Henri Weijo

Dominant perspectives on technology adoption and consumption tend to be cognitive, instrumental, and individualistic. We offer a desire-centered, future-oriented, and culturally grounded alternative model called the Disenchanted Enchantment Model (DEM). Drawing on historical evidence and revised interpretations of theories of enchantment and disenchantment by Weber and Saler, we show that desire is at the heart of technology consumption’s enchantments, and how its fulfilment is temporary, skeptical, and ironic. We provide an important cultural counterbalance to models such as the Technology Acceptance Model, which replace wonder with reason. Instead we theorize the process that drives contemporary technology adoption as centering on desirous senses of wonderment and anticipation. We offer current and recent examples of the DEM process and discuss the implications this model holds for a new understanding of technology, consumption, desire, and broader consumer culture.

Consumer movements strive to change markets when those markets produce value outcomes that conflict with consumers’ higher-order values. Prior studies argue that consumer movements primarily seek to challenge these value outcomes by championing alternative higher-order values or by pressuring institutions to change market governance mechanisms. Building on and refining theorization on value regimes, this study illuminates a new type of consumer movement strategy where consumers collaborate to construct alternative object pathways. The study draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the German retail food sector and shows how building alternative object pathways allowed a consumer movement to mitigate the value regime’s excessive production of food waste. The revised value regime theorization offers a new and more holistic way of understanding and contextualizing how and where consumer movements mobilize for change. It also provides a new tool for understanding systemic value creation and the role of consumers in such processes.

Consumer movements are resolute and persistent efforts by organized consumer collectives to reimagine elements of consumer culture. Such movements often use creative public performances to promote their causes and to make movement participation more ludic and fun. Yet collective creativity within consumer movements has rarely been an explicit focus of research. Using ethnographic methods and assemblage theory, this study elaborates how collective creativity organizes a consumer movement and facilitates its quest for market change. Findings show how the Restaurant Day movement initially emerged as a resistant response to market tensions relating to constraining food culture regulation in a Nordic market context. Findings then illuminate the movement's appropriation of collective creativity as its chief mode of organization and participation. Collective creativity builds on iterative and co-constituting deterritorializing and territorializing processes of consumer production that fuel transformative and explorative creativity, respectively, within the market context. The study provides new insights to consumer movement mobilization, organization, member recruitment, and market legitimacy. The study also provides novel theoretical insights to the study of consumer creativity.

The successful alignment of co-creative practices between brand communities and marketers promises many benefits, including stronger consumer brand relationships. Yet recent research has identified the inherent difficulty of creating or maintaining such an alignment. This study builds on these cautionary tales to show how marketer-initiated brand transgressions impact communal brand relationships built on extensive histories of successful co-creation. Building theory through netnographic inquiry of the drama surrounding a poorly managed brand transgression in a video game brand community and a counterexample of positive marketer action, this study introduces a theoretical model of brand community coping and its four stages of instigation, distillation, mobilization, and remembrance. Overall, the study provides new insights on brand transgressions, consumer coping, brand relationships, and co-creation.

Communal consumption is often described as inherently playful, with previous research mainly focusing on successful ludic communal experiences, and largely disregarding its potential pitfalls. Moreover, the marketer is usually seen as the primary facilitator of ludic experiences, which has marginalized the role of the consumer. This article explores how consumers produce and sustain ludic consumption community experiences in the face of growing instrumental costs. It assumes a practice theory lens, and is based on an ethnographic inquiry into cosplay, which is a time and resource intensive form of pop culture masquerade and craft consumption. Prolonged engagement in the cosplay community leads to growing emotional, material, temporal, and competence-related costs, which hinder playful experiences. Consumers practice modularization, reinforcement, and collaboration to overcome these costs and maintain the important ludic sensations that motivate communal engagements.

Markkinointiviestinnän kentällä on käynnissä kaksi mielenkiintoista ja hyvinkin ajankohtaista teoreettista keskustelua, jotka liittyvät muutoksiin kuluttajien käytännöissä. Ensimmäinen keskustelu koskee kuluttajien jatkuvaa siirtymistä postmoderniin kuluttajuuteen, kun taas toinen ...

Purpose ! The purpose of this study is to investigate how brand commu- nities collectively react towards brand transgressions, an area where previous research has been scant.
Methodology/approach ! This study adopts a netnographic approach in studying the reactions of one particular brand community and its reactions to a marketer-initiated brand transgression.
Findings ! Building on coping theory, we find evidence of brand commu- nity coping, a temporally bounded process in which the community seeks to come to terms with and even overturn the transgression. Overall, we define the brand community coping process as unfolding through three overlapping and temporally bounded stages of (1) making the problem communal, (2) exploring the problem’s meaning, and (3) co-creating responses.
Originality/value ! Studies of consumer coping particularly in cases of brand transgressions have predominantly adopted an individualistic approach to coping, or have treated communities as coping resources for individual consumers. This study is the first study to truly look at brand communities’ collective coping endeavors. We also offer managerial implications by questioning the overtly positive tone of brand co-creation literature and underline potential threats to marketers when consumers decide to use their co-creative practices to punish the marketer.