Teresa Heath

Beating, ditching and hiding: consumers’ everyday resistance to marketing

ABSTRACT This article illuminates consumers’ views of marketing in light of theories of resistance. It argues that consumers engage in resistance to the power of marketing through their everyday actions and also through the ways they construct their accounts of these actions. It identifies three theoretical approaches to resistance (hegemonic, relational and autonomous). These are used to discuss consumers’ accounts of marketing collected through 78 personal interviews in which participants were asked to describe marketing and provide examples of their experiences with marketing as they defined it. Through this, the study uncovers various forms of consumer resistance, which can often go unnoticed. These are conceptualised through the notion of everyday resistance to marketing and are used to challenge existing marketing theory and develop paths for future research.

Once upon a time there was a consumer…: stories of magic and the magic of stories

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the centrality of narrative to people’s understandings of the world, and the power of stories of enchantment in particular, colour consumer culture. Specifically, it analyses the ways in which fantastic themes of magic and heroism are used in the discourses of marketing scholars and practitioners, as well as consumers to shape views of consumption and marketing. It further illuminates the role that marketers and consumers each have in imbuing consumption with a sense of enchantment and situates this phenomenon within the dominant neoliberal ideology. Finally, it discusses implications for marketing theory and for practices aimed at reducing excessive consumption related to such enchantment.

Accounts of self-gift giving: nature, context and emotions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a contextualized view of participants’ accounts of self-gift consumer behaviour (SGCB) throughout the consumption cycle, from the motivations to the emotions that follow. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses an interpretive approach, focused on participants’ constructions of meanings, using 99 critical incident technique interviews, which followed 16 in-depth interviews. Findings – This paper identifies the following self-gift motivations: To Reward Myself (and Others); To celebrate; To remember or get closer; To forget or part; To feel loved or cheered up; and To enjoy life. It also uncovers a compensatory/therapeutic dimension in most self-gifts. The authors identify changes in emotional responses to SGCB over time, and suggest a relationship between these emotions and the contexts that drive self-gifts. Self-gifts are conceptualized as pleasure-oriented, symbolic and special consumption experiences, which are self-directed, or both self- and ot...

Who Are the Gift Receivers? A Dynamic Gift-Giving Network: An Abstract

This research sheds light on givers’ relationships with recipients by identifying the dimensions that characterise receivers as part of a dynamic gift-giving network. For this, we draw on attachment theory, which conceptualises humans’ propensity to form affectional bonds with particular others (Bowlby 1977). Understanding how givers characterise gift recipients is of great importance given the economic significance of gift giving in the UK, representing an expenditure of £40 billion p.a. (Mintel 2013). Marketers need to understand receivers as antecedents of gifting in order to apply strategic decisions to the marketing of gifts (Beatty et al. 1996). From a givers’ perspective, some receivers are more valued than others (Lowrey et al. 2004), and these relationship differences influence aspects such as gift expenditures (e.g. Saad and Gill 2003) and motives (e.g. Wolfinbarger and Yale 1993). Three main research limitations restrict the understanding of gift receivers. First, existing classifications assume that specific types of recipients, such as family, are close by definition (e.g. Caplow 1982) without explaining what makes them important to the giver. Second, the study of relationship closeness in gift giving is limited to the giver-receiver dyad, neglecting the influence of third parties who tie the giver and the receiver together, with the exception of Lowrey et al. (2004). Lastly, although gift relationships can change over time, prior research adopts a static approach by assuming that the factors that could cause relationship change affect all receivers in the same way. In order to address these gaps in the gift literature, we collected 28 online diaries and conducted 27 follow-up interviews from 28 informants, which provided data on 247 different gift events. After conducting a quantitative content analysis (Kassarjian 1977), we adopted an interpretive approach to enable new themes to emerge from the data as used by Ruth et al. (1999). Our findings suggest that givers characterise recipients in three ways. First, in agreement with gift research (e.g. Joy, 2001), givers distinguish receivers in terms of the nature of the relationship (e.g. family, partner, friends). Second, givers differentiate recipients based on the type of emotional ties connecting the two of them. These ties involve (1) direct bonds, indicating sources or targets of support to the giver (e.g. supportive mother); (2) mediated bonds, signalling receivers who are means of support (e.g. wife’s father as a means to be close to a wife); and (3) surrogate bonds, signalling substitutes for unavailable supportive receivers (e.g. friend replacing a deceased sister). This finding advances the traditional approach to studying relationships, restricted to the giver-receiver dyad. Finally, givers alluded to the stability of the receivers’ presence within their gift network and identified permanent gift receivers, characterised by strong attachment bonds, transient receivers characterised by weaker bonds and sporadic receivers with non-existent bonds. Permanent gift receivers with strong attachment bonds tend to be less affected by factors that could cause relationship change than transient or sporadic receivers, which challenges the assumption that all gift relationships have the same likelihood of change. This manuscript advances knowledge on gift giving by dimensionalising givers’ relationships with gift recipients in terms of the nature of the relationship, the type of bonds and stability of the receiver’s place on the giver’s gift list. In marketing, contributions based on differentiation add insight by categorising a construct under study, and they matter because lack of distinction creates errors in reasoning (MacInnis 2011). In gift giving, failure to differentiate these dimensions leads to inaccurate assumptions of closeness, which practitioners mistranslate into their marketing communications and targeting strategies.

Complexity of dyadic gift giving forms: a new framework

This chapter illuminates the complexity of dyadic gift-giving by identifying new forms of dyadic gift-giving and their links to givers’ relationship-maintenance goals. For this, we employ Attachment Theory which addresses humans’ need to be close to significant others (Bowlby 1969). Gift-giving is often identified as a mechanism to manage important but insecure relationships (Caplow 1982), which occurs within significant interpersonal relationships (Ruth 1996). Considering this, and that the UK gift market is worth £40 billion (Mintel 2013), it is important to understand how relationships operate as antecedents to gift-giving. Traditionally gift-giving has been assumed to be an aggregate of dyadic exchange rituals, thus leaving many dimensions of gift-giving unexplored (Giesler 2006). Recent research (e.g. Weinberger and Wallendorf 2012) has acknowledged the need to analyse gift-giving structures other than the giver–receiver dyad. The inherent assumption concerning dyadic gifts is that givers give only to maintain their relationship with the receiver, which neglects the link between the dyad and their networks (Parks et al. 1983). This limits the understanding of dyadic gift-giving forms and the relationship-maintenance goals of givers through gift-giving.

Consumer Experiences of Marketing: Pervasive, Problematic, and in Need of a Caring Perspective

The “corporate mantra” (Liedtka 1996, p. 179) of marketing calls for the care of customers. Indeed, meeting or serving the needs of customers has long been regarded as a core aspect of the discipline. However, such customer-centrality is at odds with public views. Amongst other criticisms, marketing has been accused of using manipulative, misleading, and outright dishonest techniques (Heath and Heath 2008) and of lacking ethics (Sheth and Sisodia 2005). Such views may have a negative impact on marketing’s credibility and effectiveness (see Smith 2006). Despite their importance, little effort has been made to explore the origins of these attitudes in depth or to advance insights to address them. This study offers an attempt to address this void by looking at consumers’ criticisms of marketing in the light of the school of moral philosophy known as the ethics of care (Held 2006).