Søren Askegaard

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..

Corporate identity and corporate image revisited ‐ A semiotic perspective

Asserts that the marketing discipline has been quite instrumental in securing and maintaining both practical and theoretical attention to the issues of identity and image in contemporary organisations. Discusses and critiques much of the discourse of corporate identity and image management. This is accomplished through a semiotic exercise in which prevailing perspectives and assumptions with respect to corporate identity and image are explained, analysed and subjected to a coherent interpretive framework. Rather than trying to legislate terminology or suggest conceptual parsimony, we use the semiotic framework as one way to illustrate the benefits of theoretical consistency and to stimulate self‐reflection among scholars who use the notions of identity and image.

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..

Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory: Phenomenology and the context of context

This paper argues for an epistemological positioning of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) research beyond the lived experience of consumers. CCT, it is argued, brought sociocultural context to consumer research, not least through the introduction of existential phenomenology as a paradigm for CCT studies. However, it is time to expand the contextualization of lived consumer experiences with another contextualization, this time the one of systemic and structuring influences of market and social systems that is not necessarily felt or experienced by consumers in their daily lives, and therefore not necessarily discursively expressed. There is a need to take into consideration the context of context. We therefore suggest an epistemology for CCT that explicitly connects the structuring of macro-social explanatory frameworks with the phenomenology of lived experiences, thereby inscribing the micro-social context accounted for by the consumer in a larger socio-historical context based on the researcher’s theoretical insights.

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.

The new work ethics of consumption and the paradox of mundane brand resistance

In terms of consumer resistance and marketplace ideologies, consumer researchers have called for a more nuanced conceptualization of consumption moralism in order to avoid the simplistic trope of inside/outside the marketplace (e.g. Arnould, 2007; Luedicke et al., 2010; Peñaloza and Price, 1993; Thompson, 2004). With the aim of contributing to this quest, this article brings together two originally separate ethnographic studies on food consumption and brands in Scandinavia in order to provide new insights regarding the increasingly complex arena of consumer morality. Instead of focusing on highly pronounced consumer resistance — such as activist communities or specific brand antagonists or protagonists — we focus on ordinary Scandinavian consumers whose identities are not centered around resisting the marketplace. Through a pluri-methodological combination of field observations, interviews, symbol elicitation, photo diaries and artefact collections, we propose an empirically informed model illustrating the paradox of ordinary consumers’ brand resistance: embracing myths of craftsmanship. We show how ordinary middle-class consumers bridge ‘bad’ with ‘good’ brand consumption in various ways to legitimize the former, and how they make the evaluations according to traditional work ethics rather than (post)modern consumption ethics.

When Hershey met Betty: love, lust and co‐branding

Purpose – This paper seeks to present a cultural approach to co‐branding. The purpose here is to discuss issues concerning the phenomena of brand and branding with particular focus on the mythological narratives that are at stake in a brand.Design/methodology/approach – This paper conducts a case analysis of a co‐branded product. Provides both a managerial and a cultural reading of the co‐brand in question, before proceeding to make a “neo‐Freudian” analysis of the potentially transgressive meanings involved in the co‐branding in question. This is done not so much to produce an authoritative reading of the cultural and commercial sign of the co‐brand as to make a bold leap and provide a daring reading of a seemingly innocent co‐branded product.Findings – Through the case study of the co‐branded product, the vast amount of cultural meanings that goes beyond the sets of brand identities proposed by the brand managers is explored. Discusses the limitations of traditional strategic branding models and suggest...

Leaving the milky way! The formation of a consumer counter mythology

In this article we present the emergence of a consumer community resisting a national mythology that milk is a central constituent of a healthy life style. This unfolds in a contemporary consumptionscape in which the consumer body and health is the subject of a number of moralisms and counter moralisms. The case is an example of how commercial and official (moral) definitions of health and collective identity are reinterpreted in the establishment of a counter-mythology. This counter-mythology contests an alleged conspiracy between industry and public health authorities. Dairy producers have expropriated the structural mythological ties between milk and the nurturing aspects of family, a process which is underpinned by medical discourses that point to the connection between health and milk consumption. It explores the formation of a counter consumer mythology as it unfolds in the interaction between self-proclaimed experts and consumer-to-consumer communication. We detect four stages in what we suggest is a recursive, for example, non-linear, process of consumer community formation. Finally, the emergent mythologies and moralism from these processes are discussed.

Moralities in food and health research

Abstract Society has imposed strict rules about what constitutes a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ food and ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ eating behaviour at least since antiquity. Today, the moral discourse of what we should and should not eat is perhaps stronger than ever, and it informs consumers, researchers and policy-makers about what we all should consume, research and regulate. We propose four types of moralities, underlying sets of moral assumptions, that orient the contemporary discourses of food and health: the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nature of food items, the virtue of self-control and moderation, the management of body size and the actions of market agents. We demonstrate how these moralities influence consumer behaviour as well as transformative research of food and health and develop a critical discussion of the impact of the underlying morality in each domain. We conclude by providing a few guidelines for changes in research questions, designs and methodologies for future research and call for a general reflection on the consequences of the uncovered moralities in research on food and health towards an inclusive view of food well-being.

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.