Sharon Schembri

Rationalizing service logic, or understanding services as experience?

This article discusses the argument put forward by Vargo and Lusch (2004) that a new service dominant logic is emerging within marketing. Taking on this new service logic means our understanding of marketing has developed from a focus on exchange of goods to a broader focus on exchange of services. However, in seeking to elaborate on Vargo and Luschs argument, limitations are highlighted and consequently their eight foundational premises are challenged at an ontological level. While Vargo and Lusch recognize the evolution of marketing towards a service orientation, their understanding of this and what it means for marketing continues to be founded on the same rationalistic assumptions as the traditional goods-centred logic. In recognizing the emergent service orientation, marketers and researchers need to question their underlying assumptions and seek to understand services as constituted in the customers experience.

Service Quality and the Consumer's Experience: Towards an Interpretive Approach:

As marketers and researchers we understand quality from the consumers perspective, and throughout contemporary service quality literature there is an emphasis on what the consumer is looking for, or at least that is the intention. Through examining the underlying assumptions of dominant service quality theories, an implicit dualistic ontology is highlighted (where subject and object are considered independent) and argued to effectively negate the said necessary consumer orientation. This fundamental assumption is discussed, as are the implications, following a critical review of dominant service quality models. Consequently, we propose an alternative approach to service quality research that aims towards a more genuine understanding of the consumers perspective on quality experienced within a service context. Essentially, contemporary service quality research is suggested to be limited in its inherent third-person perspective and the interpretive, specifically phenomenographic, approach put forward here is suggested as a means of achieving a first-person perspective on service quality.

The experiential meaning of service quality

Within dominant marketing approaches, service quality is conceptualized as a fixed set of static service dimensions such as reliability and responsiveness that reflect consumer expectations and/ or perceptions. As an alternative to the dominant approaches, the aim in this work is to identify and describe the consumer’s lived experience of service quality. Achieved through an interpretive approach the findings presented here demonstrate that the dimensions and attributes consumers’ use for evaluating service quality are based upon what service quality means to consumers and how consumers experience service quality in a particular services context. Moreover, the findings show that the experiential meaning of service quality varies and this theoretical contribution has important implications for improving service quality and future research on service quality.

Online brand communities: constructing and co-constructing brand culture

ABSTRACT Consumers act and interact via social media networks and online brand communities, collectively generating brand culture. In this context, organisations have the opportunity to develop a cultural following. The respective task for brand managers and marketers is to understand how consumers collectively generate online brand culture? Using active and overt netnography and investigating the specific context of the Behance Network, the findings presented here demonstrate that online brand community members collectively generate brand culture in variant ways: through construction of self, emotional relationships, storytelling and ritualistic practices. Pragmatically, this work demonstrates that online brand community members are curators of online brand culture and netnography offers a window through which to identify what actions and interactions need to be facilitated and fostered.

The paradox of a legend: A visual ethnography of Harley-Davidson in Australia

Consumption, especially high profile brand consumption, implicates our identities. More than that, brand consumption connects our lives to others through shared lifestyle expressions to the extent that subcultures of consumption emerge. However, as this work shows, the meaning of particular consumption objects or brands cannot be assumed. Using visual ethnography, this study describes the experiential meaning of the legendary Harley-Davidson to owners and riders in Australia. For more than three years, fieldwork was conducted primarily from within a chapter of the Harley Owners Group (HOG) and included participant observation, interviews, and visual documentation of the Harley-Davidson experience. The findings show the Australian Harley-Davidson experience to be a postmodern paradox. As an iconic American brand with a rebellious image, Harley-Davidson is readily embraced in this Australian subculture of consumption. Also, despite the widely assumed deviancy of those on a Harley-Davidson, the Australian HOG subculture is shown to uphold mainstream values in a family-friendly environment. Moreover, as an iconic symbol of freedom, this experience is achieved through regulation and organization. This work also shows the act of consuming Harley-Davidson creates the experiential meaning and postmodern spectacle that demands attention. In effect, consumers become producers in co-constructing the postmodern paradox of the (Australian) Harley-Davidson experience.

An heretical consumer research perspective on music, culture and heritage

ABSTRACT This special issue presents both empirical and conceptual papers on music, culture, and heritage as a discursive site of human action and social interaction. The theme of this special issue of music, culture, and heritage are aspects symbolically embedded throughout the market, as well as within cultural and ritualistic practice. The work featured in this special issue captures the essence of the 2015 Heretical Consumer Research Revival conference held 28–30 September in New Orleans, LA (partially funded by Association of Consumer Research). This diverse gathering of critical thinkers and consumer researchers considered various avenues to enrich future directions for consumer culture research. In line with that conference, this special issue is oriented towards generating innovative, radical, and even heretical schools of thought in consumer culture research surrounding markets, music, culture, and heritage in a nonconventional, nonconformist manner.

Subculture as learning context: subcultural music consumption as language, channel and journey

ABSTRACT Subcultures cultivate alternative and resistive discourses and practices as well as transcendental meanings, experiences and identities. Yet, current knowledge falls short in documenting the ways in which subcultures facilitate learning. Therefore, this study empirically investigates the ways in which music subcultures offer consumers a learning context and potentially transformative process. Via an extensive online and offline ethnographic research design, the findings show how music subcultures enable learning at both the individual and collective levels. Findings reveal that the language of music awakens, the channel of music engages, and the music as journey of experiences facilitates action, navigation from one subcultural scene to another, alternative ways of knowing and critical social learning. Subcultures of music therefore provide consumers with a highly informal and unstructured experience in a participative, (inter)active, creative learning context.

Digital consumers as cultural curators: the irony of Vaporwave

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.,This research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.,Hermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.,This research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.,As digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.,Vaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.,This interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.