Brands and their Meaning Makers (original) (raw)
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From the EditorThe Territory of Consumer Research: Walking the Fences
Journal of Consumer Research, 2007
A journal is pulled into the future by its past. It publishes articles that cite articles that the journal published earlier, and it chooses as reviewers and gatekeepers the most published of its earlier authors. The character of a journal risks being less sensitive to change than even the field itself, which has at least the opportunity to launch new journals to accommodate new topics. Over time, unless it engages in vigorous reflection, a journal may start to look like an unkind caricature of its more youthful self. This editorial is an invitation to readers of JCR to contribute to reflections on the scope of consumer research. There has been some private discussion, for example, when I or a reviewer has asked authors whether their submissions have enough to say about consumption to be right for JCR or whether they are, perhaps, better suited to a more general journal. Sometimes the response is defensive-hasn't JCR published articles in the past that are less linked to consumption than mine-and sometimes the reply is that the work is basic to consumer behavior, and do I not think that readers would find it applicable? These conversations have led me to think that a broader conversation on this theme might be useful. As a preamble, I want to suggest what JCR is, who reads it, why they read it, and where it belongs in the system of journals. I assume, safely I think, that most JCR readers work in business schools and that business schools are professional schools whose agendas differ from the agendas of psychology departments and other university social science departments in that they pay more attention to accumulating professionally usable knowledge. The profession that most of our readers relate to is marketing. And yet JCR is not a professional journal, and in particular it is not a marketing journal. Nor should it be. It is read by people who are looking for deeper intellectual stimulation on the topic of consumption than is found in the marketing journals. Tension arises because, as a sociological fact, JCR owes most of its readership, its sponsorship, and its patronage to the expectation that its consumer insights are useful to marketing and the regulation of marketing. The resolution, in my view, is that consumer research is foundational to marketing, while in turn the social sciences are foundational to consumer behavior. Consumer research sits in a slightly uncomfortable middle ground, an applied discipline relative to psychology, economics, statistics, sociology, or anthropology but a fundamental discipline relative to marketing or management. This middle ground is home to "pure" scholars, who aspire to the intellectual freedom that comes from never having to explain why a research project is useful, and "applied" scholars, who aspire to the power that comes from doing just the opposite. If there is mutual respect between these two kinds of scholars, the middle ground can be wonderfully plastic, alert to shifts in intellectual fashion in the foundational disciplines and to shifts in the practices of the profession and feeding both. If not, it risks being dry, brittle, and easily fragmented into factions. This editorial expands on this view of JCR as a journal that lives between disciplines and professions and invites debate on some features of research that belong in such a journal. I am writing it because of all the discussions that have followed my last editorial (Deighton 2005); this one seems to have the most left to say. Another reason is that good fences make for good neighbors, and it never hurts to walk the boundaries of a domain from time to *Thank you to the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) associate editors for reading and commenting on the first draft of this editorial. No endorsement should be inferred.
Creating Boundary-Breaking Marketing-Relevant Consumer Research
SSRN Electronic Journal
Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or defaults regarding what we study, why we study it, and how we do so. We identify these boundaries and describe how they can be challenged. We show that boundary-breaking marketing-relevant consumer research can impact relevant stakeholders (including academics in our own discipline and allied ones, and a wide range of marketplace actors including business practitioners, policymakers, the media, and society) by detailing five articles and identifying others that have had such influence. Based on these articles, we articulate what researchers can do to break boundaries and enhance the impact of their research. We also indicate why engaging in boundary-breaking work and enhancing the breadth of our influence is good for both individual researchers and the fields of consumer research and marketing.
Our Vision for the Journal of Consumer Research: It’s All about the Consumer
Journal of Consumer Research
Journal of Consumer Research is a leading journal in the field of social science, with a rich history of publishing multidisciplinary research focused on the study of consumers. JCR has been fortunate to have had strong editorial leadership over the years, and has forged a prestigious reputation. We are honored and humbled by the Journal of Consumer Research Policy Board's decision to select us to shepherd JCR for the next three years. During any editorial transition, there is a level of uncertainty regarding the direction in which the editors plan to take the journal. Authors, particularly junior authors, are wary of editorial changes that might affect the likelihood of their work being published in the journal. To alleviate this uncertainty, we present our ambitions for JCR under our editorship and our plans to realize those ambitions. As we do so, we gratefully acknowledge the excellent job done by the outgoing team of Darren Dahl, Eileen Fischer, Gita Johar, and Vicki Morwitz. This editorial team is passing the baton of a journal that is in great shape. Enabled by the careful, rigorous stewardship of the journal over many committed past editorships, we have high ambitions for our editorial term. OUR AMBITION FOR THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH Our basic ambition is to make the Journal of Consumer Research the first choice for submission of all high-quality, consumer-relevant research. At its core, JCR's mission is to increase the understanding of consumer behavior and its underpinnings. In order to achieve such understanding, we feel strongly that JCR needs to be receptive to a broad array of consumer research. Thus, we will adopt a "big tent" approach to all research that focuses on a consumer-relevant question. The ambition to create a big tent for high-quality, consumer-relevant research does not originate with our editorial team. This philosophy is reflected in the JCR Policy Board's composition of 11 sponsoring organizations that run the gamut from base disciplines (Society for Personality and Social Psychology, American Sociological Association, American Anthropological Association) to quantitative (American Statistical Association, INFORMS) and applied fields (American Marketing Association, American Association for Public Opinion Research, International Communication Association, Association for Consumer Research, American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, Society for Consumer Psychology). From the beginning, the founders of JCR and the field of consumer research stressed interdisciplinary and broad relevance goals. Several past editors have made valiant efforts to realize those goals, incorporating new research paradigms and methods and promoting interdisciplinary consumer research (see Lutz 1989). Despite efforts by many committed editors and scholars, however, a thoughtful examination of the disciplinary status of consumer behavior concluded that consumer behavior is currently not an interdisciplinary field and perhaps not as multidisciplinary as it could or should be (MacInnis and Folkes 2010). In that same year, the editorial team of Deighton, MacInnis, McGill, and Shiv invited findings papers (heavy on effects, light on theory), and conceptual contributions (heavy on ideas, light on data) (2010, 895); but several years later there are still few published papers that map onto these goals. The editorial team of Peracchio, Luce, and McGill ended their term with an editorial calling on us to pursue "bridges rather than silos," noting that they view the "failure to transition to a more integrative approach to research" as the primary challenge for the healthy evolution of consumer research (2014, vi). In 2014, the most recent editorial team of Dahl, Fischer, Johar, and Morwitz summarized their vision for advancing the journal "with a single mantra: 'make it meaningful,'" suggesting that we begin with attention to how the research will inform the attitudes and behaviors of the intended audience (iii). Despite long-standing and heartfelt ambitions to create a big tent for impactful, consumer-relevant research, we are still far from obtaining that goal. Many agree that "value placed on research rigor and sophistication exceeds the value placed on the importance of the research question and the substantive insights provided by that research," (Lynch et al. 2012, 474; Lehmann, McAlister, and Staelin 2011). Many express quietly, and some not so quietly, that too much of what appears in JCR and our other leading journals has narrow scope; uses narrow theoretical lenses; relies on easy, cheap, nonrepresentative samples; and puts too much emphasis on process rather than on detecting and describing generalizable, substantive phenomena (Campbell forthcoming;
2019
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. The coming out of the ”new consumer” Wided Batat
Are Brands Actually the Output of a Dialectical Process Between the Consumer and Companies
Tripodos, 2018
Developments in communication technologies are challenging classic marketing and communication paradigms, leading to the view that brands are no longer built top-down by marketing managers, but developed in collaboration with consumers. The importance of consumers in the process of brand value creation is largely accepted by practitioners, but to date little attempt has been made to confirm whether those responsible for brand building are truly open to a brand co-creation process. Recent research conducted by Lahoz (2017) revealed that brand managers and company CEOs are reluctant to lose control over their brands and, although they acknowledge the (new) active role of the (new) empowered consumer, they do not see consumers as co-responsible for defining their brands but as participators in peripheral areas of brand building. Els canvis permanents en les tecnologies de comunicacio estan desafiant els paradigmes tradicionals de la comunicacio i el marqueting. Els directors de ...
The roots of consumer research: institutions and ideas
Having broadly seen how consumption has emerged as a practice to become something that we all do every day. We can begin to think about how the study of consumption has developed. In this regard, it is generally recognized that consumer behavior emerged out of marketing as an academic discipline in its own right during the 1960s (Pachauri, 2001). The first text with "consumer behavior" in its title, for instance, appeared in 1967, written by Myers and Reynolds. Shortly after, the first textbooks dedicated to consumer behavior were published by Engel, Kollatt and Blackwell (1968) and Kassarjian and Robertson (1968).
Three Themes for the Future of Brands in a Changing Consumer Marketplace
Journal of Consumer Research, 2021
The purpose of our conceptual introduction is to theorize how brands will continue to be relevant in the future marketplace. We identify three themes that emerge in this special issue that offer intriguing directions for future exploration and managerial action. The first theme is that because of brands’ pervasiveness, consumers have developed a meta concept of “brands” that shapes how consumers think about the market, themselves, and others. While marketers consider the power of a particular brand as a valued consumer resource, this theme speaks to the power of “brands” as a category. The second theme contributes to a growing conversation highlighting consumer agency in relation to brands. Consumers manage their relationships with brands; selectively draw on media to create their own brand narratives; and can even upend the “rules” of brand management. The final theme is that brand owners must balance continuity and change, recognizing that brand contestation and cultural change ar...