Consumer Culture Theory

Although the new middle classes in emerging markets are a matter of significant interest for marketing scholars and managers, there is little systematic research on their values and preoccupations. This article focuses on the new middle class consumers to identify the new, shared socio-ideological sensibilities informed by the recent neoliberal reforms in emerging markets, and examines how these sensibilities are actualized in consumption. Through an ethnographic study of fashion consumption in Turkey, the authors explicate three salient new middle class sensibilities, which implicate the mastery of ordinary in pursuit of connections with people, institutions, and contexts. These sensibilities crystallize into a particular mode of consumption– formulaic creativity, which addresses consumers’ desire to align with the middle and helps them reconcile the disjuncture between the promises of neoliberalism and the realities of living in unstable societies.

What is the sovereign consumer that occupies such a central role in organizational discourse whose satisfaction has become an organizational imperative? Our research draws from extended fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography. Our analysis shows how ethnography is implicated in the organizational
fetishization of consumers, that is, how in the process of understanding and managing markets, a quasimagical
fascination with amalgams of consumer voices, images, and artefacts comes about.

Overview Market segmentation is foundational to marketing: as scholars and managers contend, its concept "is built into the fabric of marketing" (Gibson 2001, 21). Segmentation is the process through which a company's actual and prospect customers are split into subgroups (i.e. segments), each of them showing similar consumption behaviors that differ across subgroups (Peter and Donnelly 2008). Differentiation (i.e. the process leading to variations of a company's offer) and targeting (i.e. the decision of which segments to serve by means of differentiated offers; Pride and Ferrell 2004) are meaningful only when customers have heterogeneous preferences, that is, only when a market is segmentable. Subdividing and profiling market segments help identify the customers to serve, the most effective way to satisfy their specific needs/desires, the competitors to face, the resources requested to compete in each segment, and the main stakeholders to involve in order to reinforce a company's market legitimacy (Cucurean-Zapan 2014; Lambin 1998). In simpler terms, market segmentation helps perform a company's market-orientation. While segmentation is still central to today's marketing, the profound transformations as much as the rising opportunities of contemporary markets and societies ask for a profound revision of segmentation theory and practice (Arnould and Cayla 2015; Gibson 2001; Kannisto 2016). Answering to this call, the chapter's aims are twofold. First, we approach segmentation historically, in order to unveil which were, and somehow still are, its often-implicit grounding premises. We show that most of these premises sway when confronted to extant cultural, economic, and technological environments, and invite for revision. The first part of the chapter (§ 18.2) thus provides readers with a longitudinal understanding of market segmentation and with evidences motivating the requested revision. Second, by focusing on contemporary trajectories of revision, we approach segmentation epistemologically, that is, we contrast two opposite perspectives on the needed revisions of market segmentation (§ 18.1). On the one hand, the marketing science perspective combines big data-driven consumer knowledge (cf. chapter 26 by Zwick and Dholakia) and the power of new technologies (especially, of artificial intelligence) to reinvigorate and transform segmentation (Mandelli 2018). Within this perspective, segmentation-as-science goes micro-basically, at a one-to-one level-and (hyper)targeting (Hoffmann, Inderst, and Ottaviani 2013) results into personalization, interpretable as the radicalization of mass-customization (Flavin and Heller 2019). On the other hand, hailing from the cultural marketing perspective (Peñaloza, Toulouse, and Visconti 2012), segmentation evolves into a set of decisions that marketers co-construct with customers. In line with this dialogical posture, targeting then requires conversational abilities (Jarratt and Fayed 2012) not only to reach, but also to engage target customers.

This paper contributes to theories of brands as sites of identity work and convergence. It takes as its subject relations of belonging and participation as they shape communal
‘scenes’ out of which spring intimations of spaces of cultural production as branding ecosystems. To illustrate ways in which this line of thought ignites discourses on branding as a mode of
relational being, we explore the social environment fomented around Warhol’s court, ‘The Factory’, that iconic symbol of the mediated logic of his oeuvre. Drawing on archival accounts of
Factory life, we explore cultural production as illustrative of brands and branding as social technologies exciting the imaginary and its theater of possibility. And to understand how
collective consumption of relations of connectivity nurture conditions suggestive of new branding forms, we consider the existential logic of ‘branding being’, of thinking ‘spaces’ made available through branding as a mode of relational being.

While the processes of production and consumption are increasingly interrelated in society, there is a bourgeoning literature on consumers' increased power through the prosumption process and its evolutions and manifestations in various industries, markets and social contexts. This article challenges the theoretical assumption that all types of 'prosumers' become directly empowered by digital technology or have an equal opportunity to participate in the production process through Web 2.0. By extending Ritzer's reconceptualised idea of prosumption beyond the Global North, our research analysed two specific East Asian cases of fashion consumers whose countries shared rapidly rising economic status and cultural significance yet underwent different sociocultural trajectories. Using focus group interview, we investigated how these consumers interact differentially with the existing social structure, cultural values and other emergent social agents, and the extent to which they are able to exert an influence on the production of immaterial fashion. Contesting the expressivist take of the 'cultural turn' which overemphasises consumers' awareness of and control over symbolic fashion, this article's major theoretical contribution relates to symbolic consumption in the case of fashion – as a unique case blending material, immaterial and symbolic consumption – among young Chinese and Korean consumers geographically located out of the global fashion centres. We explored prosumption's vicissitudes and limits as a theoretical concept, challenging its universality across different cultures, political-economic models and product categories, also demonstrating the multifaceted relationships and dissimilar types of power balances between production/producer and consumption/consumer. The study concluded with the new and differing orders of fashion consumption in Korea and China: the recognition of the overlapping effects of economic, sociocultural, habitual and technological factors which constitute different levels of empowerment and create different types of 'prosumers', including 'elite prosumers' and 'passive prosumers'; and the power reshuffling among fashion producers, emergent social agents and consumers in the digital age.

In this paper, we use ethnographic methods to describe the market making activities of Première Vision, Paris, the leading trade fair in the clothing fabric industry. Through collective action and powerful representational practices, Première Vision's exhibitors affirm their style innovation and position themselves as trend setters. Our study extends the emerging literature on market forms and marketing practices by (i) introducing a different lens, based on the ideas of postmodern theorists, through which the nature of representation in industrial markets may be viewed and (ii) addressing the role of self-interested theorists, i.e. marketers who theorize about the market and its functioning in ways that are self-beneficial. Our paper also has implications for trade fair literature, which is mostly concerned with individual exhibitors' value appropriation strategies. The case of Première Vision shows that trade fairs may be considered as collective marketing instruments, thus highlighting the importance of organizers' value creation strategies.

Prior research stresses the importance of consumer participation in service coproduction. We examine the coproduction of aesthetic services, which are services in which beauty is a critical outcome. Consumers face challenges communicating their aesthetic tastes because of technical constraints that are understood by service providers but that consumers do not fully understand. To fill this gap, consumers do aesthetic work in communities of practice. Service providers also face challenges, as they must coproduce with consumers whose aesthetic tastes are formed amid shifting social standards. In this qualitative study, we highlight aesthetic work as a different type of consumer work that involves developing cultural competence. We identify four types of aesthetic coproduction in which cultural competence is distributed differently within the service dyad: aesthetic codesigning, aesthetic consenting, aesthetic yielding, and aesthetic reigning. We explore the managerial implications that arise as consumers increasingly use online social resources that shape and increase aesthetic expectations. We examine the unintended consequences of aesthetic service coproduction in which providers’ technical and aesthetic expertise is difficult for consumers to understand often leading to disappointing outcomes.