The branded carnival: the dark magic of consumer excitement

Rethinking marketplace culture: Play and the context of context

“…Restricted (controlled) by marketer sanctioning, games lose their potential for critique and ingenuity. The marketer orchestrating the tone and intensity of playground limits opportunities for authentic consumer expression and the release of existential angst (O'Sullivan, 2016).…”

“…Marketplace culture research contributes to marketing practice in the areas of new product development and value co-creation (Cova and Cova, 2002;Cova and Pace, 2006;Füller et al, 2008;Schau et al, 2009), experiential marketing and customer satisfaction (McAlexander et al, 2003;Schouten et al, 2007;Sherry et al, 2007), and loyalty programmes, relationship marketing and community-based initiatives (Cova et al, 2007;Fournier and Lee, 2009;McAlexander et al, 2002;Patterson and O'Malley, 2006). The marketplace culture literature emphasises the development of symbiotic marketer-consumer relationships by attempting to limit marketplace tensions (Arnould et al, 2009;Cova and Cova, 2002;Cova et al, 2007;Goulding et al, 2009;O'Sullivan et al, 2011;O'Sullivan, 2016;Tumbat and Belk, 2011). Whether discussed in terms of the cocreation of value (Arnould et al, 2009), ethnomarketing (Cova and Cova, 2002), close-toconsumer-philosophies (Fournier et al, 2001), brand community integration or facilitation (Kozinets et al, 2004;McAlexander et al, 2002;O'Sullivan et al, 2011), these managerial processes have been foundational to the marketer successfully infiltrating the playground and hijacking consumer games (Solomon in Cova andCova, 2002, or Harley Davidson in Fournier et al, 2000, as just two examples).…”

Managing collective effervescence: ‘Zomsumption’ and postemotional fandom

“…Our work follows calls to better consider how emotion interacts with and impacts upon marketplace-culture intersection (Illouz, 2007(Illouz, , 2009. By adopting a critical postemotional perspective, we contradict theorizations of consumer excitement which suggest consumers when socialized among like-minded others are prone to highly affective communal activities that transgress everyday rules (Goulding et al, 2009;O'Sullivan, 2016). Rather than assuming consumption communities, like fandom arrangements, are invariably silos for transgression, release and breaking with hegemonic structures of feeling (Kerrigan et al, 2014;Podoshen et al, 2018;Richardson and Turley, 2006;Sinclair and Dolan, 2015), we present a different position.…”

When consumers live several experiences in one: Syncretic thematization and consumers’ productive use of free time

“…Studying the complex experience proposed by Hellfest required a “hybrid ethnographic approach” (O’Sullivan, 2016: 8), which combined participant and nonparticipant observation (Stewart, 1998), visual ethnography (Pink, 2006), and informal conversations (Lofland and Lofland, 1995) in a longitudinal approach. The data collection process thus involved the first author attending Hellfest six consecutive years.…”