Luca M. Visconti

The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers’ Narrative Transportation

Stories, and their ability to transport their audience, constitute a central part of human life and consumption experience. Integrating previous literature derived from fields as diverse as anthropology, marketing, psychology, communication, consumer, and literary studies, this article offers a review of two decades worth of research on narrative transportation, the phenomenon in which consumers mentally enter a world that a story evokes. Despite the relevance of narrative transportation for storytelling and narrative persuasion, extant contributions seem to lack systematization. The authors conceive the extended transportation-imagery model, which provides not only a comprehensive model that includes the antecedents and consequences of narrative transportation but also a multidisciplinary framework in which cognitive psychology and consumer culture theory cross-fertilize this field of inquiry. The authors test the model using a quantitative meta-analysis of 132 effect sizes of narrative transportation from 76 published and unpublished articles and identify fruitful directions for further research.

Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the "Public" in Public Place

Consumer research has paid scant attention to public goods, especially at a time when the contestation between categorizing public and private goods and controlling public goods is pronounced. In this multisited ethnography, we explore the ways in which active consumers negotiate meanings about the consumption of a particular public good, public space. Using the context of street art, we document four main ideologies of public space consumption that result from the interaction, both conflict and common intent, of urban dwellers and street artists. We show how public space can be contested as private and commercialized, or offered back as a collective good, where sense of belonging and dialogue restore it to a meaningful place. We demonstrate how the common nature of space both stimulates dialectical and dialogical exchanges across stakeholders and fuels forms of layered agency.

Consumer ethnicity three decades after: a TCR agenda

Abstract Research into consumer ethnicity is a vital discipline that has substantially evolved in the past three decades. This conceptual article critically reviews its immense literature and examines the extent to which it has provided extensive contributions not only for the understanding of ethnicity in the marketplace but also for personal/collective well-being. We identify two gaps accounting for scant transformative contributions. First, today social transformations and conceptual sophistications require a revised vocabulary to provide adequate interpretive lenses. Second, extant work has mostly addressed the subjective level of ethnic identity projects but left untended the meso/macro forces affecting ethnicity (de)construction and personal/collective well-being. Our contribution stems from filling both gaps and providing a theory of ethnicity (de)construction that includes migrants as well as non-migrants.

Public Markets: An Ecological Perspective on Sustainability as a Megatrend

Although today’s public markets echo ancient market forms, they incorporate many original aspects which merit scrutiny because: 1) they are connected to a dominant neo-liberal market functioning and structures; and 2) they illuminate important tensions that question how sustainability is practicable at a macro level. Taking an ecological perspective, we show that public markets bring certain benefits in relation to sustainability. Significantly, however, we illustrate how these perceived benefits are underpinned by three compromises or “trade-offs” that public markets also invoke and that operate at inter-social, inter-nation, and inter-gender levels. We argue that what may look sustainable on a local level can raise challenges to macro sustainability more broadly conceived. Our contribution is twofold. First, we offer an updated, comprehensive definition of public markets and discuss to what extent they may represent a megatrend. Second, we contribute to the literature on sustainability by conceptualizing the notion of ecological sustainability, which suggests that an overarching analysis of sustainability reveals possible internal trade-offs between its economic, social, environmental, and ethical constituents, which the case of public markets helps highlight

New directions in researching ethnicity in marketing and consumer behaviour : a wellbeing agenda

This special commentary section proposes new directions in researching the nexus of ethnicity and well-being under three themes of (1) mobility and shifting identities in relation to place, (2) empowerment and identity performance in relation to the virtual space, and (3) religious conflicts in relation to markets and spaces of consumption. The three short essays in this collection are geared towards accelerating research on ethnicity in marketing and consumer behaviour. They problematize the very nature of ethnicity in relation to space and how ethnicity is performed in different spaces by looking at the issues of social relations, transformations and conflict. They suggest potential areas of enquiry, particularly for new (doctor of philosophy) research projects, policy-focused research grant applications, conferences/seminars/workshops and also classroom activities and teaching purposes.

Consumer mobility and well-being among changing places and shifting ethnicities

(Market)places are spatial entities which individuals and groups might experience as meaningful. By highlighting the role of place in ethnic consumer research, this article argues that increased mobility and changing places render relatively stable notions of ethnicity outdated. We identify three main trajectories to revitalize future research on ethnicity. First, we demonstrate the need for research on ethnic identity to be underpinned by a better understanding of the role of place in identity processes. Second, we contend that the established migration/acculturation paradigm should be replaced by the mobility/adaptiveness paradigm. Third, we consider the profound effects of interethnic contact among mobile and immobile populations within shared places on individual and societal well-being.

A Closer Glance at the Notion of Boundaries in Acculturation Studies: Typologies, Intergenerational Divergences, and Consumer Agency

The notion of “boundary” is central in both consumer acculturation research and migrants’ daily experience within and beyond the market. Yet, scholars have rarely questioned this concept and thus made it a taken for granted that conceals more than it reveals. Our study aims at moving from the etic notion of boundary we use as consumer acculturation scholars to an emic notion of boundaries, here grounded on an ethnographic inquiry of Moroccan mothers and daughters in France. This chapter shows that (1) the notion of boundary is much more articulated than expected, since migrants may use up to five different typologies of boundaries (national, ethnic, religious, biographical, and generational) in order to organize their experience; (2) first and second generations tend to attribute different meanings to these boundaries; and (3) boundaries represent problematic conceptual references in migrants’ life, which ask for specific coping strategies (crossing the borders, melting the borders, and pushing the borders). Overall, this chapter provides a more sensitive, blurred, and critical representation of boundaries, which – we hope – will stimulate sounder acculturation research. With reference to the limitations of our work, while we identify the variety and interpretive heterogeneity of boundaries migrants use to frame their experience, we limitedly address how such boundaries are performed.

A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity, representations, and storytelling

ABSTRACT This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.

Nuovi italiani, nuovi marketing: approcci emergenti per la conquista del mercato etnico nazionale

The Italian ethnic market is increasingly relevant, with its 3.7 million presences and almost the 6% of the Gdp attributable to foreigners. In the past, other countries have already applied the ethnic/national criterion to segment this market. However, the Italian context requires different criteria, given the pulverization of immigrants over 200 different nationalities. The paper aims to contrast three different criteria of segmentation that emerge from managerial praxes, market researches and academic debate. In detail, we document the following criteria of segmentation for the ethnic market: i) lifestyles; ii) socio-cultural integration; iii) generation-based analysis. In the light of these praxes, new marketing paradigms are discussed in order to meet the almost virgin ethnic market.

Do Story Domain, Number of Storytellers, and Number of Story-receivers Matter in Narrative Persuasion? A Meta-Analysis Expanded

The recent adoption of storytelling to promote harmful products and services indicates that storytelling poses a key business ethics issue. Extant research demonstrates that a story can persuade story-receivers through the experience of narrative transportation. We introduce the business ethics concerns that storytelling raises because of the superior persuasiveness of the narrative transportation effect, stories’ use to promote harmful products and services, and their reach to vulnerable target groups. By means of a meta-analysis, we further show that the narrative transportation effect is strengthened when (1) the story pertains to marketing (vs. other domains), (2) is told by multiple storytellers, and (3) is received by one story-receiver at a time. We also discuss the ethical implications of these moderators.