This paper highlights the paradoxical coping strategies employed by low-income families. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 families in the UK, it is demonstrated that individuals initiate strategies to avoid the social effects of stigmatization and alleviate threats to social identity. In particular, families engage in conspicuous consumption, with emphasis on ensuring children have access to the 'right' brands. This can be interpreted in two opposing ways. Low-income consumers, in particular single mothers, may be understood as coping within the challenging context of consumer culture to improve the standard of living for their families. However, drawing on underclass discourse surrounding 'chav' culture and single mothers, it is demonstrated that the coping strategies employed to achieve approval in fact fuel further stigmatization and instead of creating inclusion have the opposite outcome of exclusion and marginalization.

This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/57128/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the Strathprints administrator: strathprints@strath.ac.ukThe Strathprints institutional repository (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk) is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde research outputs. It has been developed to disseminate open access research outputs, expose data about those outputs, and enable the management and persistent access to Strathclyde's intellectual output. Stigmas, or discredited personal attributes, emanate from social perceptions of physical characteristics, aspects of character, and "tribal" associations (e.g., race; Goffman 1963). Extant research has emphasized the perspective of the stigma target, with some scholars exploring how social institutions shape stigma. Yet the ways stakeholders within the sociocommercial sphere create, perpetuate, or resist stigma remain overlooked. The authors introduce and define marketplace stigma as the labeling, stereotyping, and devaluation by and of commercial stakeholders (consumers, companies and their employees, stockholders, and institutions) and their offerings (products, services, and experiences). The authors offer the Stigma Turbine as a unifying conceptual framework that locates marketplace stigma within the broader sociocultural context and illuminates its relationship to forces that exacerbate or blunt stigma. In unpacking the Stigma Turbine, the authors reveal the critical role that market stakeholders can play in (de)stigmatization, explore implications for marketing practice and public policy, and offer a research agenda to further understanding of marketplace stigma and stakeholder welfare.

We introduce the concept of therapeutic servicescapes, defined as consumption settings where emplaced, market-mediated performances compensate for sociocultural dilemmas. Our focus is on the localization of emotions that are emplaced in specific sociospatial features and collectively reproduced through ritualized consumer performances. This ethnographic study of religious pilgrimage consumption reveals that the therapeutic servicescape comprises three features: evocative spaces, ideological homogeneity, and restorative emotion scripts. These servicescape features catalyze the consumer rituals of therapeutic relations, therapeutic release, and therapeutic renewal. Our theorization of therapeutic servicescapes offers three contributions. First, we reveal how emotions are socially and geographically orchestrated and transformed in marketplace settings. Second, we demonstrate how therapeutic ritual performances reproduce emplaced, market-mediated emotion and compensate for embodied emotional restrictions. Third, we demonstrate how the negotiation of emotional ordering guides the therapeutic dialogue between religion and the marketplace.

This paper explores consumption practices in poor families focusing on children's influence on consumption decisions. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 such families, the study demonstrates that children exert considerable direct and indirect influence on family consumption decisions and practices. Consumption in poor families often revolves around children and parents make considerable sacrifices to ensure their children are not stigmatised by the visibility of poverty. Indeed, some parents place their own needs and desires on hold until their children are older. The findings are discussed with reference to love influence in family consumer research.

Purpose -Whereas much previous research focuses on the ways consumers strive to gain social approval, consumption that may result in social disapproval must be considered. In order to do so, the purpose of this paper is to explore consumers' self-concepts within a risky consumption context, namely smoking. Self-concept discrepancies and the resulting emotions and coping strategies are identified. Design/methodology/approach -A qualitative methodology based on 30 focus groups conducted across ten European countries is employed. Findings -Findings demonstrate self-concept discrepancies between both the actual self and ought/ideal guiding end states, as well as between the "I" and social selves. Such discrepancies generate negative emotions and result in emotion-focused coping strategies. In addition, the accuracy of smokers' social self-concepts with reference to the actual perceptions of non-smokers is discussed. Practical implications -Important implications for the design of effective anti-smoking advertising are discussed, based on the findings. It is suggested that counter advertising should encourage dialogue between smokers and non-smokers and that message themes should centre on building the self-efficacy of smokers. Originality/value -The reason why the social context should be an integral part of consumer self-concept research is highlighted. Moreover, the importance of moving beyond merely understanding the existence of self-discrepancies, to focus on the emotions that are generated by these discrepancies and the consequent coping strategies employed to resolve them is identified. As such, the potential contributions that may arise by recognising the intersection between two bodies of literature that are often treated separately, namely, consumer coping and the self-concept, are highlighted.