Celebrity chefs as brand and their cookbooks as marketing communication

This paper aims to illuminate how consumers engage with celebrity chefs as marketing objects and their cookbooks as marketing communications. Based upon narrative analysis of qualitative data it suggest that celebrity chefs are acting as brands, that consumers clearly understand and engage with them on that basis and have clear understanding of their values and benefits leading to loyalty and trust in these chef brands. It further suggests that the level engagement which these chef brands can achieve is unmatched by the consumer goods brands and retailers within food marketing. It argues that while the cookbooks under these brands clearly act as product and merchandise that they should also be considered as part of the brand's marketing communication toolkit: that they play a role in driving consumer loyalty to the brand by effectively communicating its brand values and attributes. It concludes that traditional consumer goods and retailers within the grocery sector need to re-evaluate the range of marketing communications tools available to respond to the brand dominance of the celebrity chef and rethink traditional models of endorsement as they may be doing more to build the celebrity brand than associated consumer goods. Consumption, marketing communications, branding

Cookbook choice a matter of self-identity

Cookbooks have long been recognised as more than instructional texts rather as a literary genre with narratives beyond the functional. This paper discusses the influences which guide choices of cookbook and cookery writer for a group of thirtysomethings with particular attention to the role that their narratives of self-identity play within this choice. In the sociology of consumption the role of self and identity is a recurring one particularly among those who view consumption as an act of integration between external objects and self, often through a process of personalisation. Whether food consumption can take on such significance is well debated but cook books in common with other forms of literature, this paper contends, become well used and take on increased symbolism for their owners. Cookbooks have a heterogeneity of style from the instructional owner manual style of Larousse through to the lifestyle led work of Oliver and Slater so that they can embody not only representations of contemporary culinary culture but also extend far beyond the kitchen to create aspirational cultural narratives. Utilising narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews this paper explores the narrative construction of self, drawn in part from attitudes towards food and cooking, outwardly manifest through choices of cookbook in order to add to understanding of symbolic consumption practice

Medicaid 1915(c) home and community-based services waivers across the states.

This article provides State-level data on the Medicaid 1915(c) home and community-based services (HCBS) waivers program. Medicaid 1915(c) waiver participants were 32 percent of the Medicaid participants in institutional care in 1997. These data document wide interstate variation in organizational oversight and program policies for the waivers. Many structural barriers to HCBS waiver growth existed. Case management services, in some form, were normative for most HCBS waiver participants, but formal mechanisms to assess client satisfaction and service quality were less common. Substantial new growth in this program may require fundamental changes in HCBS waiver policies

Monetary Policy Implications of Financial Frictions in the Czech Republic

As the global economy seems to be recovering from the 2009 financial crisis, we find it desirable to look back and analyze the Czech economy ex post. We work with a Swedish New Keynesian model of a small open economy which embeds financial frictions in light of the financial accelerator literature. Without explicitly modeling the banking sector, this model serves as a tool for understanding how a negative financial shock may spread to the real economy and how monetary policy may react. We use Bayesian techniques to estimate the model parameters to adjust the model structure closer to the evidence stemming from Czech data. Our attention focuses on a set of experiments in which we generate ex post forecasts of the economy prior to the 2009 crisis and illustrate that the monetary policy response to an upcoming crisis implied by the model with financial frictions is stronger on account of an increasing interest rate spread.Bayesian methods, financial frictions.

Consumer poetry : insightful data and methodological approaches

Within interpretive consumer research there is sustained interest in preserving the authentic emic voice of consumers within research accounts (Wallendorf and Belk, 1989). The use of diaries (Patterson, 2005) photography (Dion et al, 2014) and consumer verbatim (Corden and Sainsbury, 2006) all have heritage as evidence of the consumer within researcher interpretation. This paper considers the potential of consumer authored poetry as an additional source of the consumer insight. It argues that, despite notable calls (Sherry & Schouten, 2002) for the inclusion of poetry within interpretive consumer research, it remains largely absent as a source of consumer storytelling.It considers that there may be two bases for this. That there may be disciplinary reluctance to engage in the unfamiliarity of poetic deconstruction; and that there may be a lack of value placed upon the data and resultant insight which poetry can provide. To address these issues it suggests methodological considerations which may be useful for consumer researchers considering engagement with poetic materials

Farm retailing : motivations and practice

This paper investigates rural diversification strategies, specifically focussing upon farm retailing. The study reveals farmers’ different motivations and experiences of structural diversification through both farmers markets and wholly owned farm shops. Using a qualitative study of eight farm businesses we find that diversification is not always motivated by entrepreneurial objectives. Necessity (push) factors (such as agri-food market inequality) act as the catalyst transforming nascent diversification tendencies. Once the need for diversification is unlocked farmers face an entrepreneurial choice: those with push motivations (such risk reduction) choose non-entrepreneurial diversification in the form of farmers markets; while those with pull motivations (such as business growth) exhibit characteristics of entrepreneurship and engage in entrepreneurial diversification in the form of on-farm retailing