Dannie Kjeldgaard

The Glocalization of Youth Culture: The Global Youth Segment as Structures of Common Difference

In this article we present an analysis of global youth cultural consumption based on a multisited empirical study of young consumers in Denmark and Greenland. We treat youth culture as a market ideology by tracing the emergence of youth culture in relation to marketing and how the ideology has glocalized. This transnational market ideology is manifested in the glocalization of three structures of common difference that organize our data: identity, center-periphery, and reference to youth cultural consumption styles. Our study goes beyond accounts of global homogenization and local appropriation by showing the glocal structural commonalities in diverse manifestations of youth culture. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Postassimilationist Ethnic Consumer Research: Qualifications and Extensions

Data collected among Greenlandic immigrants in Denmark fuel a critical examination of the postassimilationist model of ethnic consumer behavior in a non-North American context. We find that Greenlandic consumer acculturation is broadly supportive of the postassimilationist model. However, acculturative processes in the Danish context lead immigrants to adopt identity positions not entirely consistent with those reported in previous postassimilationist consumer research. Further, we identify transnational consumer culture as an acculturative agent not identified in previous research on consumer ethnicity and question the performative model of culture swapping. Finally, the analysis supports ideas about postassimilationist ethnicity as culture consumed. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Here, There, and Everywhere: Place Branding and Gastronomical Globalization in a Macromarketing Perspective

In this article, the authors discuss the role branding can play in regional development in the context of the global cultural economy. They base their discussion on a set of studies of various initiatives having in common the aim of establishing the island of Funen, Denmark, as a region of particular gastronomic quality and competence. The article illustrates how processes of globalization not only result in the dissolving of local cultures by homogenizing forces but also enable the construction of places by way of marketing. In that way, the authors show that marketing not only represents a homogenization of culture through global corporate business but also that the principles of marketing and branding can be used in the service of creating sustainable small-scale production-consumption relations and, therefore, local cultural sustainability.

Coffee Grounds and the Global Cup: Glocal Consumer Culture in Scandinavia

Whether contemporary consumer cultures across the globe are becoming homogenized or whether they are still characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity has been the topic of a lively debate within the social sciences for more than a decade. On one side of this debate stand proponents of the homogenization thesis who argue that the proliferation of large multinational companies colonize local cultures (e.g. Ritzer 1996). On the other side are scholars who argue for alternatives to the globalization of consumer cultures and illustrate how consumers might, to follow the typology suggested by Ger and Belk (1996), resort to nationalism and a return to the roots, consumer resistance, local appropriation, or creolization. Thompson and Arsel (2004) question both the heterogenization and the homogenization strands and suggest that large, dominant corporations might forge hegemonic brandscapes. By this, the authors mean “the hegemonic influences that global experiential brands exert on their local competitors and the meanings consumers derive from their experiences of these glocal servicescapes” (Thompson and Arsel 2004, 632). The purposes here are twofold: we wish to explore how the hegemonic brandscape may operate in a cultural context outside of North America by exploring coffee cultural discourses in the Scandinavian context. As a kind of commentary to, or re-inquiry of, Thompson and Arsel’s (2004) study of the hegemonic influence that the Seattle-based company Starbucks exerts on the US coffee culture we explore how the logic of the hegemonic brandscape becomes glocalized in the Scandinavian context. While we

Prisoners in Paradise: Subcultural Resistance to the Marketization of Tattooing

This study explores the increasingly popular use of brand symbols as imagery for tattooing. Through interviews with tattoo artists and netnographic research in tattoo communities, we capture a perceived boundary between the sacred, non‐commercial sphere of tattooing and the profane, profit maximizing sphere of the commercial world. In the tattoo subculture, brands are generally considered inappropriate for tattooing. Nevertheless, the tattoo artists more or less willingly accept the role of service providers for consumers wishing to embody brand symbols. The commercial sphere hence plays a role in the cultural identity of the tattoo culture as an Otherness, from which the tattoo culture defines itself.

Value in marketing: Toward sociocultural perspectives

This commentary addresses recent debates in marketing research on the elusiveness of the notion of value, with the aim of starting a dialogue on the possibility of developing a comprehensive and culturally informed understanding of value and value creation processes. First, we provide an overview of the predominant uses of value in marketing and consumer research literature and discuss them in relation to three abstract conceptions of value. We show the interconnectedness of these value types in market and consumption contexts. Next, we suggest possible avenues that have their foundations in the notion of field, practice theory, and markets as networks approaches, in order to conceptualize complexity in value and value creation processes.

Reflexive Culture’s Consequences

Investigations of marketing relations across cultures have traditionally focused on culture as a background variable, a collection of essential character traits, habits, practices, categorizations, and so forth within a given domain that would explain the approach to and degree of acceptance of various marketing practices from abroad. Most often, such discussions are based in a Hofstedean tradition (for a review of the use of particular culture theories in literature and the dominance of Hofstede-based approaches, see Nakata and Izberk-Bilgin this volume). The role of cultural understanding in this perspective aims to predict the problems or potential misunderstandings arising from different cultural backgrounds in a marketing exchange relation or in cross-cultural managerial interactions (see, for example, Douglas and Craig’s work in this volume). Moreover, the basic question in the relation between marketing and culture is the standardization-adaptation debate, that is, the degree to which certain established marketing strategies or tactics would be applicable in a different cultural context. The unit of analysis is almost inevitably the nation-state, albeit with occasional references to subcultures, such as different ethnic groups. However, the inherent weaknesses of this approach, focusing on the comparison of cultural similarities and differences between nations, occasionally even turning to measuring the “cultural distances” between them, are becoming more and more evident in today’s globalizing environment—hence the need for a different look at relations between culture and marketing.

Glocal gender identities in market places of transition: MARIANISMO and the consumption of the telenovela Rebelde:

This article follows recent calls to take the study of gender construction beyond the affluent cultural contexts of Northern America and Western Europe. The article examines the negotiation and representation of gender in the Mexican telenovela Rebelde. The study analyses the identity positions and tensions in the cultural product as well as analyzing consumer interpretive strategies to negotiate countervailing gender ideals. The article analyses how processes of market place transition and the negotiation of gender are handled by navigating between countervailing cultural meanings of tradition and modernity, conformity and rebellion, in glocalized forms.

Consumer–brand assemblages in advertising: an analysis of skin, identity, and tattoos in ads

This paper discusses how the use of tattoos in advertising renders diverse brand–consumer assemblages visible. In considering advertising practitioners as professionals of entanglement, the paper emphasizes the embeddedness of practitioners’ use of tattoo symbolism in institutionalized marketing systems and in the cultural history of tattooing. In accordance with the recent emphasis on the importance of material devices for understanding contemporary sociality, this paper presents a semiotic analysis of a convenience sample of advertisements depicting tattoos. Tattoos are productive for the study of brand–consumer assemblages because they are situated on the human skin, which is a mediator between the individual and the socio-material world. Furthermore, tattoos reproduce discourses of both mainstream fashion and deviant subcultural identification, which imbue tattoo symbolism with communicative potency. This analysis demonstrates how the emergence of brand tattoos in advertising challenges the dominant consumer centrism in consumer research and suggests a networked, emerging understanding of the subject in which agency is distributed in socio-technical assemblages.

Consumers’ collective action in market system dynamics: A case of beer

This article examines how consumers may work strategically to alter market dynamics through formally organized activities. We address this issue in the context of the Danish beer market and its evolution over the last two decades, with a specific empirical focus on the role of a formally organized consumer association. We draw on key tenets of recent advances in sociological field theory, which views social order as comprising multiple and related strategic action fields. From this perspective, we describe the Danish beer market and its transformation, with an emphasis on how Danish beer enthusiasts played a significant role in altering the logics of competition in the market, but also played a significant institutionalized role within the field itself. We theorize this activity as consumers’ collective action.