Although a large body of research has investigated how consumers use goods to signal their status, little is known about how brands manage status. The very few studies that have examined this topic are grounded in the traditional conception of status and focus on the possession and display of status signals. The authors offer an alternative understanding of status management by investigating the role of interactions in the service encounter. Drawing from extensive ethnographic work in luxury stores, they investigate how brands (re)configure the status games that surface in the service encounter. They show that through the material and social cues of the servicescape, brands shape consumers' class subjectivities-that is, they make consumers behave as class subjects who have a specific understanding of their position in the social hierarchy. Thus, managing status requires the active creation and management of consumers as class subjects. There is a shift from managing branded goods that signal status to managing customer experiences that make consumers enact status positions. This research helps identify new ways to manage status brands, especially luxury brands.

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Starting from Georges Devereux’s research into ethnopsychiatry, we are studying the role of psychoanalytical countertransference in qualitative methodologies. Countertransference refers to the effects that fieldwork can have on a researcher and in particular on the emotional reactions aroused by encounters in the field. While the researcher normally tries to neutralise or suppress their emotions when seeking objectivity, we show in this edition of New perspectives that the choice of a reflexive approach which takes countertransference into account will help enhance our understanding of the phenomena being studied. We propose a number of recommendations for countertransference to be taken into account in interpretative research in marketing.