Ela Veresiu

Morality, appraisals of right and wrong, is central to consumers’ identities and decisions. Even everyday consumption choices can be subject to moral judgments and require moral justifications. When and how do consumers moralize formerly taken-for-granted consumption practices? Considering self-care consumption in the United States, which includes practices that range from bathing to dieting to meditating to vacationing, this article examines the moralization of everyday consumption practices. This research reveals that consumption is likely to be moralized when there are culturally contested meanings of its core constructs, like “self” and “care,” leading cultural authorities to prescribe alternative ways to pursue the same consumption goal (i.e., cultural scripts). Exposure to cultural scripts that clash with consumers’ moral intuitions about self-care consumption triggers moral introspection, an evaluation and re-calibration of those intuitions. Consumers then set moral boundaries of acceptable self-care consumption by (1) denouncing, such that they assume a position of moral righteousness; (2) positioning, to indicate moral inclusivity; (3) balancing, which implies moral licensing; or (4) ritualizing, in which case they express moral autonomy. This study advances consumer research by establishing that moral considerations intertwine with consumers’ identities and underlie the symbolic meanings of everyday consumption practices.

How do managers time the launch of new technologies? Without actionable frameworks to ensure consumers and other stakeholders are ready, innovation releases remain a risky endeavor. Previous work on legitimacy has focused on stages following a product launch. However, launch timing concerns shared expectations of when actions should occur prior to launch. This conceptual article evaluates the alignment between firm and stakeholder expectations regarding launch timing. It proposes that the market timing of new technology launches is structured by two dimensions: firm-led coordination and stakeholders’ willingness to change. Combining these dimensions, the authors map four types of market timing situations managers can encounter: antagonistic, synergistic, flexible, and inflexible timing. Temporal legitimacy is achieved when a firm and its key stakeholders share timing norms about the ideal moments when activities should occur in a market process. The authors conceptualize proto-markets as prefacing the well-known market legitimacy stages. This article concludes with a detailed managerial decision tree on how to create the optimal technology product launch moment and avenues of future research on market timing beyond technology launches.

The payday lending industry has been characterized as predatory, which has led to tougher government interventions. However, research on how stricter consumer protection regulations affect actual vulnerable consumers’ lived experiences remains seriously underdeveloped. Following in-depth interviews with financially excluded and therefore vulnerable payday loan consumers, this study finds that increased payday loan industry regulations are perceived by consumers as either empowering, disempowering, or simultaneously (dis)empowering. Accordingly, practical implications are developed to help public policy makers navigate vulnerable consumers’ ambivalent relationship with consumer protection regulations.

Despite the increased focus on racial justice in markets and society, the delegitimization of racialized brands employing racial stereotypes to enliven themselves remains unexplored. This study draws on media data and discursive (de)legitimization to compare the initial maintenance and eventual removal of a mainstream racialized brand name through public discourses in the popular press. Specifically, it unpacks how brands’ spokespeople and other professionals legitimized Gypsy Sauce in the German marketplace in 2013 only to delegitimize the controversial brand name in 2020. “Gypsy” is a racially charged and derogatory term for the self-designated Roma ethno-race. The critical discourse analysis reveals two commonly used delegitimizing discourses (antiracism and social tolerating) as direct responses to two dominant legitimizing discourses (romanticizing and market dynamicizing) for the racialized brand. This article concludes with consumer implications, branding recommendations, and future research directions on delegitimizing culturally insensitive brands.

This article unpacks time as a cultural consumption resource and introduces the concept of consumer timework. Consumer timework refers to marketplace stakeholders’ negotiation of competing interpretations of how the past and the future relate using a wide range of consumption objects and activities. Building on the theory of temporalization, we argue that social tensions, conflicts, and breaks drive the past and the future apart in multiple incompatible ways that individuals and societies must contend. We theorize four fundamental dynamics of consumer timework in which market stakeholders engage: integrative, disintegrative, subjugatory, and emancipatory. Integrative and disintegrative consumer timework respectively harmonize and rupture the multiple temporal orientations (past, present, and future) to create shared communities or counter-communities of time through consumption. Subjugatory and emancipatory consumer timework respectively enforce and disrupt temporal hierarchies of power through consumption. We delineate these temporal dynamics using examples from extant consumer research. We conclude by establishing a future research agenda on consumer timework.

Context harm crises concern the challenges of advertising morally sound products in a context that is failing, as during COVID-19. Following Koselleck, we argue that crises interrupt the trajectory of existing social processes, thereby preventing consumers’ expected future outcomes. We propose a three-step future framing advertising strategy in response: (1) mourning a future that was lost to facilitate emotional adaptation; (2) reconstructing a new future to facilitate rational action under conditions of ambivalence; and (3) establishing mythologies for future-oriented identity work to facilitate the existential demands of crises. We then discuss health messaging from the perspective of future framing.

A growing body of consumer research on intersectionality in the marketplace focuses on identifying overlapping oppressive consumer identity categories, such as gender and race. Yet this work tends to prioritize microlevel agency over power relations within structures and practices of domination. Drawing on the more transformative aspects of intersectionality theory, as well as a focused media and netnographic investigation of the Advanced Style movement in North America, we examine how advanced (aged 50+) female style influencers help transform the ageist and sexist fashion and beauty markets. Specifically, these women enact two forms of embodied resistance informed by the Western dominant discourse of successful aging (deconstructing gendered and ageist fashion and defying gendered and ageist beauty) using the social media platform Instagram. We conclude with future research directions on the transformative potential of embodied resistance for various doubly oppressive gendered and ageist marketplaces.

Although extant consumer acculturation research has investigated the acculturative effect of various ideological and institutional contexts, it has devoted minimal attention to how spatial structural conditions, in particular state-subsidized spaces, affect the consumer acculturation experiences of poor immigrants. This study builds on spatial governmentality theory to investigate the creation and consumption of a racialized gated community in Italy. Specifically, it reveals three state-sponsored spatial governmentality strategies (race-restrictive zoning, domestic space standardizing, and technological self-surveilling) used to transform perceived norm-breaking Roma immigrants (derogatorily referred to as “Gypsies”) into acculturating consumers to regional sedentary norms, as well as the accompanying Roma consumer resistance responses (community-protective insulating, domestic space rearranging, and behavioral boundary testing) used to partly contest the imposed consumer acculturation and preserve some of the minority’s nomadic culture. The article concludes with implications for research on consumer acculturation, consumer resistance, and spatial governmentality.

Prior consumer research has investigated the consumer behavior, identity work, and sources of ethnic group conflict among various immigrants and indigenes. However, by continuing to focus on consumers’ lived experiences, researchers lack theoretical clarity on the institutional shaping of these individuals as ethnic consumers, which has important implications for sustaining neocolonial power imbalances between colonized (immigrant-sending) and colonizing (immigrant-receiving) cultures. We bring sociological theories of neoliberal governmentality and multiculturalism to bear on an in-depth analysis of the contemporary Canadian marketplace to reveal our concept of market-mediated multiculturation, which we define as an institutional mechanism for attenuating ethnic group conflicts through which immigrant-receiving cultures fetishize strangers and their strangeness in their commodification of differences, and the existence of inequalities between ethnicities is occluded. Specifically, our findings unpack four interrelated consumer socialization strategies (envisioning, exemplifying, equipping, and embodying) through which institutional actors across different fields (politics, market research, retail, and consumption) shape an ethnic consumer subject. We conclude with a critical discussion of extant scholarship on consumer acculturation as being complicit in sustaining entrenched colonialist biases.

Grounded in work on geography and markets, this article offers a conceptual framework to study the dynamics of markets through a spatial lens. The characteristics of four key spatial dimensions (place, territory, scale, and network) are explained and leveraged to provide distinct analytical vantage points and to conceptualize how various types of spaces matter differently in market dynamics. Findings from a qualitative meta-analysis identify 12 unique mechanisms tied to the four proposed spatial dimensions, which offer alternative theoretical avenues for unpacking market phenomena. These four spatial dimensions are then combined with 12 space-based mechanisms to offer novel research avenues for marketing scholars interested in market system dynamics.

Responsible consumption conventionally stems from an increased awareness of the impact of consumption decisions on the environment, on consumer health, and on society in general. We theorize the influence of moralistic governance regimes on consumer subjectivity to make the opposite case: responsible consumption requires the active creation and management of consumers as moral subjects. Building on the sociology of governmentality, we introduce four processes of consumer responsibilization that, together, comprise the P.A.C.T. routine (personalization, authorization, capabilization, and transformation). After that, we draw on a longitudinal analysis of problem-solving initiatives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to explore the role of P.A.C.T. in the creation of four, now commonplace, responsible consumer subjects: the bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer, the green consumer, the health-conscious consumer, and the financially literate consumer. Our analysis informs extant macro-level theorizations of market and consumption systems. We also contribute to prior accounts of responsibilization, marketplace mythologies, consumer subjectivity, and transformative consumer research.