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PUBLISHED PROCEEDINGS by Luca M. Visconti
Journal of Business Research , 2019
In the digital era, marketers increasingly use storytelling techniques to narratively transport a... more In the digital era, marketers increasingly use storytelling techniques to narratively transport and persuade their customers. This paper pursues three primary objectives: (1) to integrate three digitally relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect into the marketing literature, (2) to empirically assess the integrated model with a quantitative meta-analysis of extant research, and (3) to provide directions for marketing managers to enhance the narrative transportation effect in an evolving technological environment. The paper contributes to the field by means of a meta-analysis of 64 articles featuring 138 narrative transportation effect sizes. The research shows that the narrative transportation effect is stronger when the story falls in a commercial (vs. non-commercial) domain, is user (vs. professional) generated, and is received by one story-receiver at a time. The study concludes with implications for research and practice and directions for future research.
Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science Cultural Perspectives in Marketing Conference, 2012
Papers by Luca M. Visconti
ACR North American Advances, 2010
Social Science Research Network, Apr 27, 2017
ACR North American Advances, 2020
ACR North American Advances, 2008
Marketing Theory, 2022
In the popular imagination sex sells. Yet, marketing theory has relatively little to say about se... more In the popular imagination sex sells. Yet, marketing theory has relatively little to say about sexuality per se. Drawing on Žižek’s metaphor of critical theory as ‘short-circuiting’ the dominant discourse, we conceptualise marketing as a field that theorises sexuality only in a series of ‘closed circuits’. Knowledge becomes hierarchical when some topics, such as sexuality, are denied the theoretical freedom to roam in wider open circuits alongside other ‘mainstream’ marketing topics. We identify four ways in which certain topics are enclosed: theoretical, empirical, institutional and neo-colonial. We then seek to short-circuit this state of affairs by bringing together a heterogeneous group of scholars interested in sexuality. By crossing their critical insights like unexpected connections in a circuit, we create sparks of inspiration that challenge the contents, contexts and concepts that relate to marketing theories of sexuality. Our paper makes a specific theoretical contribution...
Gender After Gender in Consumer Culture, 2020
The Routledge Companion to Corporate Branding, Mar 17, 2022
well-being among changing places and shifting ethnicities
Marketing Management, 2020
Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its ... more Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its concept "is built into the fabric of marketing" (Gibson 2001, 21). Segmentation is the process through which a company's actual and prospect customers are split into subgroups (i.e. segments), each of them showing similar consumption behaviors that differ across subgroups (Peter and Donnelly 2008). Differentiation (i.e. the process leading to variations of a company's offer) and targeting (i.e. the decision of which segments to serve by means of differentiated offers; Pride and Ferrell 2004) are meaningful only when customers have heterogeneous preferences, that is, only when a market is segmentable. Subdividing and profiling market segments help identify the customers to serve, the most effective way to satisfy their specific needs/desires, the competitors to face, the resources requested to compete in each segment, and the main stakeholders to involve in order to reinforce a company's market legitimacy (Cucurean-Zapan 2014; Lambin 1998). In simpler terms, market segmentation helps perform a company's market-orientation. While segmentation is still central to today's marketing, the profound transformations as much as the rising opportunities of contemporary markets and societies ask for a profound revision of segmentation theory and practice (Arnould and Cayla 2015; Gibson 2001; Kannisto 2016). Answering to this call, the chapter's aims are twofold. First, we approach segmentation historically, in order to unveil which were, and somehow still are, its often-implicit grounding premises. We show that most of these premises sway when confronted to extant cultural, economic, and technological environments, and invite for revision. The first part of the chapter (§ 18.2) thus provides readers with a longitudinal understanding of market segmentation and with evidences motivating the requested revision. Second, by focusing on contemporary trajectories of revision, we approach segmentation epistemologically, that is, we contrast two opposite perspectives on the needed revisions of market segmentation (§ 18.1). On the one hand, the marketing science perspective combines big data-driven consumer knowledge (cf. chapter 26 by Zwick and Dholakia) and the power of new technologies (especially, of artificial intelligence) to reinvigorate and transform segmentation (Mandelli 2018). Within this perspective, segmentation-as-science goes micro-basically, at a one-to-one level-and (hyper)targeting (Hoffmann, Inderst, and Ottaviani 2013) results into personalization, interpretable as the radicalization of mass-customization (Flavin and Heller 2019). On the other hand, hailing from the cultural marketing perspective (Peñaloza, Toulouse, and Visconti 2012), segmentation evolves into a set of decisions that marketers co-construct with customers. In line with this dialogical posture, targeting then requires conversational abilities (Jarratt and Fayed 2012) not only to reach, but also to engage target customers.
ACR North American Advances, 2010
The Routledge Companion to Ethnic Marketing, 2015
Ethnicity and space are thus intertwined: Space visualizes social representations of ethnicity (L... more Ethnicity and space are thus intertwined: Space visualizes social representations of ethnicity (Lipsitz 1998; Peñaloza 2000, 2001; Visconti and de Cordova 2012); dwellers’ ethnicities contribute to construct and modify the identity of the spaces in which they live, work, shop, consume, and establish social and market interactions (Peñaloza and Gilly 1999; Üstüner and Holt 2007). In brief, construction of ethnicity entails at least three types of identities: (1) migrants’/ethnic minorities’ identity (the term ‘minority’ here is used to signify ‘disempowered ethnic groups’), (2) mainstream’s (ethnic) identity, and (3) space identity, in which minorities’ and mainstream’s confrontation is emplaced. By space, I mean a large variety of spaces, ranging from the macro (e.g., nationscape, regionscape, cityscape; Paasi 2001) to the meso (e.g., marketplace, neighborhood; Peñaloza 2004, 2007) to the micro level (e.g., servicescape, workplace, home; Jamal 2003; Üstüner and Thompson 2012; Veresiu et al. 2012; Visconti and de Cordova 2012; Visconti and Premazzi 2012). More important, in this chapter I classify space through its function in the construction of ethnicity and thus distinguish among physical, cultural, social, ideological, political, and commercial space.
Storytelling is on the rise in the marketing domain, including the marketing of risky products su... more Storytelling is on the rise in the marketing domain, including the marketing of risky products such as alcohol. We argue that the ethical relevance of stories should attract more attention from managers, policymakers and scholars, as storytelling drives suspension of disbelief, has enduring persuasive effects, is unintentionally affective and may lead to actual behavior. This raises major ethical questions for marketing and consumer behavior. To fill this gap, this article offers a systematic investigation by means of a meta-analysis of how three original study characteristics: (1) story domain, (2) number of storytellers and (3) number of simultaneous story-receivers, may affect the strength of the narrative transportation effect, which manifests itself in consumers’ response to having been transported into a narrative. Our contribution to prior work is twofold. First, we contribute to the field of narrative transportation and persuasion by showing the role of these three variables...
Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory, 2017
French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard t... more French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard to pigeonhole. His boundless curiosity for disparate life and speculative domains translates into a heterogeneous corpus of works, which covers art, fashion, language and writing, literature, love, myths, music, philosophy, photography, semiotics, and sport. His critique to the traditional notion of authorship (1967 [2002]) – a position positing the need to connect a text to its writer in order to interpret it – makes using Barthes’ biography to approach his intellectual production particularly sensitive. Barthes is sharp on the point when he says that the writer is not a text’s ‘author’ but a text’s ‘scriptor’. In doing so, he ratifies the ‘death of the author’ and the beginning of the modern writer’s era. The scriptor “is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate (…).” (p. 221) The scriptor’s role is hence that of assembling pre-existing texts (i.e. citations) in a novel manner and of empowering the reader. Since there is no ‘Author-God’, a text has no theological meaning; “nothing has to be deciphered” (p. 223).
Journal of Marketing Management, 2018
Journal of Business Research , 2019
In the digital era, marketers increasingly use storytelling techniques to narratively transport a... more In the digital era, marketers increasingly use storytelling techniques to narratively transport and persuade their customers. This paper pursues three primary objectives: (1) to integrate three digitally relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect into the marketing literature, (2) to empirically assess the integrated model with a quantitative meta-analysis of extant research, and (3) to provide directions for marketing managers to enhance the narrative transportation effect in an evolving technological environment. The paper contributes to the field by means of a meta-analysis of 64 articles featuring 138 narrative transportation effect sizes. The research shows that the narrative transportation effect is stronger when the story falls in a commercial (vs. non-commercial) domain, is user (vs. professional) generated, and is received by one story-receiver at a time. The study concludes with implications for research and practice and directions for future research.
Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science Cultural Perspectives in Marketing Conference, 2012
ACR North American Advances, 2010
Social Science Research Network, Apr 27, 2017
ACR North American Advances, 2020
ACR North American Advances, 2008
Marketing Theory, 2022
In the popular imagination sex sells. Yet, marketing theory has relatively little to say about se... more In the popular imagination sex sells. Yet, marketing theory has relatively little to say about sexuality per se. Drawing on Žižek’s metaphor of critical theory as ‘short-circuiting’ the dominant discourse, we conceptualise marketing as a field that theorises sexuality only in a series of ‘closed circuits’. Knowledge becomes hierarchical when some topics, such as sexuality, are denied the theoretical freedom to roam in wider open circuits alongside other ‘mainstream’ marketing topics. We identify four ways in which certain topics are enclosed: theoretical, empirical, institutional and neo-colonial. We then seek to short-circuit this state of affairs by bringing together a heterogeneous group of scholars interested in sexuality. By crossing their critical insights like unexpected connections in a circuit, we create sparks of inspiration that challenge the contents, contexts and concepts that relate to marketing theories of sexuality. Our paper makes a specific theoretical contribution...
Gender After Gender in Consumer Culture, 2020
The Routledge Companion to Corporate Branding, Mar 17, 2022
well-being among changing places and shifting ethnicities
Marketing Management, 2020
Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its ... more Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its concept "is built into the fabric of marketing" (Gibson 2001, 21). Segmentation is the process through which a company's actual and prospect customers are split into subgroups (i.e. segments), each of them showing similar consumption behaviors that differ across subgroups (Peter and Donnelly 2008). Differentiation (i.e. the process leading to variations of a company's offer) and targeting (i.e. the decision of which segments to serve by means of differentiated offers; Pride and Ferrell 2004) are meaningful only when customers have heterogeneous preferences, that is, only when a market is segmentable. Subdividing and profiling market segments help identify the customers to serve, the most effective way to satisfy their specific needs/desires, the competitors to face, the resources requested to compete in each segment, and the main stakeholders to involve in order to reinforce a company's market legitimacy (Cucurean-Zapan 2014; Lambin 1998). In simpler terms, market segmentation helps perform a company's market-orientation. While segmentation is still central to today's marketing, the profound transformations as much as the rising opportunities of contemporary markets and societies ask for a profound revision of segmentation theory and practice (Arnould and Cayla 2015; Gibson 2001; Kannisto 2016). Answering to this call, the chapter's aims are twofold. First, we approach segmentation historically, in order to unveil which were, and somehow still are, its often-implicit grounding premises. We show that most of these premises sway when confronted to extant cultural, economic, and technological environments, and invite for revision. The first part of the chapter (§ 18.2) thus provides readers with a longitudinal understanding of market segmentation and with evidences motivating the requested revision. Second, by focusing on contemporary trajectories of revision, we approach segmentation epistemologically, that is, we contrast two opposite perspectives on the needed revisions of market segmentation (§ 18.1). On the one hand, the marketing science perspective combines big data-driven consumer knowledge (cf. chapter 26 by Zwick and Dholakia) and the power of new technologies (especially, of artificial intelligence) to reinvigorate and transform segmentation (Mandelli 2018). Within this perspective, segmentation-as-science goes micro-basically, at a one-to-one level-and (hyper)targeting (Hoffmann, Inderst, and Ottaviani 2013) results into personalization, interpretable as the radicalization of mass-customization (Flavin and Heller 2019). On the other hand, hailing from the cultural marketing perspective (Peñaloza, Toulouse, and Visconti 2012), segmentation evolves into a set of decisions that marketers co-construct with customers. In line with this dialogical posture, targeting then requires conversational abilities (Jarratt and Fayed 2012) not only to reach, but also to engage target customers.
ACR North American Advances, 2010
The Routledge Companion to Ethnic Marketing, 2015
Ethnicity and space are thus intertwined: Space visualizes social representations of ethnicity (L... more Ethnicity and space are thus intertwined: Space visualizes social representations of ethnicity (Lipsitz 1998; Peñaloza 2000, 2001; Visconti and de Cordova 2012); dwellers’ ethnicities contribute to construct and modify the identity of the spaces in which they live, work, shop, consume, and establish social and market interactions (Peñaloza and Gilly 1999; Üstüner and Holt 2007). In brief, construction of ethnicity entails at least three types of identities: (1) migrants’/ethnic minorities’ identity (the term ‘minority’ here is used to signify ‘disempowered ethnic groups’), (2) mainstream’s (ethnic) identity, and (3) space identity, in which minorities’ and mainstream’s confrontation is emplaced. By space, I mean a large variety of spaces, ranging from the macro (e.g., nationscape, regionscape, cityscape; Paasi 2001) to the meso (e.g., marketplace, neighborhood; Peñaloza 2004, 2007) to the micro level (e.g., servicescape, workplace, home; Jamal 2003; Üstüner and Thompson 2012; Veresiu et al. 2012; Visconti and de Cordova 2012; Visconti and Premazzi 2012). More important, in this chapter I classify space through its function in the construction of ethnicity and thus distinguish among physical, cultural, social, ideological, political, and commercial space.
Storytelling is on the rise in the marketing domain, including the marketing of risky products su... more Storytelling is on the rise in the marketing domain, including the marketing of risky products such as alcohol. We argue that the ethical relevance of stories should attract more attention from managers, policymakers and scholars, as storytelling drives suspension of disbelief, has enduring persuasive effects, is unintentionally affective and may lead to actual behavior. This raises major ethical questions for marketing and consumer behavior. To fill this gap, this article offers a systematic investigation by means of a meta-analysis of how three original study characteristics: (1) story domain, (2) number of storytellers and (3) number of simultaneous story-receivers, may affect the strength of the narrative transportation effect, which manifests itself in consumers’ response to having been transported into a narrative. Our contribution to prior work is twofold. First, we contribute to the field of narrative transportation and persuasion by showing the role of these three variables...
Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory, 2017
French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard t... more French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard to pigeonhole. His boundless curiosity for disparate life and speculative domains translates into a heterogeneous corpus of works, which covers art, fashion, language and writing, literature, love, myths, music, philosophy, photography, semiotics, and sport. His critique to the traditional notion of authorship (1967 [2002]) – a position positing the need to connect a text to its writer in order to interpret it – makes using Barthes’ biography to approach his intellectual production particularly sensitive. Barthes is sharp on the point when he says that the writer is not a text’s ‘author’ but a text’s ‘scriptor’. In doing so, he ratifies the ‘death of the author’ and the beginning of the modern writer’s era. The scriptor “is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate (…).” (p. 221) The scriptor’s role is hence that of assembling pre-existing texts (i.e. citations) in a novel manner and of empowering the reader. Since there is no ‘Author-God’, a text has no theological meaning; “nothing has to be deciphered” (p. 223).
Journal of Marketing Management, 2018
Marketing Theory, 2014
This special commentary section proposes new directions in researching the nexus of ethnicity and... more This special commentary section proposes new directions in researching the nexus of ethnicity and well-being under three themes of (1) mobility and shifting identities in relation to place, (2) empowerment and identity performance in relation to the virtual space, and (3) religious conflicts in relation to markets and spaces of consumption. The three short essays in this collection are geared towards accelerating research on ethnicity in marketing and consumer behaviour. They problematize the very nature of ethnicity in relation to space and how ethnicity is performed in different spaces by looking at the issues of social relations, transformations and conflict. They suggest potential areas of enquiry, particularly for new (doctor of philosophy) research projects, policy-focused research grant applications, conferences/seminars/workshops and also classroom activities and teaching purposes.
Journal of Marketing Management, 2015
ABSTRACT This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, wh... more ABSTRACT This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.
Islamic Finance in Europe. Towards a Plural Financial System, 2013
Over the last two decades, apparently everybody has been convinced that ‘the world is no longer t... more Over the last two decades, apparently everybody has been convinced that ‘the world is no longer the same’. At least, this is what we continuously hear in media, political, social and market discourses. As arguable, this epochal transformation is not usually welcomed as an improvement of our personal and collective wellbeing. By challenging established equilibria, changes are often perceived as threats to our reference points and may activate psychological and social conflicts. As such, the rhetoric of nostalgia has spread quite easily (Brown and Sherry 2003) and given the supporters of continuity additional argumentations to contrast the agents of this upturn.
We think that the world has always been changing, and our era makes no exception. For sure, contemporary society experiences a speed in changes and a spectacularization of them that were hardly imaginable in pre-modern and modern times (Brown 1995). Among others, the impact of new technologies and the ‘global diasporas’ (Cohen 1997) have rapidly multiplied the opportunity to live in more countries, meet more people and acquire more information. In short, the world has become a smaller place.
Strategic Market Creation: A New Perspective on Marketing and Innovation Management, 2008
The bond between innovation and markets should be variously observed. Nonetheless, the topic has ... more The bond between innovation and markets should be variously observed. Nonetheless, the topic has long been dominated by an almost univocal interpretative paradigm that enforces the leading role of companies in the strategic creation of markets. Far from contesting firms' momentum in market innovation, we reclaim better understanding of the role that consumers, both individually and in their social aggregations, show in transforming markets and social arenas. From a theoretical perspective, we detect three main phases in addressing the role of consumers in market innovation: (i) the subject-object interpretative framework; (ii) the user-dominated paradigm of innovation; and (iii) the subject-subject logic. First, the traditional subject-object framework has long been in favour. In this perspective, though the company holds the main role in directing market innovation, customer's importance is not neglected, but carried out in the form of 'customer orientation'. As such, consumers constitute a key constraint to companies and remain the final link of the productive and transactional chain. Therefore, customers are basically framed as passive agents who lack subjective agency. The user-dominated paradigm of innovation represents the second stage and largely benefits from Eric Von Hippel's work. In the course of his 30-year research on innovation, the author has questioned the subject-object view, suggesting a more participative role for customers in product and service design.
Research in Consumer Behavior, 2012
The notion of ‘boundary’ is central in both consumer acculturation research and migrants’ daily e... more The notion of ‘boundary’ is central in both consumer acculturation research and migrants’ daily experience within and beyond the market. Yet, scholars have rarely questioned this concept and thus made it a taken-for-granted that conceals more than it reveals. Our study aims at moving from the etic notion of boundary we use as consumer acculturation scholars to an emic notion of boundaries, here grounded on an ethnographic inquiry of Moroccan mothers and daughters in France. This chapter shows that: (1) the notion of boundary is much more articulated than expected since migrants may use up to five different typologies of boundaries (national, ethnic, religious, biographical, and generational) in order to organize their experience; (2) first and second generations tend to attribute different meanings to these boundaries; and, (3) boundaries represent problematic conceptual references in migrants’ life, which ask for specific coping strategies (crossing the borders, melting the borders, and pushing the borders). Overall, this chapter provides a more sensitive, blurred, and critical representation of boundaries, which—we hope—will stimulate sounder acculturation research. With reference to the limitations of our work, while we identify the variety and interpretive heterogeneity of boundaries migrants use to frame their experience, we limitedly address how such boundaries are performed.
The Routledge Companion on Ethnic Marketing, 2015
Ethnicity and space are thus intertwined: Space visualizes social representations of ethnicity (L... more Ethnicity and space are thus intertwined: Space visualizes social representations of ethnicity (Lipsitz 1998; Peñaloza 2000, 2001; Visconti and de Cordova 2012); dwellers’ ethnicities contribute to construct and modify the identity of the spaces in which they live, work, shop, consume, and establish social and market interactions (Peñaloza and Gilly 1999; Üstüner and Holt 2007). In brief, construction of ethnicity entails at least three types of identities: (1) migrants’/ethnic minorities’ identity (the term ‘minority’ here is used to signify ‘disempowered ethnic groups’), (2) mainstream’s (ethnic) identity, and (3) space identity, in which minorities’ and mainstream’s confrontation is emplaced. By space, I mean a large variety of spaces, ranging from the macro (e.g., nationscape, regionscape, cityscape; Paasi 2001) to the meso (e.g., marketplace, neighborhood; Peñaloza 2004, 2007) to the micro level (e.g., servicescape, workplace, home; Jamal 2003; Üstüner and Thompson 2012; Veresiu et al. 2012; Visconti and de Cordova 2012; Visconti and Premazzi 2012). More important, in this chapter I classify space through its function in the construction of ethnicity and thus distinguish among physical, cultural, social, ideological, political, and commercial space.
The Routledge Companion to Canonical Authors in Social Theory on Consumption, 2017
French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard t... more French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is hard to pigeonhole. His boundless curiosity for disparate life and speculative domains translates into a heterogeneous corpus of works, which covers art, fashion, language and writing, literature, love, myths, music, philosophy, photography, semiotics, and sport. His critique to the traditional notion of authorship (1967 [2002]) – a position positing the need to connect a text to its writer in order to interpret it – makes using Barthes’ biography to approach his intellectual production particularly sensitive. Barthes is sharp on the point when he says that the writer is not a text’s ‘author’ but a text’s ‘scriptor’. In doing so, he ratifies the ‘death of the author’ and the beginning of the modern writer’s era. The scriptor “is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate (…).” (p. 221) The scriptor’s role is hence that of assembling pre-existing texts (i.e. citations) in a novel manner and of empowering the reader. Since there is no ‘Author-God’, a text has no theological meaning; “nothing has to be deciphered” (p. 223).
Consumer Culture Theory, 2019
Why is gender important and how do we research it? This chapter hopes to address both these quest... more Why is gender important and how do we research it? This chapter hopes to address both these questions by looking at Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) research on the topic and summarizing existing bodies of thought with gender as their central focus. Understanding of gender, its making, deconstruction, and effects is crucial to any marketing manager. For example, the way men and women are represented in advertising is relevant in defining their social roles. Box 1 provides a brief review of how women have been portrayed in commercial communication over time, and the extent to which the transformation of these representations have accompanied their socio-political empowerment. As a result of positioning strategies, products can also be gendered. Meat is said to be masculine (Rozin et al. 2012); fairytales as well as dolls and toys set standards of femininity/masculinity from infancy onwards. Think of two opposite but both iconic American dolls: Barbie (www.barbie.com) and the American Girl (www.americangirl.com). These brands convey radically different models of femininity, with Barbie establishing aspirational standards of beauty, professional, and social fulfillment and the American Girl supporting instead a more heroic model of womanhood emphasizing triumph over adversity, perseverance, resourcefulness, and kindness toward others (Diamond et al. 2009).
Research Handbook on Luxury Branding, 2020
Storytelling as a practice is as ancient as mankind: ‘there is not, there has never been anywher... more Storytelling as a practice is as ancient as mankind: ‘there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds […]. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.’ (Barthes, 1966/1975: 237). The pervasiveness and longitudinal relevance of stories, which Barthes highlights, find a biological and evolutionary explanation in the fact that human beings memorize through stories (Boyd, 2009; Bruner, 1986; Schank, 1999). Among other reasons, the narrative basis of human memorization would derive from the massive episodic nature of the information we store and retrieve (Woodside, 2010), which is particularly compatible with a story-format. As Gottschall (2012: 87) says ‘the mind is a storyteller’. Cultural anthropologists themselves demonstrate that stories are relevant to understand and transmit class dynamics, ethnicity, gender, ideology, power, and many other aspects of social life (Quinn, 2005). In sum, stories are biologically and culturally intertwined with human history and nature.
Marketing Management: A Cultural Perspective, 2020
Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its ... more Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its concept "is built into the fabric of marketing" (Gibson 2001, 21). Segmentation is the process through which a company's actual and prospect customers are split into subgroups (i.e. segments), each of them showing similar consumption behaviors that differ across subgroups (Peter and Donnelly 2008). Differentiation (i.e. the process leading to variations of a company's offer) and targeting (i.e. the decision of which segments to serve by means of differentiated offers; Pride and Ferrell 2004) are meaningful only when customers have heterogeneous preferences, that is, only when a market is segmentable. Subdividing and profiling market segments help identify the customers to serve, the most effective way to satisfy their specific needs/desires, the competitors to face, the resources requested to compete in each segment, and the main stakeholders to involve in order to reinforce a company's market legitimacy (Cucurean-Zapan 2014; Lambin 1998). In simpler terms, market segmentation helps perform a company's market-orientation. While segmentation is still central to today's marketing, the profound transformations as much as the rising opportunities of contemporary markets and societies ask for a profound revision of segmentation theory and practice (Arnould and Cayla 2015; Gibson 2001; Kannisto 2016). Answering to this call, the chapter's aims are twofold. First, we approach segmentation historically, in order to unveil which were, and somehow still are, its often-implicit grounding premises. We show that most of these premises sway when confronted to extant cultural, economic, and technological environments, and invite for revision. The first part of the chapter (§ 18.2) thus provides readers with a longitudinal understanding of market segmentation and with evidences motivating the requested revision. Second, by focusing on contemporary trajectories of revision, we approach segmentation epistemologically, that is, we contrast two opposite perspectives on the needed revisions of market segmentation (§ 18.1). On the one hand, the marketing science perspective combines big data-driven consumer knowledge (cf. chapter 26 by Zwick and Dholakia) and the power of new technologies (especially, of artificial intelligence) to reinvigorate and transform segmentation (Mandelli 2018). Within this perspective, segmentation-as-science goes micro-basically, at a one-to-one level-and (hyper)targeting (Hoffmann, Inderst, and Ottaviani 2013) results into personalization, interpretable as the radicalization of mass-customization (Flavin and Heller 2019). On the other hand, hailing from the cultural marketing perspective (Peñaloza, Toulouse, and Visconti 2012), segmentation evolves into a set of decisions that marketers co-construct with customers. In line with this dialogical posture, targeting then requires conversational abilities (Jarratt and Fayed 2012) not only to reach, but also to engage target customers.