Stacey Menzel Baker

Building Understanding of the Domain of Consumer Vulnerability

Consumer vulnerability is a sometimes misunderstood or misused concept that is equated erroneously with demographic characteristics, stigmatization, consumer protection, unmet needs, discrimination, or disadvantage. This article seeks to clarify the boundaries for what is and what is not consumer vulnerability. By explicating the key themes of consumer vulnerability from previous studies in the consumer research and marketing literatures, the authors build a definition and model to explain that consumer vulnerability is multidimensional, context specific, and does not have to be enduring. The authors clarify that multiple and simultaneous internal and external factors contribute to consumer experiences of vulnerability. They conclude by proposing some ways the consumer-driven definition of consumer vulnerability can be implemented into research and policy decisions. Most important, their implementation focuses on treating consumers as they wish to be treated, not as well-meaning others think they should be treated, and on directing policy toward facilitating individual empowerment.

Vulnerability and Resilience in Natural Disasters: A Marketing and Public Policy Perspective

This essay addresses how the definitions of disaster and vulnerability serve as guides for market and policy responses and shows how a fundamental lack of understanding of what creates a disaster and what constitutes human (and consumer) vulnerability constrains the ability of individuals, communities, and institutions to mitigate and/or recover from natural hazards and the responses that follow. The essay outlines the current state of affairs on conceptualizations of disaster and vulnerability, distinguishes between risk and vulnerability, and notes ten paradoxes of disaster that create constraints on resilience. Fundamentally, the perspective taken here is that disaster is socially constructed and that vulnerability is a dynamic process that depends on a host of contextual factors. The essay shows that sustainable models of economic, social, and environmental development are at the heart of disaster and vulnerability analysis. Furthermore, it argues that market and policy responses must consider both the resource deficits and adaptive capacities of disaster survivors and the characteristics of the environments in which they live to cocreate opportunities for resilience.

Consumer Vulnerability as a Shared Experience: Tornado Recovery Process in Wright, Wyoming

Natural disasters leave people vulnerable because of threats to health and safety and because of losses of lives, financial assets, and possessions valued for functional and symbolic purposes. This article explores vulnerability as a shared experience, examines how responses to individual and community vulnerability facilitate and impede the restoration of control, and shows how vulnerability can transform individuals and a community. The findings demonstrate that vulnerability can be experienced as a social process and as a state of flux and that individuals and social groups actively and constructively work to move themselves out of their vulnerable states. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for theory and for public policy.

What Do They Know? Integrating the Core Concept of Customer Value into the Undergraduate Marketing Curriculum and Its Assessment:

The purpose of this article is to encourage discussion among marketing educators about the logic and structure of current undergraduate marketing curricula. The authors offer one alternative conceptualization of marketing, whereby current marketing knowledge is organized around the core concept of capturing and creating customer value for a sustainable competitive advantage. They argue that one of the primary benefits to this approach is that marketing students, future business decision makers, will be better able to grasp the linkages between key concepts. A guide for curriculum conceptualization and assessment is provided.

Toward a process theory of consumer vulnerability and resilience: Illuminating its transformative potential

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Beyond Poverty: Social Justice in a Global Marketplace

The social justice paradigm, developed in philosophy by John Rawls and others, reaches limits when confronted with diverse populations, unsound governments, and global markets. Its parameters are further limited by a traditional utilitarian approach to both industrial actors and consumer behaviors. Finally, by focusing too exclusively on poverty, as manifested in insufficient incomes or resources, the paradigm overlooks the oppressive role that gender, race, and religious prejudice play in keeping the poor subordinated. The authors suggest three ways in which marketing researchers could bring their unique expertise to the question of social justice in a global economy: by (1) reinventing the theoretical foundation laid down by thinkers such as Rawls, (2) documenting and evaluating emergent “feasible fixes” to achieve justice (e.g., the global resource dividend, cause-related marketing, Fair Trade, philanthrocapitalism), and (3) exploring the parameters of the consumption basket that would be minimally required to achieve human capabilities.

Perceptions of University-Corporate Partnership Influences on a Brand

The marketing literature has not specifically addressed how customers perceive the type of strategic alliance inherent in university-corporate partnerships, which are primarily implicitly, versus explicitly known as in the case of co-brands or brand alliances. This study uncovers customer perceptions of university-corporate partnerships and examines how beliefs about university-corporate partnerships influence attitude toward the university brand. The results of focus groups and a survey are presented demonstrating that university customers have conflicting beliefs about university-corporate partnerships and that attitude toward the university is influenced (1) positively by beliefs about the benefits provided by university-corporate partnerships, (2) positively by beliefs about the importance of shopping with university-corporate partners, and (3) negatively by beliefs about university-corporate partnerships creating limitations on customer choices. Implications for theory and practice are offered.

On the Symbolic Meanings of Souvenirs for Children

This paper explores the symbolic meanings that children of elementary school age attach to souvenirs from different types of vacation destinations. Data from interviews and pictorial projectives illustrate the meaning of souvenirs for children, including how children skillfully use souvenirs in their everyday lives and how they interpret souvenirs as symbols of people, places, and experiences. More specifically, the interview data reveal the meanings attached to souvenirs which are possessed, including how souvenirs are clearly distinguished from other objects which are possessed and how they are used for their contemplation and action value, for their communicative properties, and to provide continuity across time and place. In addition, the data from pictorial projectives reveal the latent motives of souvenir acquisition as well as how different types of places lead to different types of souvenir choices. Thus, the paper demonstrates the many layers of meaning associated with souvenirs in both acquisition and consumption processes and provides evidence that the meanings between children, places, and objects are inextricably linked.

Improvisational Provisioning in Disaster The Mechanisms and Meanings of Ad Hoc Marketing Exchange Systems in Community

This article explores the logic underlying alternative marketing exchange systems in community and the conditions under which each operates. Through ethnographic work in a town impacted by a tornado, we observe how a local exchange system morphs and evolves to reveal the functions, mechanisms, and meanings of two different yet complementary exchange systems: a commercial marketing exchange system and an ad hoc marketing exchange system. While these systems operate for unique purposes, they often meet consumer needs through the exact same consumption offerings. This results in confusion or tension for people who may participate in an ad hoc system while operating under assumptions of a commercial system. Thus, by extending exchange theory to the community level, we expose the logic, nature, and operation of these competing systems, and offer the marketing field theoretical and practical bases from which to transcend prevailing stereotypes about marketing and its role in society.

The Bounce in Our Steps from Shared Material Resources in Cultural Trauma and Recovery

Our research reveals how people employ shared material resources to socially construct their stories and collective identity in times of cultural trauma and recovery. Analysis of a documentary series, interviews, books, songs, and visual images chronicling the recovery of a community following a devastating tornado reveals three themes: (1) a vulnerability narrative about suffering, lost capacity, and responsibility, (2) a resiliency narrative about opportunity, collaboration, and abundant capacity, and (3) a bounce narrative about the power of shared material resources to shift collective identity within the cultural landscape of trauma and recovery. We draw on cultural trauma theory from cultural sociology that explains how a traumatic event shapes collective identity. Our findings extend cultural trauma theory by revealing that vulnerability and resiliency are intertwined processes that are informative when studied together, particularly with respect to the role of shared material resources in empowering shifts in collective identity trajectories.