Rethinking marketplace culture: Play and the context of context

Abstract

Play theory has been underutilized to understand consumer behaviour. In this article, we adopt a play theory perspective to understand how consumers respond to and navigate macrostructural influences. The marketplace culture stream of consumer culture theory (CCT) research is particularly well suited to macrostructural analysis from a play theory perspective. We develop an analytical framework derived from play theory to interpret the context of marketplace culture. We show how the types of play foundational to marketplace culture experiences act as expressions of order or disorder to wider macrostructural influences. In contrast to agentic perspectives, we show how marketplace culture experiences, despite their fun appearance, embody the underlying tensions of the intensifying rationality, regulation and competition structuring neoliberal society. Finally, we express concern over the marketer’s control of playground expression and suggest CCT adopt a more critical stance to the commercialization of play.

Close knit: using consumption communities to overcome loneliness

“…It is neither based around a single brand (as illustrated in Table 2), oppositional (as illustrated by its open-ended membership and member's willingness to attend and interact with other groups), nor transient and playful, as illustrated by the members deep emotional commitment to each other and the existence of a self-help support group. As such, it seems that O'Sullivan and Shankar's (2019) call for a critical re-examination of the foundational theoretical framework of these consumption communities is clearly supported by our findings. However, the self-help support group type of consumption community is clearly distinct from the "play-community" type of marketplace culture.…”

“…Schau and Thompson (2010) identify a need to actively negotiate liminality as a key meaning behind the Twilight brand community, which is also exceptionally female. This points to the idea that these groups may function as something more than the playful (O’Sullivan and Shankar, 2019), transitory (Goulding et al , 2013) meaning previously ascribed to consumption communities.…”

“…However, the self-help support group type of consumption community is clearly distinct from the “play-community” type of marketplace culture. Perhaps, this is because O’Sullivan and Shankar (2019) too uses as its context the familiar “hyper-masculine” (Martin et al , 2006) environments.…”

“…These terms, along with marketplace culture and consumption communities as over-arching terms, have become confused and muddled in the literature as they are used interchangeably and in situations dissimilar to the original definitions. Even following the admirable attempts by Thomas et al (2013) and Goulding et al (2013) to clarify the variety of and distinctions between various types of community described in the literature, calls have been made for a full critical re-examination of the concept and for the establishment of a new foundational theoretical lens (O'Sullivan and Shankar, 2019).…”

“…This lack, this loneliness, has led to people searching for alternative means of achieving socialisation processes and of forming bonds. Evidence suggests that some consumption communities (Cova and Pace, 2006), also termed marketplace cultures (O’Sullivan and Shankar, 2019), may serve to ameliorate loneliness (Agrawal and Ramachandran, 2017), but there is limited literature exploring how this might occur.…”