Stephanie O’Donohoe

Advertising Uses and Gratifications

Outlines uses and gratifications theory and its limited advertising applications to date. Presents findings from a qualitative study which identifies many marketing and non‐marketing uses of advertising by young Scottish adults. Argues that this supports a view of audiences as active, selective and sophisticated consumers of advertising. Suggests that the active, reward‐seeking consumer of advertising challenges traditional models of advertising effectiveness and requires a reorientation of the advertising‐planning process.

Compassion at the counter: Service providers and bereaved consumers

Although the emotional labour required of service providers has received considerable research attention, few studies have examined service workers’ experiences of emotionally charged service encounters. In this article we review literature on emotion management and compassion in the workplace. We then describe a qualitative study which examined the service encounter occurring when bereaved Irish consumers contacted their local newspaper to place In Memoriam notices on the anniversary of a close family member’s death. We suggest that these newspaper employees engaged in philanthropic emotion management when dealing with bereaved customers, and we locate this within the broader context of compassion as interpersonal work and as organizational accomplishment. We also suggest that compassion in organizations is not amenable to managerial systematization and control.

Raiding the postmodern pantry: Advertising intertextuality and the young adult audience

While analysts of postmodernism have feasted on marketing practices, the marketing discipline has been slow to acquire a taste for postmodernism. Offers marketers a taste of what it has to offer by examining the concept of intertextuality and demonstrating its reliance to advertising texts and their production and consumption. Drawing on a qualitative study of young adults, shows how their descriptions and experiences of particular ads shaped and were shaped by their experiences of other texts. Considers the implications of intertextuality for consumers’ attitudes, involvement and literacy with respect to advertising, for the link between ad and brand consumption, and the relationship between marketing theory and practice.

Practising gender: The role of banter in young men’s improvisations of masculine consumer identities

Abstract Although consumer researchers have explored the social, cultural and consumption-related tensions involved in being and becoming masculine, prior research has tended to focus on individual men’s experiences. This paper reviews literature in this area together with theories of gender as performed, performative and social practice. Our ethnographic study of male friendship groups in central Scotland explores the gender processes involved in improvising their masculine consumer identities within and across various social settings and interactions. In particular, through consumption-related banter, they played for and played with their ideas of masculinity, thereby engaging in the practising of gender. The boundaries between ‘safe’ and ‘danger’ zones of consumption varied across social groups and contexts, highlighting the complexity and contingency of contemporary masculinities.

Edging out of the nest: emerging adults’ use of smartphones in maintaining and transforming family relationships

Abstract The transition to adulthood, often accompanied by an emptying of the family nest, has implications for family relationships, identities and consumption practices. Despite this, the voices and experiences of emerging adults are largely missing from literature on family consumption. Emerging adult families typically combine digital natives and digital immigrants, but little is known about how their interactions around digital communications technology relate to emerging adult preoccupations with affiliation and autonomy. This interpretive study explores how emerging adults’ smartphones are bound up with a complex network of family communication and consumption practices, often across household, geographic and generational boundaries. Affiliation and autonomy emerged as intertwined rather than competing dimensions of participants’ smartphone use, contributing to the distribution and development of family as the nest empties.

Volunteer stereotypes, stigma, and relational identity projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to seek to enhance the understanding of non-profit marketing and consumer identities by exploring volunteering as a form of symbolic consumption. Specifically, it seeks to examine how young people – both volunteers and non-volunteers – understand and relate to volunteer stereotypes, and how they manage stigma in negotiating their social identities in relation to volunteering. Design/methodology/approach – Grounded in consumer culture theory, the study uses mixed qualitative methods, incorporating focus groups, paired and individual interviews and a projective drawing task. Findings – Five volunteering-related stereotypes were identified: the older charity shop worker, the sweet singleton, the environmental protestor, the ordinary volunteer and the non-volunteer. Participants related to positive and negative attributes of these stereotypes in different ways. This led volunteers and non-volunteers to engage in a range of impression management strategies, some of which ...

New Vocabularies, Old Ideas: Culture, Irishness and the Advertising Industry

2008 in taking Hovis to the nation’s heart. And purse. What is perhaps different and most exciting is that the best of the entries are no longer concerned with advertising ideas, but ideas that can be advertised. This is perhaps the biggest revolution in this volume of Advertising Works. Waitrose Essentials is a brilliantly simple piece of repositioning. Sainsbury’s feeding us for a fiver likewise. Cadbury’s laddered a brand idea right up to its essence in its Joy campaigns. TDA teacher recruitment and Wispa show us that it is just as much about the channels as the idea. Has the medium ever been more of the message than in our multi-channel age? The nature of anticipated revolution is that it takes longer, but goes deeper, than anyone can imagine in the early phases. In the early 1980s it was thought that, within a couple of years, perhaps 10% of the population would use mobile phones every day. In reality this revolution has been truly felt only in the last 15 years, accelerating to an average ownership of more than one mobile each. So it will be with brand communication, for all the revolutionary talk that is in the air and in the pages of this book. Everything new will have its day, but that day will take longer to dawn than we may think, and it will bring new horizons than none of us can imagine. The potential content of Advertising Works 2030 boggles the mind.

Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online

his effortless archaeology of the idea of ‘cool’, from its romantic origins, through bohemia to the cultural mainstream, is worth the cover price alone. The book teems with such intellectual verve and revelatory insights, but saddles them rather clumsily to the idea of a Chief Cultural Officer as the specialist, high-ranking ‘listener’ for the big corporation. The top-down organisational politics of this idea, the notion that cultural insight belongs to a corporate office, seems strangely out of kilter with the intelligence and empathy evidenced everywhere else in McCracken’s work. Nevertheless, McCracken’s bigger agenda could not be more relevant. Brands, companies and ideas are all now participants in culture, not merely servants of a reductive idea of a consumer (that withering shrinking of a person to a consuming thing). As an advertiser I am most excited by the new possibilities of our ideas participating directly in culture, unmediated by the limitations of paid media. That will happen only if we understand that culture deeply and well. Real cultural significance is the highest ambition for brands – an ambition that McCracken reminds us is the most lasting source of business advantage and profit.

Creativity and Advertising

represent the soul of the company’. While acknowledging the importance of other disciplines he stresses that ‘ultimately, it’s in the beliefs and passions of the creative director that the agency’s future resides’. Of the new media, Hegarty says ‘digital has made what we used to call “below the line” exciting’. He sees linking established ‘traditional’ media to the digital world as vital now for advertisers and marketers. For those working in the advertising business, and people like me who love good creative advertising and are intrigued by the stories behind it, the second section is rich in both. It documents the rigors of building BBH, in addition to an impressive collection of anecdotes about a formative career. In keeping with his view that storytelling is central to the art of communication, Hegarty tells tales of helping the Saatchi brothers to found Saatchi & Saatchi (Charles Saatchi, he writes, ‘had a PhD in media manipulation’). The author also shares stories of pitching the Levi’s campaign from a hastily constructed conference table made from old desks, and of slipping creative pitches for Gossard bras to unpopular account men to take to meetings with Courage. For me it is the narrative in this second section which make this book so good to read, alongside the examples of Hegarty’s favourite ads, which include a series of posters from the ’90s for Boddingtons beer, ‘The Cream of Manchester’. There is also an ad for Choosy, a brand of cat food which features not a cat but a puppy, with a crayoned caption: ‘When I grow up, I want to be a cat’. The book’s final chapter, ‘How Advertising Drove Me to Drink’, is about Hegarty’s second career as a vintner. I’ve tasted his wine, and I can recommend it as much as his book.

Emotions, Advertising and Consumer Choice

Whenever the subject of emotion in advertising is written about in the media these days I am reminded of the scene in Casablanca when Captain Renault exclaims disingenuously that he’s ‘Shocked, shocked to learn that gambling is going on’ in Rick’s Café. Of course advertising creatives have always understood that emotions play an essential role in advertising effectiveness, but given all the media stories lately about new start-up companies using biomedical techniques for imaging consumers’ emotional engagement with television commercials, you would think researchers had just discovered the subject. The new textbook, Emotions, Advertising and Consumer Choice, by Flemming Hansen and Sverre Riis Christensen, reminds us that several generations of advertising researchers have been thinking about the subject of emotion in advertising for a long time, and have laid a lot of theoretical and empirical groundwork for future work on the subject. While this book is targeted at graduate students in the advertising and marketing field, it is a good resource for professional students of advertising, researchers and practitioners alike, to have in their library as well. The first part of the book is a useful overview of the subject of cognition and the role of emotions in consumer information processing and brand choice. An example would be the review of various cognitive models of how advertising works, such as ‘high involvement versus low involvement’ or ‘thinking versus feeling’. These classification systems are built on a theory of central (semantic) versus peripheral (aesthetic) information processing that have been incorporated into the planning models of many advertising agencies – another reminder that advertisers have been thinking about emotions for a long time. Much of this research work has been undertaken at the holistic level of product categories and brands, however, and the new research tools that measure moment-by-moment the distributed mental processes involved in watching an ad should soon make it possible to explore these subjects at the operational level of how to make individual advertising executions more Book Reviews