Marie-Agnès Parmentier

Things Fall Apart: The Dynamics of Brand Audience Dissipation

Much prior work illuminates how fans of a brand can contribute to the value enjoyed by other members of its audience, but little is known about any processes by which fans contribute to the dissipation of that audience. Using longitudinal data on Americas Next Top Model, a serial brand, and conceptualizing brands as assemblages of heterogeneous components, this article examines how fans can contribute to the destabilization of a brands identity and fuel the dissipation of audiences of which they have been members. This work suggests that explanations focusing on satiation, psychology, or semiotics are inadequate to account for dissipation in the audience for serial brands. Moreover, the perspective advanced here highlights how fans can create doppelganger brand images and contribute to the co-destruction of serial brands they have avidly followed.

Consumption and gender identity in popular media: discourses of domesticity, authenticity, and sexuality

The goal of this research is to compare contemporary representations of masculinity and femininity in two HBO television series, Entourage and Sex and the City, and illustrate how these representations intersect with consumption. In the analysis, the authors discuss how gender fluidity gives the characters the freedom to be multifaceted in their performances – performances with regard to three emergent themes: domesticity, sexuality, and authenticity. Characters in both programs negotiate the tensions between more traditional gender roles and the assumption of contemporary roles through consumption. The characters find ways to simultaneously re-establish and reinforce their gendered identities as they create new roles, often with the aid of consumption. On the other hand, it is the consumption itself that is sometimes complicit in creating new tensions.

How athletes build their brands

This paper examines the dynamic processes of person branding by conducting an inductive analysis of two case studies of acclaimed athletes: David Beckham and Ryan Giggs. Although their careers have notable similarities and both athletes are regarded as outstanding soccer players, they have contrasting profiles as person brands. An analysis of their on- and off-field brand-building practices helps us understand how people in sporting professions build brand equity. We offer novel conceptual insights on two elements that characterise athletes’ brands: professional image and mainstream media persona. We provide insights into practices that yield a better professional image and a more valuable mainstream media persona, and posit connections between these constructs and person brand equity. Finally, we discuss implications for athletes and those managing their brands.

When David Met Victoria: Forging a Strong Family Brand

This article seeks to understand how distinctive family brands are created. Recent studies in family business have focused on the benefits for a firm to be known as family owned or family controlled. Few studies have paid attention to the distinct meanings stakeholders associate with a given family or to how that family comes to have those associations in the eyes of external stakeholders. Based on a case study of one of the entertainment industry’s most successful family brands—The Beckhams—four practices conducive to building brand distinctiveness and brand visibility are identified.

You can’t always get what you want: Unsustainable identity projects in the fashion system

This paper extends the literatures on both fashion systems and marketplace identity projects by investigating the identity trajectories experienced by women who strive for successful careers as fashion models. It argues that while end‐consumers in a symbolic field such as fashion may experience nearly limitless postmodern potential for identity play, those individuals who strive for positioning in the production systems of such fields have more limited scope for identity construction so long as they remain within the field. Unless they possess or can acquire significant symbolic and social capital, actors low in power within a field, such as aspiring fashion models, will typically face limited success in sustaining the identity they strive for. The analysis thus traces an arc from identity emergence to identity abandonment. It identifies two routes to identity re‐construction, both of which invoke cultural discourses of authenticity to cope with the abandonment of the identity project within the fashion system. The paper contributes to the marketing literature on fashion systems by focusing on how structured systems of social position matter to individual actors struggling to achieve a certain standing within a symbolic field. At the same time, it furthers our understanding of marketplace identity quests by shedding light on how market actors cope when confronting unsustainable identity projects.

Arrested emotions in reality television

“Arrested emotions” references the capitalist firm’s conscious mobilization of prosumers’ emotions and their associated expressions as amenable input for production within corporate confines. We draw on reality TV – The Bachelor and Extreme Makeover (Home Edition) – to suggest the centrality of emotional recruitment in the contemporary economy. Reality TV is driven almost entirely by the work of audiences and those in their ranks who are recruited (or volunteer) to become performers. Our observations lead us to conclude that the corporate arrest of emotions leads to a level of consumer emotional vapidity that is inextricably fused with firm profitability. The firm therefore allows the consumer ample leverage in offering these emotions that are mobilized, packaged and sold back to the consumer.

Working to Consume the Model Life: Consumer Agency Under Scarcity

Prior research on consumer agency has tended to focus on contexts where there are few restrictions on the type or number of people who can consume a desired object, provided they have adequate resources. This study develops theoretical insights into the modes of consumer agency adopted by consumers who desire a commodity that is in scarce supply, and to which access is restricted by powerful agents. Based on interviews and archival data from the fashion modeling industry, and drawing on Bourdieus praxeology, this paper identifies distinct modes of consumer agency that are manifest in a context characterized by enforced scarcity. Depending in part upon initial human capital endowments, in part upon conditions in the field, and in part upon deliberate choices, models adopt different modes of agency in order to survive, thrive in a highly restricted aesthetic field and ultimately consume the coveted good, which we refer to as the “model life.” This paper thus contributes not only to our understanding of consumer agency in an under-studied type of context, but also to our understanding of the seemingly burgeoning phenomena of the quest for fame, celebrity, and status.

Evolving netnography: how brand auto-netnography, a netnographic sensibility, and more-than-human netnography can transform your research

The basis of netnography is rather simple. It is grounded by the principle that the perspective of an embodied, temporally, historically and culturally situated human being with anthropological training is, for purposes relating to identity, language, ritual, imagery, symbolism, subculture and many other elements that require cultural understanding, a far better analyst of people’s contemporary online experience than a disembodied algorithm programmed by statistics and marketing research scientists.1 1. Of course, computer scientists are having their day, currently. And there is no doubt that there are many macro behaviours and precise measurements which are handled far better using statistical methods operating on large decontextualised data sets than they are by human participant-observers. But that really is not the point of netnography, of this paragraph or of this special section. View all notes The fundamental positioning of netnography as a research method, its marketing-oriented point of difference, relevant to digital humanities artists, library and information scientists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, marketing practitioners and consumer researchers alike, is also rather clear. It is that the knowledge we gain from machine understanding of human experience is often sorely limited, and the ethics of the investigatory situation fraught, no matter how large the data set, how cleverly programmed the machine learning algorithms or how extensive the public surveillance.

Navigating person-branding in the fashion blogosphere

Abstract Fashion blogs have received much attention since their emergence in 2002. Yet, little is known about how fashion bloggers succeed or fail in building their brand in the fashion industry. This article examines how fashion bloggers navigate person-brand building by focusing on how fashion bloggers accumulate – or fail to accumulate – status and audience, on the basis of a new form of capital and construct: person-brand capital. Based on an 18-month netnography in the fashion blogosphere and a Bourdieuian theoretical approach, we find that to build a strong person-brand, fashion bloggers must engage in at least two sets of practices that help fuel person-brand capital. Fashion bloggers must signal that they belong to and play a valuable role in the field of fashion and in the subfield of blogging. Our findings also demonstrate that engaging in practices rooted in either a lack of cultural capital in the field of fashion or weak social capital in the subfield of blogging can hinder person-brand capital development. Overall, our research provides insight into successful person-brand building in the fashion blogosphere and offers implications for fashion brands that want to benefit from the unique showcase that they can offer.