Places where people matter: The marketing dynamics of Fairtrade Towns (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
This paper details and justifies Grounded Theory as a methodology for researching into significant and emerging macromarketing phenomena, through an exploration of its use to investigate the marketing dynamics of the Fairtrade Towns Movement. The paper describes the research ‘journey’ undertaken from the initial consideration of Fairtrade Towns as an underresearched and challenging topic, through to the final production of new theory rooted in the reality of the research context. The philosophy and systematic processes that underpin Grounded Theory are explained, along with examples of how the key processes of data collection and analysis were undertaken. The insights generated in this paper demonstrate Grounded Theory as a suitable, yet underused, research approach available to macromarketers. It is revealed as a methodology that can bring rigor and confidence to research into emerging macromarketing themes, and the paper concludes by considering its potential for application in ke...
Expanding the boundaries of brand communities: the case of Fairtrade Towns
European Journal of Marketing
Purpose This paper aims to further the authors’ understanding of brand communities, and their role in brand co-creation, through empirical and theoretical contributions derived from researching the marketing dynamics operating within a successful but atypical form of brand community, Fairtrade Towns (FTT). Design/methodology/approach The paper reflects a pragmatic application of Grounded Theory, which captured qualitative data from key “insiders”, with a particular emphasis on FTT steering group members and their role as “prosumers”. Data were gathered via ethnographic involvement within one town and semi-structured interviews with participants in others. Findings FTTs, as brand communities, demonstrate elements of co-creation that go beyond the dominant theories and models within the marketing literature. They operate in, and relate to, real places rather than the online environments that dominate the literature on this subject. Unusually, the interactions between brand marketers a...
Fairtrade Towns as Unconventional Networks of Ethical Activism
Journal of Business Ethics, 2016
The growing availability and consumption of Fairtrade products is recognised as one of the most widespread ethically inspired market developments, and as an example of activist-driven change within the wider marketing system. The Fairtrade Towns movement, now operating in over 1700 towns and cities globally, represents a comparatively recent extension of Fairtrade marketing driven by local activists seeking to promote positive change in production and consumption systems. This paper briefly explores the conventional framing of the role that ethically related activism plays in the operation of markets and in influencing market participants. It then presents key insights gathered from a grounded theory exploration of Fairtrade Towns as activist-driven marketing systems, revealing the atypical nature of the activism involved. The findings demonstrate how local activists leverage their social networks to exert pressure and generate support to promote ethical consumption. The study suggests that Fairtrade Towns offer a new role for activists as Fairtrade itself becomes more mainstream, and considers the role they are fulfilling as 'informal' local marketers. The marketing dynamics revealed represent a complex and distinctive form of relational activism that seeks to build Fairtrade markets and highlight their positive benefits, with potential lessons for other local ethical market-building efforts in future.
Mapping microcosms: value and contestation at the Seven Sisters Indoor Market
Royal College of Art, MRes Architecture dissertation, 2019
Recent years have seen the rapid growth of cities. With it the distribution of resources, capital, and power also becoming part of the ever-changing landscapes. In an urban centre-peripheries scheme, the fluctuations of the cost of land and the agendas of development create inequalities. The access to decision making processes between marginalised communities and developers regarding construction and investment are highly polarised. However, whilst being exposed to the immediacy of everyday life, we can understand how alternative structures of governance emerge, from practicing common spatialities within some sort of public space. When public space is a space for sustained representations of the diverse layers that we encounter in the urban landscape: we can foresee its various roles underpinning the intersection between socio-political, economic and spatial configurations in perpetual negotiation. This research takes an interest in the tension between the endurance of physical space, and the ways in which social capital unravels, shifting from micro to macro structures of power and layers of infrastructure. Through the lens of social theory and empirical research, this project studies (street) markets of London at risk of disappearance, relocation or undergoing processes of redevelopment. It touches upon the cases of RRM and Brixton Markets, and takes a closer look into north-London’s Seven Sisters Market (SSIM), with the aim of identifying tactics of resistance and guidelines to safeguarding social value in the everyday, within the current political and urban development drivers. As the SSIM has become a battleground for competing visions of city-making, what other forms of architecture are the social relationship and governance structures shaping? As small-scale spaces like the market become social, spatial and economic alternatives in a city like London, how are they confronting opposite realities from the urban fabric in which they are embedded? And, how can community architecture be a tool for resilience against erasure? Because of major economic drivers and the access that different groups have to reshaping the city, the notions of what is of value and what counts as heritage become uneven. Those who have agency to decide how a place will change or be reshaped are not necessarily the same people who recognise value in them; or at least not the same value. This raises the question of where and what is of value in processes of urban transformation. Value for whom? What kind of values are at stake of being lost or kept? The SSIM is not only a market, but a community centre, a solid economic structure and platform, an enclave of nostalgia of another home, Colombian in the most part. What can we learn from within its surface, its physicality, its materiality? In a triangulation between resistance, value, and the physicality of the market, this research focuses on how its everyday activity translates into the form of bridges, bonds, games, frictions, and relationships of care, as a response to the 16-year-long struggle that the market has put up to fight back the CPO and stop the Grainger’s project that would demolish the site. This project looks to understand what the social value of the market is, where it can it be found, and how it is related to the process of evolving resistance into an alternative for the struggle.
Place marketing for social inclusion
Inclusive Place Branding, 2017
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Performing Place Promotion -Implaced Identity in Marketized Geographies
Marketing Theory , 2019
In the period that has become known as late capitalism, processes of commercialization are continuously taking on new forms. These tendencies enact an influence on how people understand themselves, the social relations they engage in, and the world around them. Geographical knowledge is no exception and has become increasingly shrouded in the language, symbolism, and tropes of marketing. Following the work of Judith Butler, we explore how these tendencies have profound implications on our self-construal, making discursive 'implacement' an expedient factor in the marketization of identity. Further, we examine how two interrelated marketing discourses deal with place as commercial entities: the country-of-origin effect and place branding. In their commercial vernacular, they provide salient examples of subtle yet inescapable effects on the understanding of self-construal. In presenting this sensitizing diagnostic, we hope to further advance issues of stakeholdership as it pertains to the place-world, and to offer new trajectories of critical inquiry into the commercial relevance of place.
Performing place promotion—On implaced identity in marketized geographies
Marketing Theory, 2019
In the period that has become known as late capitalism, processes of commercialization are continuously taking on new forms. These tendencies enact an influence on how people understand themselves, the social relations they engage in, and the world around them. Geographical knowledge is no exception and has become increasingly shrouded in the language, symbolism, and tropes of marketing. Following the work of Judith Butler, we explore how these tendencies have profound implications on our self-construal, making discursive “implacement” an expedient factor in the marketization of identity. Further, we examine how two interrelated marketing discourses deal with places as commercial entities: the country-of-origin effect and place branding. In their commercial vernacular, they provide salient examples of subtle yet inescapable effects on the understanding of self-construal. In presenting this sensitizing diagnostic, we hope to further advance issues of stakeholdership as it pertains to...
Place marketing in a logistics context: A Swedish case study and discourse
Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 2009
Distance challenged regions, geographically or demographically, need to engage in the development of unique and strategic logistics capabilities in order to support existing business and to attract new business. However, the development of logistics capabilities is not suffi cient; place marketing is essential for attracting new business. Today, many regions use place marketing. There is, however, great homogeneity in the way regions market themselves using logistics arguments. The level of differentiation concerning logistical arguments is very low. Approaching the same audience with similar arguments has little chance of attracting investments, as no unique capabilities or features are emphasised in the marketing mix of arguments. The lack of differentiation deters decision-makers, as they have diffi culty evaluating location alternatives. This absence of strategic marketing planning constitutes a window of opportunity that, when opened, creates a possibility for the local to have the global ear. This paper provides an insight into the story of a small region in Sweden that has been surprisingly successful in attracting business through its efforts in developing strategic logistics capabilities and using logistics arguments in its place marketing.
Marketing the unmarketable: Place branding in a postindustrial medium-sized town
Cities, 2021
This paper analyzes place branding as a policy intervention in postindustrial small and medium sized towns. We broaden the current and primarily large city focused discussion of place branding in postindustrial locales by examining the re-branding of the former mining town of Heerlen, the Netherlands. The concept of urban imaginaries, or the collection of (historical) representations and narrations of urban space, is used to analyze how place branding strategies are (un)successfully received by target audiences, in particular by different resident groups. While the campaign 'Urban Heerlen' has contributed to a successful cultural regeneration, its contested definition of 'urban' and the application of a 'one-size-fits-all' strategy for regeneration limits its effectiveness in terms of authenticity and inclusivity. We argue that place branding in smaller postindustrial cities might benefit from an explicit recognition of and engagement with the urban imaginaries of residents.