The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

Purpose – The advent of the internet and in particular the interactive features of Web 2.0 in recent years have led to an explosion of interest in customer engagement. The opportunities presented by social media to help build close relationships with customers seem to have excited practitioners in a wide variety of industries worldwide. Academic scholarship on customer engagement, however, has lagged practice and its theoretical foundation is relatively underdeveloped and a better understanding of the concept is essential to develop strategies for customer engagement. This paper seeks to address some of these issues.Design/methodology/approach – The paper attempts to enhance understanding of customer engagement by examining practitioner views of customer engagement, linking it to the marketing concept, market orientation, and relationship marketing, modeling the customer engagement cycle, and developing a customer engagement matrix.Findings – The paper develops a model of the customer engagement cycle wit...

Customer engagement, buyer‐seller relationships, and social media

Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities have the potential to create stronger relationships between firms and stakeholders. Although marketing researchers have studied the impacts of CSR activities on stakeholder responses, the CSR activities and outcomes measured have been varied and inconsistent. In this article we (a) review the extant literature to outline which CSR activities and outcomes have been included in previous research; (b) synthesize the means by which CSR activities can add value for consumers and how these have been represented in CSR literature, and; (c) present a research agenda for future research to allow greater consistency among CSR researchers.

How can corporate social responsibility activities create value for stakeholders? A systematic review

Social media marketing efforts of luxury brands: Influence on brand equity and consumer behavior

In this paper, consumer environmental choice is studied by analysing the relative importance of green packaging when compared with other relevant product attributes. The empirical study is based on a choice-based conjoint analysis of preferences for functional drink products of a sample of 330 consumers using these products. Our choice-based approach on environmental behaviour brings new insights to previous research, which predominantly relies on attitude models. Results indicate that consumers differ in their preferences for packaging, brand, price and convenience of use of daily products. In addition, various distinctive consumer segments can be identified on the market. Contrary to several previous studies, we found that the largest consumer segment, one-third of consumers, favoured environmentally labelled packaging as the most important criteria in their choice. The findings emphasize the increasing importance of ethical and environmental dimension in product choices. We also propose that the attention in environmental consumer research should be shifted from general attitude studies towards the study of actual product choices.

Preference for green packaging in consumer product choices – Do consumers care?

Purpose – Drawing from recent work on online social networking and communities of consumption, the purpose of this paper is to explore, identify, and postulate key factors facilitating the growth and success of marketing in virtual worlds.Design/methodology/approach – An empirical study was conducted employing netnographic evidence from three different virtual worlds and related user‐generated blog discussions.Findings – The findings suggest mechanisms which enable virtual worlds to gain and maintain the interest of their users and therefore underlie successful marketer practices.Research limitations/implications – This is an exploratory study based on qualitative and ethnographic online research methods, and therefore the results are of a descriptive nature. The study was conducted to initiate the academic discourse about marketing in virtual worlds. As such, the paper believes that it can act as a reasonable starting‐point for future discussion.Practical implications – The study suggests that traditiona...

Exploring virtual worlds: success factors in virtual world marketing

While the importance of the temporal dimension for both positive and negative consumption experiences has been well understood, no general theory exists to explain how consumers’ temporal experiences come about. We theorize temporal experiences as an effect of performing consumption practices in order to move from assessing isolated contextual variables to a more holistic understanding. The timeflow of a practice is defined as its ability to evoke an experienced temporality that cannot be reduced to either subjective “inner” time or cosmic “outer” time. On the basis of a longitudinal ethnography of temporality in two lifestyle sports—freeskiing and paintball—we find that five practice elements shape temporal experience: material set-up, bodily routines and skills, teleoaffective structures, rules, and cultural understandings. Misalignments of practice elements induce experiences of temporal drag or rush associated with experiences such as boredom and stress. We contribute to prior research on consumption experiences, waiting, and servicescapes.

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Joonas Rokka

Papers

Social media marketing efforts of luxury brands: Influence on brand equity and consumer behavior

Preference for green packaging in consumer product choices – Do consumers care?

Exploring virtual worlds: success factors in virtual world marketing

Timeflow: How Consumption Practices Shape Consumers' Temporal Experiences

Timeflow: How Consumption Practices Shape Consumers’ Temporal Experience