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Textual data require an analytical trade-off between breadth and depth. Automated approaches locate patterns across large swaths of data points but sacrifice qualitative insight because they are not well equipped to deal with context-determined ways to express meaning, like figurative language. To strengthen the power of automated text analysis, researchers seek hybrid methodologies that combine computer-augmented analysis with sociocultural researcher insights based on qualitative textual interpretation. This article demonstrates a new method, which the authors term metaphor-enabled marketplace sentiment analysis (MEMSA). Building on existing automated text analysis methodologies linking word lists to sentiments, MEMSA adds metaphors that associate topics with sentiments across domains. Using MEMSA, researchers can leverage the sentiment potential of these located metaphors and scale insights to the level of big textual data by employing a dictionary approach enhanced by a specific and useful linguistic property of metaphors: their predictable structure in text (something is something else). This article shows that metaphors add associative detail to sentiments, revealing the targets and sources of sentiments that underlie the associations. Understanding nuanced market sentiments enables marketers to identify sentiment-based trends embedded in market discourse, so they can better formulate, target, position, and communicate value propositions for products and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many retailers invest in artificial intelligence (AI) to improve operational efficiency or enhance customer experience. However, AI often disrupts employees' ways of working causing them to resist change, thus threatening the successful embedding and sustained usage of the technology. Using a longitudinal, multi-site ethnographic approach combining 74 stakeholder interviews and 14 on-site retail observations over a 5-year period, this article examines how employees' practices change when retailers invest in AI. Practice co-evolution is identified as the process that undergirds successful AI integration and enables retail employees' sustained usage of AI. Unlike product or practice diffusion, which may be organic or fortuitous, practice co-evolution is an orchestrated, collaborative process in which a practice is co-envisioned, co-adapted, and co-(re)aligned. To be sustained, practice co-evolution must be recursive and enabled via intentional knowledge transfers. This empirically-derived recursive phasic model provides a roadmap for successful retail AI embedding, and fruitful future research avenues., Author(s): Francesca Bonetti [sup.1] , Matteo Montecchi [sup.2] , Kirk Plangger [sup.2] , Hope Jensen Schau [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.20364.33, 0000 0000 8517 0017, Fashion Business Research Centre, Fashion [...]

We identify value narratives as stories that promote certain product or service attributes as benefits within the marketplace. We show how value narratives reflect benefit attributes that align with alternative versus mainstream market settings. Our empirical focus is local food value narratives within a common local food system with alternative settings being farmers' markets and mainstream settings being supermarkets. Farmers' market and supermarket purveyors choose which benefit characteristics to emphasize throughout narrative curation, enabling us to witness strategic narrative use, or what we term narrative stewardship. We find that multiple value narratives express an array of 'local food' benefits in ways that create a contested marketplace. Narrative deployment at farmers' markets is guided by an amalgam of institutional perspectives, while narrative use at supermarkets is dominated by a market institutional perspective. We identify a continuum of value narrative stewardship (promotion-neglect) within farmers' markets that leaves the meaning and value of 'local food' vulnerable to mainstream market appropriation via narrative voidance, dilution, and replacement. We propose strategies for better value narrative stewardship., Author(s): Matthew M. Mars [sup.1] [sup.2] , Hope Jensen Schau [sup.2] [sup.3] , Tyler E. Thorp [sup.1] [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.134563.6, 0000 0001 2168 186X, College of Agriculture and [...]

This article explores how firms, through characteristics of physical environments, can inspire consumers to engage in creating and posting environment-cued indirect advertising, or what is commonly known as "Instagramming." The first study is used to qualitatively understand what makes an environment "Instagrammable" from the designer perspective. Emergent themes are used to inform a second study, a quantitative analysis of 43,004 instances of indirect advertising gathered by scraping Instagram postings from 97 environments in four prominent pop culture museums. After manually sorting the data, both artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled computer vision and manual coding are used to quantify multiple environment characteristics. Analysis reveals how different environment characteristics affect the creation of indirect advertising. Environments that use more interactive props, color, and brightness are associated with greater indirect advertising. Except in limited cases, most design themes have no effects—or negative effects—on indirect advertising. This article also contributes to the emerging literature on computer vision by showcasing how AI can offer insight for better understanding shared digital content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how reflexivity contributes to the continuation of value creation for consumers throughout consumption journeys. Reflexivity is awareness of the self within the world. Our study establishes a framework for studying consumption journeys centered on progressive engagement with a practice-in this case surfing-over time. We discover that reflexivity manifests in consumption journeys in an iterative, recursive manner-i.e., recursive reflexivity-tacking between identity (mis)alignment (with dominant institutions) and reflexive outcomes, such as imitating, improving, adapting and reconciling. Our findings reveal that recursive reflexivity contributes to the continuation of value creation in consumption journeys by fostering practice continuity-i.e., immersion, adaptation, innovation and/or dissolution of a practice-which provides opportunities for enhanced consumption experiences and supports the evolution of identity projects. These findings deepen the understanding of how practices, identity, and institutions contribute to value creation. Implications from these findings suggest that firms should pay close attention to recursive reflexivity and practice continuity to cultivate value creation with consumers by (a) providing opportunities for enhanced consumption experiences, (b) aligning or misaligning brand identity with dominant institutions, and (c) sparking imagining, identity evolution, and practice innovation., Author(s): Melissa Archpru Akaka [sup.1] , Hope Jensen Schau [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) 0000 0001 2165 7675, grid.266239.a, University of Denver, , 2101 S. University Blvd, 80208, Denver, CO, USA [...]

Diffusion is traditionally examined at a macro level , measured by adoption (e.g. sales), or at a micro level , assessed by consumer characteristics (e.g. adopter types). We address diffusion at a meso level focusing on how a practice disseminates across extended time and cross-cultural and cross-national space. We conduct an historical analysis and ethnographic inquiry of the dispersion of an indigenous practice, surfing, and the consequences of practice diffusion on practice reproduction. Our data suggest practice diffusion is not the wholesale adoption of a practice. Rather, a practice emerges across diverse cultural and national contexts through adaptation , fueled by processes of codification and transposition. We find that the movement of practice elements (meanings, materials, and competences) and their dynamic linkages (transposition, codification, and adaptation) enable a practice to (re)emerge across broad historic epochs and complex sociocultural landscapes. This study reveals how a practice evolves through shifts in power between practice carriers and noncarriers and results in distinct forms of reproduction (demarcation, imitation, acculturation, and innovation) that can mask the cultural genealogy of a practice. The continual maintenance and evolution of a practice depend on its strength of alignment and embeddedness within systems of practices that make up the social fabric of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of unprecedented consumer access to media and the tools to control narrative delivery, speed, and exposure to transmedia content, there is no longer the illusion of a cohesive narrative managed by a recognized singular author or unified authorial voice. Instead, consumers carve their own trajectories through brand narratives. Our multimethod inquiry of television series viewing, based on a combination of interviews, diaries, video recordings followed by member-check interviews and online forum analyses, identifies two key forces that guide narrative navigation: how consumers manage a text's gravitational pull and its permeability to transmedia content. We find that consumers shape their own trajectories by adopting and/or moving between nine documented narrative positions. This more nuanced understanding of narrative consumption in a transmedia environment offers new insights for the study of narrative brand spaces and brand storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although governments and organizations are increasingly addressing the importance of diversity and inclusion policies, LGBTQIA+ consumers still experience instances of discrimination and stigmatization in the market. Research identifying the barriers and struggles that these consumers face is therefore imperative in order to inspire more inclusive marketplace practices. By combining bibliometric and automated text mining methods, this article systematically reviews the existing scholarship on LGBTQIA+ issues at the intersection of marketing and public policy and identifies five thematic clusters: consumer experiences, marginalized consumer identities, imagery creation in advertising, marketplace policies, and minority targeting strategies. Further, this article plots the temporal evolution of this literature domain and identifies three substantive phases: crisis, marketization, and advocacy. The outcome is a phasic framework that unpacks how the LGBTQIA+ consumer market emerged and evolved. This conceptual framework can be used to understand and strategically invigorate research that leads to more inclusive marketing and public policy efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has made substantial impacts on every aspect of our lives, including our consumption habits and how we interact with communication messages like advertising. This special section examines the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on consumers, brands, stakeholders, and advertisers using a variety of theories and methodologies including experimental designs, text analysis, and content analysis. The research presented is divided into three key areas: (1) advertising's impact on society, (2) consumer behavior in a pandemic, and (3) pandemic message framing. These themes illustrate how consumers, brands, advertisers, and other stakeholders have proven to be resilient and compassionate in the face of an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than looking to the future, Patsiaouras and Fitchett turn to the past to shed light on the ideological underpinnings of marketing theory, examining two 20th century political (anti) heroes, namely Joseph Stalin and Margaret Thatcher, and the role of marketing in shaping these figures. Finally, consumers are increasingly encouraged to participate in heroic consumption ([2]), to act heroically to achieve an important consumption goal ([7]), to make comparisons to heroes and heroines ([24]), and to live what [8] calls "heroic lifestyles" whereby consumers are active and self-aware rather than passive, easily duped mass market consumers. Sing to me of the twists and turns of this special issue, Muse, and the many pains suffered as its heroes and heroines are driven time and again off course, fighting to save their sagas and bring their ideas to light. [Extracted from the article]