Australasian Marketing Journal

This article adopts perspectives of family identity practice as an analytic lens to understand advertising response and attention in the family living room. By using an emerging approach that examines ethnographic data through the reflexive role of the researcher, the article brings a novel conceptualisation of advertising response as a set of domestically constructed consumption practices. Through this approach, it is shown how advertising response is performed by viewers in the family living room embedded within a network involving cultural ideologies, domestic discourses, advertising literacies, and viewing practices, but argues that the very configuration of these performances is itself developed by the researcher through broader scholarly debates about the politics of advertising response, viewing, and attention in the marketing and advertising research literature. The article argues that advertising response is not value neutral, it takes on different meanings for viewers beyond an advertising text's informational orientation, and response is understood to be a product of the research method that uncovers it. To better conceptualise advertising response and attention, the findings suggest that a deeper exploration of advertising response is required in terms of the researcher's reflexive role in constituting it.

For contemporary Western women, many of whom cohabit for extended periods, the selection of a wedding date initiates the liminal bride-to-be identity. Choosing her central wedding artefact, the bridal gown, is not only an important first step in organising her wedding, but it is also a rite of passage. Within the setting of the Australian bespoke bridal boutique a feminine ritual is enacted. Here brides-to-be reconcile, sometimes competing, cultural and personal scripts about brides through the discovery of the bridal gown that is perfect for them. Accompanied by close friends and her mother, these actors in the ritual support the bride-to-be and reflect an imagined wedding audience, but it is the mother of the bride-to-be who is given licence to be honest. The mother's frankness provides a counterbalance to the frivolity of friends that assists in the reconciliation of the divergent scripts and the personalisation of this important artefact. The retailer stage-manages the spectacle of presenting the bride-to-be to her chosen audience and, at this moment of revelation, brides-to-be transition into the identity of bride. Different from other research, Australian brides-to-be rely on bespoke bridal boutique retailers for their knowledge of contemporary trends, and mothers play a significant role in this feminine shopping ritual.

This paper aims to challenge social marketers to extend their research repertoire beyond restrictive ‘individualised rationalities’ driving reliance on scientifically proven evidence, population data and focus groups as insight-oriented research. Social marketing, as a discipline, is constrained by using techniques aimed at (dis)proving scientific hypotheses, thus misses the mark when it comes to creating effective social change. Gaining insight into human conduct requires research tools that examine the deep ecological context of behaviour. Ethnography has the capability to generate deep culturally based insights that captures the social world through the eyes of the consumer, yet to date remains largely underutilised in social marketing. This article explores the value of ethnography as a social marketing research method enabling in-depth and meaningful engagement with the social and cultural experiences and the performative practice that is the manifestation of human existence.

We interpreted depth interviews and personal observations of 29 Tongan and New Zealand European (NZE) women who self-identified as non-smokers to examine the role of self-construal in the creation and maintenance of their smoking-resistant identities. Our research offers substantive contributions to the smoking prevention literature because most prior work has been situated wholly within Western cultural contexts. We contribute methodologically by showing how a multicultural team-based approach can reap the advantages of interviewer–participant congruity whilst overcoming its limitations, thus paving the way for more fruitful qualitative research with minority groups. Our research also contributes theoretically to the self-construal literature by comparing the role of self-construal not just within the two groups but also across them. Our findings show that independent self-construal played a significant role in NZE women's resistance to smoking. However, for Tongan women, both independent and interdependent self-construals played important roles in their smoking resistance. Our findings both confirm and extend the current view that there are marked differences between collectivist and independent societies. We extend this view because our findings contradict the notion that Tongan women are likely to only use an interdependent self-concept when deciding to resist smoking, suggesting instead that Tongan women negotiate their self-construals in ways that allow them to employ the positives from both Tongan values and Western world views. We suggest that future appeals to Pacific women to resist smoking should draw on both traditional Pacific values and modern Western independence.

In this paper, we deconstruct the ethnographic process to examine how adopting a multifaceted approach impacted our interpretation of the findings. The original intention was to undertake (only) structured, observational research to consider a fairly standard marketing problem – why do consumers choose some grocery brands over others. However we soon realized that such a format was unsatisfactory. Instead we recognized the need to consider both the content and process of shopping to understand the complexity of behaviours reflected. The results suggest that many consumers’ lives are created around various realities and they use consumption to engage and experience these.

In this article, we present an analysis of young migrant consumer culture based on an empirical study of xin yimin living in Australia. We treat xin yimin's desire for appropriating culture to fit a Western ideology of identity. Based on six different types of projective data we develop a meaning of mimic consumption and motivating forces behind this behaviour. Young xin yimin has an embodied passion for Otherness or Western identity. The findings also reveal insights into what is driving the pursuit of desired self, asserted through benign envy and missing self. We further address theoretical implications of these processes behind identity creation for consumer culture theory research.

Through sensual ethnography and poetic representation, we learned that individuals “self-authenticate” through embodied performance experiences of their own identities. Participating in the extraordinary experience of rock concerts revitalises existential authenticity, which enhances a person's feeling of wholeness and well-being. This extends our understanding of value derived from extraordinary experiences and adds “existential authenticity” to consumption motivations and consequences.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of country of brand (COB) communication within the retail environment of emerging markets. Drawing from the literature on store image, we developed a framework to analyse static and dynamic elements of COB communication. By adopting an inductive approach, we analysed COB use in a sample of 20 stores of Italian fashion brands in China using the mystery shopping technique. Given the increasing growth of e-retailing in China, the in-store observation is complemented by an analysis of the use of COB within the brand's local website and e-commerce page. In order to have a multi-layered representation of the phenomenon, in-depth interviews with managers of Italian firms in fashion industry are carried out. Findings confirm that retailing represents a primary communication channel for firms operating in China; however, the results of the participant observation show that COB is a cue information utilised only by a small percentage of the sample, mainly in a textual and iconic way. Managerial implications are discussed on the extent to which COB communication in store should be managed within an effective marketing strategy in line with the country and consumer characteristics in order to enhance the brand image in a growing market like China.