PurposeTo analyse the power that a virtual brand community exerts over a brand of a mass‐marketed convenience product. To draw implications about the strategy that a company can employ facing this power shift. To track emerging trends in virtual brand communities applied to convenience product (as opposed to niche or luxury goods).Design/methodology/approachCase study of the web community “my Nutella The Community” promoted by the firm Ferrero in Italy. The study applied multiple methods and was conducted through interviews with key informants, netnography and document analysis.FindingsThe virtual community that gathers around a convenience product brand shows a new form of sociality and customer empowerment: it is not based on interaction between peers, but more on personal self‐exhibition in front of other consumers through the marks and rituals linked to the brand. The company should play the role of non‐intrusive enabler of these personal expressions, reducing its control over the brand's meanings.Originality/valueThe literature on brand community has traditionally focused on communities born around niche or luxury brand (Harley Davidson, Mercedes, Saab). The paper deals with a mass marketed convenience product like Nutella (the worldwide famous hazelnut spread), showing noteworthy differences that would advance current knowledge on brand communities and customer empowerment.
In marketing and consumer research, consumers have been increasingly theorised as producers.However, these theorisations do not take all facets of consumers' productive role into account. This paper mobilises both post-Marxist economics and post-Maussian socio-economics to develop the concept of working consumer. This concept depicts consumers who, through their immaterial labour, add cultural and affective value to market offerings. In so doing consumers increase the value of market offerings, although they usually work at the primary level of sociality (interpersonal relationships) and are therefore beyond producers' control. However, given certain conditions, companies capture such a value when it enters the second level of sociality (the market). The concept of the working consumer summarises and enriches extant approaches to consumer (co)production, while challenging right-minded developments, such as the service-dominant (S-D) logic in marketing, which try to create/construct an ethereal marketscape in which consumers and producers live in harmony.
This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake — conceptually and politically — when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide definitive answers but instead lead to a more elaborate set of questions. By doing so, they broaden the critical engagement with value co-creation in marketing.
How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographically study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Through sensory intensification, pain brings the body into sharp focus, allowing individuals to rediscover their corporeality. In addition, painful extraordinary experiences operate as regenerative escapes from the self. By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness. Finally, when leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, market operators play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.
The notion of experience entered the field of consumption and marketing with Holbrook and Hirschman's pioneering article of 1982. Twenty years later, this notion has become a key element in understanding consumer behaviour, and, in some views, a foundation for the economy and marketing of the future. In our view, however, this development is not without its risks, as the concept of experience is still illdefined or, worse, defined in ideological terms. To this end, the present paper looks 1) to give an overview of the different meanings ascribed to the word `experience' in various scientific disciplines and to detail the different meanings ascribed to the notion of consumption experience; and 2) to highlight, using a deconstructive approach, that in the field of marketing we must use a typology of consumption experiences which goes beyond an ideological view that tends to consider every experience as extraordinary.
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