Paul Hewer

Consumer attitude and the usage and adoption of home‐based banking in the United Kingdom

This paper seeks to develop our understanding of consumer attitudes towards bank delivery channels. Accordingly, a questionnaire was designed to obtain information about which delivery channels consumers had used when acquiring four types of financial service. This information was then contrasted with data on how these consumers would acquire the same services if they had to purchase them again at some time in the future. The questionnaire also obtained information about the factors which consumers believed to be important in encouraging and discouraging the adoption of home‐based banking. In concluding, the paper discusses and assesses some of the strategic implications of the study’s findings for financial service providers.

Customer involvement and interaction in retail banking: an examination of risk and confidence in the purchase of financial products

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine bank customer involvement and the importance of risk when contemplating the purchase of financial products.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a discussion of the literature on customer involvement, risk and interaction forms the basis for a series of focus discussion groups and facilitates the design of a questionnaire. The questionnaire is used to collect information on bank customer involvement and confidence when purchasing a comprehensive range of financial products. The data is analysed using cluster analysis.Findings – The paper finds that the clusters provide evidence to suggest that the market consist of a number of distinctive customer segments. Although the research suggests that the market might be changing and becoming more “active”, the majority of bank customers are still essentially “passive”.Research limitations/implications – The sample size means that it is not fully representative of the UK banking population. The findings also ra...

'Spinning' Warhol : celebrity brand theoretics and the logic of the celebrity brand

Abstract The paper takes as its subject celebrity and consumption and the cultural logic of the celebrity brand. It introduces the concept of celebritisation as the engine of celebrity culture, discussing ways in which celebrity brands operate as ‘map-making’ devices which situate consumers within networks of symbolic resources. We construct particulars via an investigative narrative that draws critically upon published accounts of the life and work of Andy Warhol, generating observations of signature practices and technologies of formation of Celebrity Brandhood. Within an inductive architecture we modulate to celebrity brands as transmediated marketing accomplishments which trade upon allure, glamour and charisma, constructed around rituals of transition, belonging, intimacy, and affect. We suggest that at the heart of the machinery of the cultural logic of the Celebrity Brand is the mediated spectacle as a field of social invention and transformation. In this way, the paper opens up pathways toward further interpretive analyses of celebrity brands, articulating the basis of accounts of Celebrity Brand Theoretics.

Prime Beef Cuts: Culinary Images for Thinking ‘Men’

The paper contributes to scholarship theorising the sociality of the brand in terms of subject positions it makes possible through drawing upon the generative context of circulating discourses, in this case of masculinity, cuisine and celebrity. Specifically, it discusses masculinity as a socially constructed gender practice (Bristor and Fischer, 1993), examining materialisations of such practice in the form of visualisations of social relations as resources for “thinking gender” or “doing gender”. The transformative potential of the visualisations is illuminated by exploring the narrative content choreographed within a series of photographic images positioning the market appeal of a celebrity chef through the medium of a contemporary lifestyle cookery book. We consider how images of men “doing masculinity” are not only channelled into reproducing existing gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality in the service of commercial ends, but also into disrupting such enduring stereotyping through subtle reframing. We acknowledge that masculinity is already inscribed within conventionalised representations of culinary culture. In this case we consider how traces of masculinity are exploited and reinscribed through contemporary images that generate resources for rethinking masculine roles and identities, especially when viewed through the lens of stereotypically feminised pursuits such as shopping, food preparation, cooking, and the communal intimacy of food sharing. We identify unsettling tensions within the compositions, arguing that they relate to discursive spaces between the gendered positions written into the images and the popular imagination they feed off. Set against landscapes of culinary culture, we argue that the images invoke a brand of naively roughish “laddishness” or “blokishness”, rendering it in domesticated form not only as benign and containable, but fashionable, pliable and, importantly, desirable. We conclude that although the images draw on stereotypical premeditated notions of a feral, boisterous and untamed heterosexual masculinity, they also set in motion gender‐blending narratives which test the shifting limits of masculine discourse when set in the mediating context of culinary culture.

Tribal mattering spaces: Social-networking sites, celebrity affiliations, and tribal innovations

Abstract In this paper, we explore the opportunities and possibilities of Web 2.0 through the theoretical lens of tribes and fandom, arguing that social-networking sites centring on iconic celebrities provide a rich context to explore notions of tribal identities and their forms of interaction, connectivity, and creativity. Employing what we term a Netnographic Imagination, we seek to explore the nature and character of this tribal context to provide insights into the tribal mattering spaces that are constructed around celebrity brands. Our analysis highlights the passions and enthusiasms within such emotional communities and the investments they make in celebrity brands, along with the forms of critique they construct around their associated marketing practices. Finally, we draw attention to the tribal innovations that emerge from the sense of togetherness and belonging made explicit through such tribal affiliations.

Culinary tourism: An exploratory reading of contemporary representations of cooking

In Levi‐Straussian terms cooking marks the “transition between nature and culture”. Yet the study of cookbooks as placed cultural artefacts is largely neglected by consumer researchers. This essay seeks to address this oversight, setting out to explore the potential contribution of a turn to cookbooks for enriching our understanding of the character of contemporary consumer culture. It weaves a line of argument that asserts the value of treating cookbooks as cultural products, as objectifications of culinary culture, as constructed social forms which are amenable to textual analysis. In this respect it declares that, rather than simply being understood as reflections of contemporary consumer culture, cookbooks should be understood as artefacts of cultural life in the making. That is, cookbooks contain not only recipes but inscribed cultural tales which can be understood as productive of the culinary culture that they pretend only to display, and performative in their attempt to do things with us. We reveal cookbooks to be sites of aestheticised consumption.

Cultures of consumption of car aficionados: Aesthetics and consumption communities

The purpose of this paper is to explore the virtual consumption communities which cohere around the object of the car. Focusing upon the cultural practice of debadging, the paper intends to reveal forms of connectivity and resistance within communities of car customization. Design/methodology/approach - A netnography in the form of non-participant observation is used to explore the talk of car aficionados around issues of customization and affiliation. Findings - The paper discusses the importance of internet discussion boards as forums for the exchange of information and advice, but also as a site to express their passion for cars and their affiliation with like-minded others. The research reveals that the question of aesthetics is a significant one for car aficionados. This enables us to theorize such consumers as akin to designers for whom the discussion boards exist as key reference points. Research limitations/implications - This is an exploratory study and its primary limitation is one of scope and method. Netnography provides access to web-based communication. In this sense, a novel channel of access to new forms of expression and ways of doing social relations is employed. Clearly, the insights generated from this study are mediated by the character of the empirical site and the limits of non-participatory netnography. Originality/value - The originality of the paper resides in its attempt to theorize the significance of the cultural practice of debadging as a key constituent in community-formation.Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the virtual consumption communities which cohere around the object of the car. Focusing upon the cultural practice of debadging, the paper intends to reveal forms of connectivity and resistance within communities of car customization.Design/methodology/approach – A netnography in the form of non‐participant observation is used to explore the talk of car aficionados around issues of customization and affiliation.Findings – The paper discusses the importance of internet discussion boards as forums for the exchange of information and advice, but also as a site to express their passion for cars and their affiliation with like‐minded others. The research reveals that the question of aesthetics is a significant one for car aficionados. This enables us to theorize such consumers as akin to designers for whom the discussion boards exist as key reference points.Research limitations/implications – This is an exploratory study and its primary limitation is one of sco...

Management theory and practice: bridging the gap through multidisciplinary lenses

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue that critically examines topics informing long-standing disputes concering the status of theory and practice in management studies. Contr ...

Spaces of hope, enlivenment and entanglement : explorations in the spatial logic of celebrity culinary brands

This article explores the production of the ‘Nigella’ celebrity brand through forms of gendered talk performed by means of online community forums. The complexity and appeal of celebrity culinary brands forces us to turn to particular contexts to explore the passions, concerns and enthusiasms that they elicit and excite. As a context for the exploration of such hyper-mediated brands it is useful to explore the social interactions and associations harboured and sheltered within the collective canopy of the forum, in our case the Food Forum of Nigella.com. The emotional fabric of celebrity culinary brands has much to do with the fact that they are created and sustained through a range of multimedia platforms. One such critical stage is that of the online forum, which we explore as a site wherein feminine identities are performed and reimagined; where notions of ‘doing gender’ within culinary landscapes are worked and reworked through networks of affiliation and shared sentiment.

On market forces and adjustments: acknowledging consumer creativity through the aesthetics of ‘debadging’

Abstract This paper explores the social dynamics by means of which market forces are enacted at the level of everyday consumption. In particular, it draws on Holts (2002) notion that as ‘unruly bricoleurs’, consumers kick-start processes of market adjustment and innovation through improvising ways to negotiate the demands of daily life. In this way, consumers can become active players in realising new possibilities for identity construction and empowerment that involve the creative re-appropriation of marketer-based meaning. To investigate those issues, we turn to a virtual community in the empirical setting of car customisation. Over an eight-month period, an internet-based methodology generated textual observations of online posting activity on five internet newsgroups attracting those interested in the particular pursuit of car modification. Participants used those web-forums to share information, passions, and enthusiasms. Analysis shows that grounded aesthetics function as vehicles for creativity and the reworking of dominant market logics (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). We conclude that online discussion threads offer valuable access to the emergent interplay of discursive resources in circulation among virtual communities and that this has implications for the conduct of environmental scanning. The paper illustrates how the discursive resource-base is nurtured, sustained, and transformed through various interpellations, including performing claims to prestige and self-defining distinctions, as well as constructing narratives of personal history and social dynamics.