Suchergebnisse

Marketing scholarship often employs geographical regions to demarcate and contextualize market and consumer research. Regions help researchers grasp phenomena that span over areas larger than a single locality. However, the potential for regions to create greater understanding in consumer research has been limited by researchers' acceptance of geopolitical frontiers as the natural boundaries of cultural practices. We introduce critical regionalities and the archipelago metaphor as an analytic lens for interrogating and redrawing regional borders while preserving the benefits of a regional approach. Combining poststructuralist and critical historical perspectives, we argue for greater sensitivity to place and history in operationalizing regional consumer cultures. To illustrate this approach, we take Latin America as our point of departure and use examples from the central consumption areas of food and dwelling, for example, the consumption of rice and beans and the rise of gated communities. We contribute to recent theoretical developments in marketing and consumer culture theory with a flexible notion of regional consumer culture, paying critical attention to the relationship between analytical scales and researchers' reflexivity. This approach also allows for more attention to non-Western contexts, ontologies, and epistemologies.

Purpose
This paper aims to investigate how and when visual referents in brand visual aesthetics (i.e. colours, shapes, patterns and materials) serve as design applications that enable consumer diasporic identity.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses an innovative methodology that triangulates 58 in-depth interviews with diasporic consumers, 9 interviews with brand managers and designers and a visual analysis of brands (food retailer, spices and nuts, skincare, hair and cosmetics, ice cream and wine) to provide a view of the phenomenon from multiple perspectives.


Findings
This study illustrates how and when particular applications and compositions of product and design referents support diasporic identity for Middle Eastern consumers living outside the Middle East. Specifically, it illustrates how the design applications of harmonising (applying separate ancestral homeland and culture of living product and design referents simultaneously), homaging (departing from the culture of living product and design referents with a subtle tribute to ancestral homeland culture) and heritaging (departing from the ancestral homeland culture product and design referents with slight updates to a culture of living style) can enable diasporic identity in particular social situations.


Research limitations/implications
Although applied to the Middle Eastern diaspora, this research opens up interesting avenues for future research that assesses diasporic consumers' responses to brands seeking to use visual design to engage with this market. Moreover, future research should explore these design applications in relation to issues of cultural appreciation and appropriation.


Practical implications
The hybrid design compositions identified in this study can provide brand managers with practical tools for navigating the design process when targeting a diasporic segment. The design applications and their consequences are discussed while visually demonstrating how they can be crafted.


Originality/value
While previous research mainly focused on how consumption from the ancestral homeland occurred, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to examine how hybrid design compositions that combine a diaspora's ancestral homeland culture and their culture of living simultaneously and to varying degrees resonate with diasporic consumers.

This paper examines the influence of socialisation agents in shaping digital competence in older adults (aged 65+ years). Data was collected from the University of the Third Age (U3A) Network Victoria, a volunteer organisation that provides courses and programs for the retired and semi-retired community. We used a two-stage approach; focus groups as a sensitising tool, followed by 21 in-depth interviews. The research identifies three distinct consumer socialisation processes: reciprocity, self-socialisation and outsourcing, and details the central socialisation agents influencing these processes and how these processes influence learners to reach different socialisation outcomes. Overall, this study sheds light on the complex socialisation processes that influence how older adults become digitally competent and the barriers they face in this process, illuminating the need to address negative attitudes, improve access to devices and support older adults in maintaining their independence.