This paper explores young people's motivations for using mobile phones. Older adolescents' everyday use of traditional and new forms of mediated communication were explored in the context of their everyday lives, with data generated from self-completion questionnaires, diaries and mini focus groups. The findings confirm the universal appeal of mobile phones to a youth audience. Social and entertainment-related motivations dominated, while information and commercially orientated contact were less appealing. While marketers are excited by the reach and possibilities for personalisation offered by mobile phones, young people associated commercial appropriation of this medium with irritation, intrusion and mistrust. In other words, while marketers celebrated mobile phones as a 'brand in the hand' of youth markets, young people themselves valued their mobiles as a 'friend in the hand'. This suggests that the way forward for mobile marketing communications is not seeking or pretending to be young consumers' friend, but rather offering content that helps them maintain or develop the personal friendships that matter to them. About the authorsIan Grant is Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Strathclyde. He has recently been researching the differences in how young consumers use traditional and new forms of media, and the implications for marketing practice. This research spans his interests in digital communications, lifestyle and media consumption. As a former advertising planner, Ian has also published on advertising planning, strategy and consumption.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

Advertising in Britain has traditionally been the preserve of a middle-class, public school and Oxbridge-educated workforce. Although this narrow recruitment base is recognized as problematic, the influence of social class on advertising careers remains largely unexplored. This article explores the career trajectories of British advertising creatives from different social class backgrounds and the forms of capital at their disposal. Drawing on life history interviews with creatives, we explore how they got started, got in and got on in advertising careers. In particular, we highlight how the `working-class' creatives struggled to overcome the economic, social and cultural barriers they face in entering the industry. We suggest, however, that once `in', the influence of their social class background was more subtle and less detrimental, due to the social capital they accumulated en route and the value of their distinctive brand of cultural capital.

Given the moral and medical panic surrounding rising rates of childhood obesity, there has been much debate about who on what is to be blamed, with parents and HFSS (high fat, salt, and sugar) food advertising often censured for their role. In this paper, we review the literature on childhood obesity and pester power, and the broader context of consumer socialization within the family. We then discuss findings from a questionnaire and focus group study of 8-11 year old children in New Zealand exploring aspects of their advertising experiences and everyday snack food consumption. HFSS food ads were well-represented in their repertoire of favorite ads, and they reported being influenced by these. However, their accounts of snacking highlighted the extent to which their actual consumption was shaped by parental agendas and concerns. Although they gravitated towards less healthy snack foods, fruit, and vegetables were included in their categorization and repertoire of snacks, perhaps reflecting the level of monitoring and gatekeeping exerted by their parents, who established ground rules for snacking and in many cases directly controlled their access to snack foods, although the limits imposed varied according to context. The children were generally accepting of this, although they drew on a range of strategies and tactics to access their preferred snacks. We conclude by considering the implications of this study for parents who seek to provide their children with a healthy diet and others concerned about health and public policy, and we suggest some avenues for developing knowledge in this area.

The increasingly unpredictable, individualized and short-term nature of the labour market is evident in the careers of advertising creatives. We explore the career trajectories of 48 creative professionals in the British advertising industry, using theories of situated learning and communities of practice to illustrate how the collective remains important to individuals' career prospects. Creatives learn their craft by becoming immersed in the multiple, inter-related communities that constitute the advertising world during the demanding 'pre-peripheral' and 'peripheral' stages of their career. Learning through immersion continues throughout the journey from the periphery to the centre, since creatives participate in a competitive, tight-knit creative community, actively engaged in social networking and constantly monitoring each others' creative output. Creatives' legitimacy (and power) is earned by winning peer regard for their work. The nature of the learning required changes as each stage of the creative trajectory brings different motivations and pressures, but the processes of learning, the mutual shaping of individual and community, and the identity work involved are evident throughout creative career trajectories.

Although the emotional labour required of service providers has received considerable research attention, few studies have examined service workers’ experiences of emotionally charged service encounters. In this article we review literature on emotion management and compassion in the workplace. We then describe a qualitative study which examined the service encounter occurring when bereaved Irish consumers contacted their local newspaper to place In Memoriam notices on the anniversary of a close family member’s death. We suggest that these newspaper employees engaged in philanthropic emotion management when dealing with bereaved customers, and we locate this within the broader context of compassion as interpersonal work and as organizational accomplishment. We also suggest that compassion in organizations is not amenable to managerial systematization and control.

Purpose-This paper seeks to enhance understanding of nonprofit marketing and consumer identities by exploring volunteering as a form of symbolic consumption. Specifically, it seeks to examine how young people-both volunteers and non-volunteers-understand and relate to volunteer stereotypes, and how they manage stigma in negotiating their social identities in relation to volunteering. Design/methodology/approach-Grounded in consumer culture theory, the study uses mixed qualitative methods, incorporating focus groups, paired and individual interviews, and a projective drawing task. Findings-Five volunteering-related stereotypes were identified: the older charity shop worker, the sweet singleton, the environmental protestor, the ordinary volunteer and the nonvolunteer. Participants related to positive and negative attributes of these stereotypes in different ways. This led volunteers and non-volunteers to engage in a range of impression management strategies, some of which bolstered their own identities by stigmatising other groups. Research limitations-The sample was drawn from 39 16-24 year-olds living in Scotland. Practical implications-Since stereotypes are acknowledged as a major barrier to volunteering, particularly among young people, a greater understanding of how these stereotypes are understood and negotiated can assist nonprofit marketers in recruiting and retaining volunteers. Originality/value-This paper draws on theories of consumer culture and stigma to explore volunteering as a form of symbolic consumption; examines volunteering stereotypes among both volunteers and non-volunteers; and uses multiple qualitative methods to facilitate articulation of young people's experiences in this area.

This paper seeks to understand the texture and emotional tenor of the relations that bereaved people can have with a range of objects, including those that seem mundane or simply part of the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. Taking Joan Didion's best-selling book, The Year of Magical Thinking, as its focus, the paper examines the varied and significant roles that certain objects played as she negotiated the vagaries of her first year as a widow. While previous literature has mined the memorialising function of goods for survivors, our analysis suggests that goods and consumption experiences can also play a powerful role as tools to think with for those struggling to create a meaningful narrative of death and loss. It concludes by considering the contribution of the analysis to the understanding of goods as 'active life presences' (Turkle, 2007), the relationship between consumption and bereavement, and 'the sadness of lives and the comfort of things' (Miller, 2008).