Activist brands commonly engage in controversies to redefine which opinions and ideas are acceptable to express publicly. We conceptualize this practice as free speech boundary work. How can activist brands negotiate the boundaries of free speech to authenticate their activist positioning? By conducting a comparative case study of 18 activist brands, we identify three controversial strategies—creating monstrous hybrids, challenging the establishment, and demonstrating exemplarity—each of them challenging the boundaries of free speech through a distinct mechanism. The results show that whether these strategies authenticate brands’ activism depends on their ability to communicate brands’ moral competency, defined in terms of moral sensitivity, moral vision, and moral integration. This study contributes to the literature on brand activism by proposing an integrative framework that articulates the mechanisms underlying the reformative power of controversial brand activism. Second, we contribute to the literature on brand activism authentication by introducing a competency‐oriented view that reveals the heterogeneous and multidimensional nature of activism authenticity and expands our conception of the spectrum of moral territories with which activist brands can engage.

Extant research on bodily commodification emphasizes contexts, where market actors can pursue commodification in relatively unconstrained ways. However, scant research examines how marketers foster bodily commodification in markets, where institutional constraints limit the value which can be extracted, produced and/or exchanged. We fill this gap by studying sperm donation services in the United Kingdom and Australia, where a number of governmental regulations limit bodily commodification and value creation processes. Using an archival analysis of visual and textual material, we find that sperm banks in these constrained contexts strategically rely on the marketing of masculine archetypes as a source of value. This article delineates the concept of constrained bodily commodification and its marketing implications. Moreover, it evidences sociocultural discursive mechanisms by which marketers attempt to overcome constrained commodification issues. Specifically, we emphasize the role of gender archetypes as a resource, which allows sperm banks’ marketers to transfer identity value to the donor and donation experience. Finally, this article also has implications for the theorizing of value creation by expanding our understanding of how value is created during consumer disposition processes.

Despite the popularity of access-based platforms, the understanding of customer journeys remains anchored in traditional market contexts that overlook prosumers’ extended value-chain roles, interconnected experiences, and instrumental sociality in access-based consumption. Using a qualitative study on the access-based platform Rent the Runway, the authors discuss the nature of customer journeys in access-based platforms and showcase how customers perform these journeys. The study reveals two key elements: (1) systemic dynamics, which encompass just-in-time circularity and tightly coupled customer interdependencies, and (2) job crafting, which involves customer work practices that allow pain point avoidance, circulation flow adjustments, and journey stickiness increases. Job crafting can create unpredictable disruptions in other customer journeys and affect systemic flows. This investigation expands research on customer experience management and journey design by developing an access-based platform journey model differentiated from ownership- and service-based platform models, showcasing its systemic instability dynamics, and elaborating how to manage these customer journeys. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11747-023-00942-6.

Third places—communal or socializing places such as coffee shops—are confronted with a rising customer segment: customers who use them for work. Prior research is divided on this trend: customer-workers are seen either as a source of added value or a major threat to third places. Relying on a multimethod, qualitative study, we investigate the strategic implications of the rise of customer-workers in third places. We extend prior research by considering customer-workers as a new and valuable segment, with its specific motivations and practices. Building on the co-constitution of practices and places, we show that the rise of the customer-worker segment has fostered market differentiation. We identify four types of third places (archetypal, status quo, compromise, and productive) depending on their targeting strategy and their servicescape adaptation. We delineate how customer-workers transform third places’ value proposition and bring challenges to each type. Specifically, we show that status quo third places are most prone to customer conflicts while compromise third places generate managerial struggles. In contrast, productive third places adapt their servicescape to become work accelerators and a source of professional identity for customer-workers. We provide recommendations for managers to overcome conflicts and benefit from this growing customer base.

Using the sociology of emotions, we investigate the role of social emotions as a legitimating force in the market. In a longitudinal study of the media coverage surrounding U.S. fertility technologies, we find that legitimation involves the establishment of hierarchies among feeling rules, which dictate what social emotions are expressed toward markets, consumers, and technologies. We delineate three mechanisms (polarizing, reifying, and transforming social emotions) that are affected by trigger events such as product innovations and historical developments. These mechanisms work to (re)shape regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive legitimacy pillars, influencing the overall cultural attention paid to a market. Consequently, legitimation is ongoing and fragmented as the dominance of feeling rules varies across multiple entities and over time, with negative social emotions and controversies at times aiding this process rather than exclusively hindering it.