Economic Psychology and Fashion Marketing theory Appraising Veblen's Theory of Conspicuous Consumption

The study here serves to examine customer choice and firm profitability outcomes from the conjoining of four perspectives: economics, fashion, marketing, and psychology. This article describes core tenets of fashion marketing theory (FMT) from the perspective of economic psychology. The study here is unique and valuable in proposing empirically testable hypotheses that follow from FMT and in describing evidence from available literature testing these hypotheses. The core tenets reflect the view that impactful fashion marketing moderates the relationships among price and consumer demand for the firm’s offering (i.e., brand) by psychological customer segments, and subsequently firm profitability. Relating to fashion marketing, “psychology” in “economic psychology” includes the influences of chronic desire for conspicuous consumption (CC) and desire for rarity as relative human conditions, that is, humans vary in these desires; consumers relatively very high versus very low in these desires are more prone to enact conspicuous choices whatever the price level of the object or service. Consequently, different pricing points (decisions) that maximize profitability vary considerably for product designs which are positioned high in CC and rarity directed to customers very high in chronic desire for CC and rarity versus product designs which are positioned low in CC and rarity directed to customers very low in chronic desire for CC and rarity. The study offers an interesting application of interdisciplinary research that combines economics, fashion, marketing, and psychology. The theory and empirical findings support the view that the influence of fashion marketing designs and price depends substantially on the chronic desires of consumers and marketers’ abilities to segment and target customers by these desires—a conclusion made explicit by Veblen (1899)

Iconic Studies Relevant for Research in Marketing and the Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science

Here, an “icon” refers to a study widely and critically admired, a study symbolizing a movement or field of activity; iconic marketing studies offer exceptional contributions to marketing theory and/or data collection, and/or data analysis, and/or interpretations/ implications of qualitative and/or quantitative empirical findings. This article identifies antecedent conditions associated with achieving iconic status in research in marketing and proposes 10 tenets useful for identifying and planning iconic studies in marketing. The study reviews examples of iconic studies in the marketing literature. The study also addresses a few telling mistakes that researchers in the marketing discipline frequently make. The study of iconic research is helpful for crafting high-quality theory and planning high-quality research designs, as well as increasing vigilance and skill in identifying truly exceptionally high-quality studies and studies that are plainly just bad. The essay briefly reviews 10 JGSMS articles appearing also in this virtual issue as possible candidates for the achievement of iconic status in marketing

The general theory of behavioral pricing: Applying complexity theory to explicate heterogeneity and achieve high-predictive validity

Building behavioral-pricing models-in-contexts enriches one or more goals of science and practice: description, understanding, prediction, and influence/control. The general theory of behavioral strategy includes a set of tenets that describes alternative configurations of decision processes and objectives, contextual features, and beliefs/assessments associating with different outcomes involving specific price-points. This article explicates these tenets and discusses empirical studies which support the general theory. The empirical studies include the use of alternative data collection and analytical tools including true field experiments, think aloud methods,long interviews, ethnographic decision-tree-modeling, and building and testing algorithms (e.g., fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis). The general theory of behavioral pricing involves the blending of cognitive science, complexity theory, economics, marketing, psychology, and implemented practices. Consequently, behavioural pricing theory is distinct from context-free microeconomics, market-driven, and competitor-only price-setting. Capturing and reporting contextually-driven alternative routines to price setting by a compelling set of tenets represent what is particularly new and valuable about the general theory. The general theory serves as a usefulfoundation for advances in pricing theory and improving pricing practice

Introduction: The tourist gaze 4.0: uncovering non-conscious meanings and motivations in the stories tourists tell of trip and destination experiences

This special issue includes unique contributions sharing advanced concepts and tools immediately applicable to building theory that describes and increases understanding of practices in tourist travel and destination experiences. Articles in this special issue focus emic-to-etic reporting on naturalistic drama-enactments that enable tourists as storytellers to experience powerful myths in actual destination settings (also recognising that mythical qualities imbue aspects of both travel and destination sites, e.g., ‘The Orient Express [train]’ and Machu Picchu, Peru, respectively). Tourists’ stories provide intimate tourist travel insights regarding destinations as well as the enactments they engender for tourists. Such insights offer the material for guidelines for productions of ‘authentic’ tourist-destination relationship engagements. This special issue contributes to developing a comprehensive understanding of non-conscious influence-paths that impact tourist-destination behaviours and experiences

Capturing and (re)interpreting complexity in multi-firm disruptive product innovations

Purpose – This case study research report aims to include collecting additional field interviews with the original and additional executives participating in the original case study (on the Zaplet software applications firm) to enhance the interpretations by the original case study investigators as well as add-in downstream events occurring after the original report. The focus of the study is to increase descriptive knowledge and understanding of innovation and diffusion processes in developing high-tech disruptive software technologies. Design/methodology/approach – The study includes an application of the long-interview method and reinterpretation of original case data along with preparing and interpreting decision system analysis and chronological maps. Findings – The reinterpretation and expansion of the original case study illustrate dramatic revisions in plans and implementing new applications following positive and negative responses by third-parties and lead-user customers to alpha and beta designs. Concrete field trials occur frequently in shaping where and how the firm goes about changing its direction. Third-parties play critical roles in multiple time periods in shaping the firm's new product development direction.Research limitations/implications – The case study reanalysis and expansion are generalizable to innovation and diffusion theory and not to a specific population of firms. Practical implications – The paper illustrates the wisdom of Tom Peter's dictum, “Put it to tin quickly” and Dwight Eisenhower's focus on improvising, “The plan is nothing, planning is everything.” Originality/value – Formal sensemaking of what happened helps to destroy the myth that executives must have the resources before innovating. Resources follow vision and action (implementing) is the hidden and great lesson of this paper – what Tom Peters means when he writes about the value in creating a “skunk works” – using “borrowed” time, material, places, and creative juices to make things happen

Consumer Storytelling of Brand Archetypal Enactments

The study here probes the perspective that consumers use certain brands as actors that play roles in the consumers’ lives and that help consumers as protagonists to enact roles that give them the feelings of achievement, well-being, and/or emotional excitement. The method enables the uncovering of archetypes as unconscious forces that drive consumers to specific actions implicitly and to a less extent, explicitly. The study employs two techniques: degrees-of-freedom analysis (DFA) to test whether or not consumer stories fit a given archetypal theme and visual narrative art (VNA) to confirm whether or not consumer’s own stories enact a specific archetype and how such enactments are done. This study offers an alternative for survey auditing consumer-brand relationships; the study here describes and explains the importance of narratives in consumer behaviour and the use of archetypes as universal themes that aid understanding of brand-consumer relationships. The study describes DFA and VNA with two examples of the use of these analytics

Advancing Customer Experience Theory: Five-Way Conversations in Two-Person Customer-Marketer Talk

This study advances customer experience theory (CET) by configuring research on talk, storytelling, customer-marketer interactions, and customer assessments of experiences in encounters with sales and hospitality/service representatives. Customers’ introspections and assessments of their meetings with marketers constitutes one genre of storytelling that include not only surface talk between two persons but surface and subsurface (nonconscious) talk between persons and within self. Practical implications include creative storytelling scripts for performing in sales and service training programs in firms and classroom contexts. Given the centrality of face-to-face meetings in many consumer shopping contexts (e.g., cars, houses, medical services; campus visits by high school seniors and parents, insurance selling, clothes shopping; tourism and hospitality), advancing CET and personal selling/buying effectiveness represent worthwhile pursuits. The study is one step forward in reducing the relative scarcity of extant research on customer-marketer talk. Empirically, the study includes customers’ thick descriptions of their self-marketer interactions via subjective personal introspections (SPI) and assessments of these exchanges. Interpersonal verbalization is only one of five levels of processing that take place when a researcher observes a decision-maker in a marketing organization interact with a decision-maker in a customer organization. At level 2, the speaker, listener, and observer are consciously editing thoughts as well as surfacing unconscious thoughts to combine and change conscious editing of what is said, heard, or observed. Level 3 is an automatic process in which unconscious thoughts are brought into working memory to mingle with conscious processing and to send some of the conscious processing into unconscious storage. Level 4 includes unconscious processing between or among individuals that do not become part of conscious processes or verbalization. Level 5 processing spreads activation within the person’s unconscious so that automatic thoughts and behaviors are set into motion without the individual being aware of the process. Customers’ introspections and assessments of their meetings with marketers constitutes one genre of storytelling that include not only surface talk between two persons but surface and subsurface (nonconscious) talk between persons and in within self. The study here includes customers’ thick descriptions of their self-marketer interactions via subjective personal introspections (SPI) and assessments of these exchanges. SPI uses the researcher as the subject of the study and allows for rich, thick, impressionistic narratives of the author’s own experiences in a particular context. Students in various marketing classes in five nations participated in a Trade Tales project. The Appendix provides a common set of instructions used by the Trade Tales Team members. All Trade Tales had a title page, abstract, story (with dialogue), five possible solutions with points awarded for choosing a particular solution and the rationale behind the choice, and surface (explicit) and deep (implicit/personal) assessments of the situation, story, and outcome assessments. Theory and practical implications: the participating student experiences “proper pleasure” in the re-telling of his or her story and also achieves better sense making and problem solving. The finalized versions of the Trade Tales can be used in other classes as case lets for studying customer-marketer interactions. The following case study illustrates one of the stories collected for the Trade Tales Team project. To achieve anonymity, the names of firms and persons are disguised. “AbsolutelyBest Ham to Pocatello, Idaho, USA: Arrival Delay in Customer\u27s Order” is the title of the case study. A customer goes on-line at firm’s (AbsolutelyBest) website and orders 9-lb ham to be delivered to daughter’s home in Pocatello, Idaho, on December 29th. Customer pays extra for two-day delivery service. Ham fails to arrive on December 29 due date. Customer asks for a credit on service not received. Bad weather hit most of the U.S. on December 28. What should the firm do? The full story appears in the paper with possible solutions for students to assess. Practical implications for Trade Tales include creative scripts for performing in sales and service training programs in firms and classroom contexts. Trade Tales are useful as case studies in classroom instruction. Given the centrality of face-to-face meetings in many consumer shopping contexts (e.g., cars, houses, medical services; campus visits by high school seniors, insurance selling; clothes shopping; tourism and hospitality), the relative scarcity of extant research on customer-marketer talk is surprising and represents a vacuum that researchers need to fill

How Contextual Cues Influence Response Rates and Results of Online Surveys

The study investigates the contextual cues which affect response rates of online surveys and bias the results. An experimental design on the response rates and survey results of the visitors to a tourist destination demonstrated that the researcher\u27s identity and the sponsorship would influence the response rates, and the combined arrangement may increase the response rates up to 45%. Due to the amount of spamming online and consumers\u27 hectic lifestyle, the credibility of solicitation messages is of paramount importance. The mention of the destination in the solicitation message will draw certain type of visitors to respond

Tiger Woods, Nike, and I are (Not) Best Friends: How Brand’s Sports Sponsorship in Social-Media Impacts Brand Consumer’s Congruity and Relationship Quality

This study examines the effects of brand’s sports sponsorship in social media on brand consumer’s congruity and brand relationship quality. The study included a survey of targeting consumers whose ages range between early twenties and late forties; data from 322 respondents were collected. The results are as follows. First, brand’s sports sponsorship in social-media activities relating to sports brands has significant effects on brand consumer’s congruity. Second, this congruity significantly influences brand relationship quality. Third, male consumers, who have previously purchased products and services associated with a sports brand, perceive the sponsor’s brand image more positively when they are exposed to the sponsor’s brand’s sports sponsorship in social-media activities, compared to those consumers having no previous purchases of the sponsored brand. Lastly, consumers in their forties with prior experience consuming the sponsor’s brand products are most affected by the level of selfcongruity with the sports brand compared to younger or older consumers