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As we write this editorial, we are sitting in our respective homes, during a period when we would usually attend annual academic conferences. These conferences provide the opportunity to share research, to have conversations with colleagues regarding what we are working on, hear about new areas of research, new approaches and new methods. Often, we return home tired, but refreshed and inspired. At the same time, such conferences can result in group think, we sometimes recycle old ideas and structures; as pressures of work increase, time and space to think about new approaches or areas of research may decrease. We can often work in isolation in our home institutions as the sheer breath of the field of marketing and consumer research means that departments house colleagues with widely divergent research interests and philosophical and methodological approaches. The tried and tested conference format of short presentations where we distil the highlights of our studies, followed by a few questions from the audience, is often insufficient for the thoughtful dialogue needed when wishing to move our research forward. If we are lucky, we end up in a session with similar papers, likeminded authors and an engaged audience and our discussion can spill out into the coffee or lunch break. But, all too often, such conversations are rushed and end abruptly in an attempt to get to the next session, grab some fresh air, drink bad coffee, or go off in search of better coffee, review the publisher stands or check in at home. For this reason, we proposed a new format for the annual Academy of Marketing Conference starting from 2018. With the introduction of conference workshops aimed at 'cutting edge theory, methods or pedagogy' we aimed to bring together a critical mass of colleagues already working on specific theoretical, methodological or pedagogical approaches or interested in finding out more about what we hoped would be rewarding engagement.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an increasingly consumerized market environment, encouraged firms to pay greater attention to the marketing of their goods and the development of modern branding practices. However, in the literature, the development of these branding practices has remained somewhat obscured by the assertion that brands conform to general characteristics within historical periods (Moore and Reid, 2008). However, as Mercer (2010: 18) notes: “such an argument overlooks nuances and shifts in the types of brands and branding employed over time.” This paper is concerned with understanding these nuances and the historical instantiation of brand building activities. In order to achieve this, we consider the role of the retailer Liberty of London at the emergence of modern branding practices. In particular, we focus on Liberty’s success engaging emergent middle class consumers with its distinctive design values associated with the exoticism of the Orient at a crucial stage in the development of mass consumer culture. Arthur Lasenby Liberty commercially activated the elitist aestheticism of mid-nineteenth century England associated with such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris by articulating a vision of market-mediated authenticity. In 1875, Liberty opened his first store in Regent Street and over the next quarter of a century became a major influence on consumer taste. Our findings show that Liberty’s branding practices were encountered at three levels: first, through authoritative advocacy and allegorical encounters within a wide socio-cultural sphere; secondly, through augmented admission and experiential engagement within an iconic retail setting; thirdly, through symbolic substantiation within the consumer’s social and domestic space. We conclude by proposing that this process of brand building, through market-mediated authentication, was linked intrinsically to consumers’ associated experiential imagining within an iconic retail space. Further, we propose the firm’s exploitation of territorial legitimacy to underpin brand validity was a precursor to a wider commercial exploitation of iconic venues of consumption that became increasing evident in the early years of the next century.

The role of consumers has evolved over time, with consumers becoming more active contributors to the activities of firms (Kozinets et al., 2010). This blurring of boundaries has resulted in an evolution of firms’ marketing strategies, in which many firms now desire deeper engagement from customers (Harmeling et al., 2017). Engagement is broadly understood as a genuine disposition of a customer towards a brand, associated with the voluntary contribution of resources (Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014). To this extent, accepted engagement antecedents are seen as representing genuine acts of consumers (Brodie et al., 2011). Consumer engagement is amplified through the ubiquity and functionality of social media platforms, which provide countless opportunities for a brand to continuously interact and develop relationships with consumers (Dessart, Veloutsou and Morgan-Thomas, 2015). However, this new form of brand engagement on social media may also cause a shift in the interactions of users. Rather than interaction with a brand to reflect a genuine disposition of a product or service, social media allows individuals to engage with brands as part of ideal self-construction through a self-presentation process. Thus, brand engagement on social media may not reflect consumers’ genuine behaviour. This research explores of the potential for ‘inauthentic engagement’ within social media. Data were collected through thirty semi-structured interviews with Facebook users covering 11 nationalities, using the projective technique of asking interviewees to comment on their own Facebook news feed and posts. The findings identify three types of inauthentic engagement, reflecting varying degrees of inauthenticity and which include: staged engagement, spurious engagement and fake engagement, which come with diverse drivers – self-differentiation, self-enhancement, concern for others, group belonging and attention seeking. Given that most firms currently employ engagement marketing strategies that are perceived to reflect genuine brand engagement by consumers (Harmeling et al., 2017), this research implies that the results of firms’ existing strategies could be questionable when consumer engagement is no longer based on a genuine disposition to engage. This research expands awareness of the nuances of consumer brand engagement within social media. The research diverges from traditional investigations of engagement, which assume a genuine disposition associated with long-term commitment to a focal object (Brodie et al., 2011; Harmeling et al., 2017). This research will have important implications for companies in terms of their ability to identify inauthentic engagement and design effective strategies to place greater emphasis on self-presentation to encourage consumers to engage through brand association. Consequently, when firms recognise this informed perspective, they are able to capture more engagement from every aspect of consumers’ segmentation on social media. Indeed, inauthentic engagement could damage a firm’s efforts because people are making decisions as a result. As existing research suggest that online engagement has an effect on brand performance, and ultimately sales (Malthouse et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2016); therefore, engagement that is inauthentic could also have some effect on this.

In this paper, we explore how cosmopolitanism became strategically divorced from its roots in world citizenship imagination during the infancy of modern consumer culture giving rise to the other-directed, postemotional, and market-based variant that persists indefinitely today. By drawing upon historical data from retail operations during the Belle Époque (1871-1914), and specifically the commodification of the imagined geographies of “the Orient” by the early British department store, we identify ideological antecedents to the current commodification of otherness and the valorisation of a panoply of foreign and anti-structural retreats from the provincial, familiar, and mundane. In doing so, our cultural-historical approach, first, dovetails with recent calls in ICR for attentiveness to the historical contexts from which contemporary discourses of consumption emerge (Bonsu, 2009; Bryce et al. 2013; Karababa and Ger, 2011). Here, we build a case for what we call historically-led “conceptual instantiation”, a process of extending, clarifying, complicating or dimensionalising an extant concept through retroactively making sense of and problematising how it first became instantiated in the particularities of time and space. Second, our research contributes to a nascent stream of work on marketplace oases for aesthetic experiences and utopic praxis (Chatzidakis, Maclaran, & Bradshaw, 2012; Roux, 2014) by theorising how fantasy and enchantment are not encountered through micro-emancipatory market venues alone but through their embeddedness in and interaction with wider macro-social structures and ongoing relations with collective history and geography. We focus on the interpellation of an emergent middle class of consumers to the exoticism of the Orient by Liberty of London at the gestational period of contemporary consumer culture, illustrating how cosmopolitan ideals became reconfigured as an ideology of consumption conducive to global capital rather than world citizenship ethics. Based on a process of extraction, creolisation, dechronisation, and commodification, we explore how Liberty and others at the time instantiated bourgeois consumers’ zeal for imported goods and styles perceived to be foreign simply because of their very foreignness. This laid the material and spatial groundwork for the phenomenological operation of “capitalist cosmopolitanism” (Pieterse, 2006) or what, we argue, might be better considered “heteropolitanism” (i.e. self-realisation by consuming “otherness” through the market rather than realising true “worldliness” through ethos). To assist in our identification and retroactive conceptualisation of heteropolitanism, we draw from Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia, which denotes social spaces that are ‘different’ to other spaces. Heterotopias exist as “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which real sites found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (Foucault, 1986: 24). Here, beyond the creolization of the Orient with British tastes, we explore Liberty’s blending of temporalities where imagery of otherness is assembled from a collage of semi-mythical histories. We also approach aspects of Liberty’s design influence as both a challenge and an abutment to the incipient rationalization of the marketplace. Liberty’s co-optation of otherness and exoticism came at just the right time to allow modern industrial capitalism to reconcile its ideological contradictions; particularly, the conflict between objective mechanical efficiencies supported by the rationalistic ethic of homo economicus and the burgeoning awareness that ‘new’ consumers’ desires are based on subjective feelings, fantasies, and fictive frameworks of self-conceptions and lifestyle goals.

In this paper we problematize the contextualization and analysis of innovative international retailing practices in time and across time. Theoretically, the paper contributes to an understanding of the role of marketing activities in defining the boundary of the international firm. Using historical methods and drawing on primary data from firm-based archives in the United States and the United Kingdom this paper shows how adopting a long-term perspective on retail marketing innovation facilitates a deeper and richer understanding of the internationalization of retail activity from the perspective of practice and theory. We explore the epistemological challenges of incorporating historical methods into mainstream marketing research. These historiographical and theoretical issues are explored through consideration of the role of ‘flagship’ stores in the creation of brand identity in international markets during and between the first and second global economies: 1880 - 2019. Analyzing the experiences of American and British firms, this paper explores strategic tensions created by the relative financial and marketing value of iconic stores in prestigious locations in international markets. At the firm-level, the article provides insight into the emergence and development of in-house branding, retailing and marketing practices. At the market-level, it explores how marketing innovation defined by the first global economy (1880-29) was challenged by volatile trading conditions after 1929 and reasserted in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century (1980-2019). Authors Professor Nicholas Alexander Department of Marketing Lancaster University Management School Lancaster University Lancaster, LA1 4YX +44 (0)1524 510996 nicholas.alexander@lancaster.ac.uk Professor Anne Marie Doherty Department of Marketing Strathclyde Business School University of Strathclyde Glasgow G4 0QU +44 0141 5485899 annemarie.doherty@strath.ac.uk