes that have the spending power to participate effectively in consumer culture? Globalization research suggests that Bour-dieu's status consumption model, based upon Western research, does not provide an adequate explanation. And what we call the global trickle-down model, often invoked to explain LIC status consumption, is even more imprecise. We study the status consumption strategies of upper-middle-class Turkish women in order to revise three of Bourdieu's most important concepts—cultural capital, habitus, and consumption field—to propose a theory specific to the LIC context. We demonstrate that cultural capital is organized around orthodox practice of the Western Lifestyle myth, that cultural capital is deterritorialized and so accrues through distant textbook like learning rather than via the habitus, and that the class faction with lower cultural capital indigenizes the consumption field to sustain a national social hierarchy.
In the sociology of consumption, a core research issue is the symbolic expression, reproduction, ... more In the sociology of consumption, a core research issue is the symbolic expression, reproduction, and potential transformation of social collectivities through consumption. The two theoretical perspectives that have long dominated both consumer research and sociological investigations of this class of research ques-tions—what I term personality/values lifestyle analysis and object signification research—have become less useful in the postmodern era. In this study. I develop an alternative poststructuralist approach for analyzing lifestyles. I describe five core principles of poststructuralist lifestyle analysis that distinguish this approach from tbe two predominant paradigms. Drawing from a series of unstructured interviews, I argue that each of these five features allows for more nuanced description of lifestyles than the two predominant approaches. Poststructuralist lifestyle analysis can be used to unravel the social patterning of consumption according to important social categories such as social class, gender, race/eth-nicity, nationality, and generation in advanced capitalist countries in which post-modern cultural conditions make tracing these patterns difficult with conventional approaches.
This essay critically examines the North American sociological literature that has developed in r... more This essay critically examines the North American sociological literature that has developed in response to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, his tour-de-force study of consumer taste and social reproduction. I argue that theoretical and empirical challenges often misread Bour-dieu, recasting the theory as a variant of Lloyd Warner's social class theory. I use this evaluation to reformulate the theory to reflect socio-historical circumstances particular to the contemporary United States. In an interpretive study of cultural capital and patterns of taste motivated by this reformulation, briefly summarized here, I find six dimensions of taste that vary across cultural capital resources. Finally, I consider the implications of this interpretation of Bourdieu's theory for survey research concerned with patterns of taste and social reproduction .
Branding is often viewed as a form of ideological influence, but how brands impact ideology has n... more Branding is often viewed as a form of ideological influence, but how brands impact ideology has not been carefully specified. I use a genealogical study of the emergence of Jack Daniel's Whiskey as an iconic brand to specify the ideological role played by such brands in relation to other producers of ideological change, particularly the other culture industries. I demonstrate that brands play a distinctive role, quite different from that critics have described: brands act as parasites riding the coat-tails of other more powerful cultural forms, but then use their market power to proselytize these ideological revisions. Through ubiquity and repetition, brands transform emergent culture into dominant norms.
This article examines what people do when they consume. In recent interpretive consumer research,... more This article examines what people do when they consume. In recent interpretive consumer research, three research streams have emerged, each portraying how people consume through a distinctive metaphor: co'nsuming as experience, consuming as integration, and consuming as classification. The research reported here— a two-year observational case study of baseball spectators in Chicago's Wrigley Field bleachers—builds on this literature to systematically detail the universe of actions that constitute consuming. The resulting typology refines, extends, and synthesizes the three existing approaches to consuming and adds a fourth dimen-sion—consuming as play—to yield a comprehensive vocabulary for descnbing how consumers consume. The usefulness of the typology is demonstrated by applying it to develop an alternative conception of materialism as a style of consuming.
Expanded Programme on AQ1 Immunisation (EPI) vaccination rates remain well below 10 herd immunity... more Expanded Programme on AQ1 Immunisation (EPI) vaccination rates remain well below 10 herd immunity in regions of many countries despite huge international resources devoted to both financing and access. We draw upon service marketing theory, organisational sociology, development anthropology and cultural consumer research to conduct an ethnographic study of vaccination delivery in Jimma Zone, Ethiopia – one such region. We find that Western public health sector policies are dominated by an 15 administrative logic. Critical failures in delivery are produced by a system that obfuscates the on-the-ground problems that mothers face in trying to vaccinate their children, while instead prioritising administrative processes. Our ethnographic analysis of 83 mothers who had not vaccinated their children reveals key barriers to vaccination from a 'customer' perspective. While mothers value vaccination, it is a 20 'low involvement' good compared to the acute daily needs of a subsistence life. The costs imposed by poor service – such as uncaring staff with class hostilities, unpredictable and missed schedules and long waits – are too much and so they forego the service. Our service design framework illuminates specific service problems from the mother's perspective and points towards simple service innovations 25 that could improve vaccination rates in regions that have poor uptake. Designing the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) as a service Under the rubric of the EPI, a wide variety of Western governmental and non-governmental organisations in the global public health sector have worked intensively 30 over the past 40 years to improve routine vaccination rates in the world's poorest countries. Historically, poor vaccination rates in the EPI countries were linked to problems concerning geographic and financial access to the vaccines. Vaccines often spoiled due to malfunctioning cold chains, clinics suffered frequent stock-outs due to inadequate transportation networks and poor logistical planning, and the distance required 35 to travel to access points was often insurmountable for people in remote rural areas (Cheyne, 1989). In response, the global public health sector has worked with the health ministries in many of the EPI countries to make significant 'hard' infrastructure investments such as building rural health clinics, supplying and maintaining refrigeration units and funding missing transportation links in the supply chain. More recently, in the
Conventional psychological theories of branding have an Achilles heel that we should no longer ig... more Conventional psychological theories of branding have an Achilles heel that we should no longer ignore. Outside of certain technology- and service-driven categories, where brands are built largely through reputation effects, branding's big stakes are decided increasingly by cultural symbolism. Brand symbolism delivers customer value by providing culturally resonant stories and images that customers use to buttress their identities.