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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate business visitor behaviour at trade shows and to propose a complementary view based on the experiential perspective in marketing.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reports an ethnographic study conducted in the context of ten international trade shows in the textile‐apparel industry in Europe.FindingsThe study sheds light on the nature of the experience provided by trade show exhibitors and organisers and on visitors' lived experiences. Trade shows immerse industrial buyers in a physical and cognitive experience that requires their active participation. Under such circumstances, industrial marketers who employ experiential marketing techniques are likely to increase their trade show performances.Originality/valueThe paper adopts a new perspective that sees business visitor behaviour from an experiential standpoint and discusses the managerial implications that highlight the interplay of exhibitors and trade show organisers in designing and setting valuable experiences for visitors.

This book sheds light on the consumption of spiritual products, services, experiences, and places through state-of-the-art studies by leading and emerging scholars in interpretive consumer research, marketing, sociology, anthropology, cultural, and religious studies. The collection brings together fresh views and scholarship on a cultural tension that is at the centre of the lives of countless individuals living in postmodern societies: the relationship between the material and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane. The book examines how a variety of agents - religious ins.

Although previous research has investigated consumer mythopoesis (consumers' identity work using marketplace myths), little is known about its enactment involving ambiguous myths. Here, we investigate the myth of the witch (predominantly depicted by dominant mythmakers as a villain but recently repositioned more positively) and describe how consumers reclaim the empowering and heroic aspects of the ambiguous witch myth. Based on a qualitative study using archival data and in-depth interviews with self-proclaimed witches, we argue that the witch's ambiguity originates in different mythopoetic cycles. Then, we describe the following processes through which consumers reclaim positive cycles: incarnating the myth, coming out to selected others and practising myth-related craft. Finally, we show that reclaiming results in new forms of heroic agency that amplify the myth's ambiguity and identity value. Our results reveal that consumers cope with market-wide paradoxical injunctions, stressful situations and marginalisation by transforming these pressures into acts of self-heroism.

The chapters in this volume are selected from the best papers presented at the 11th Annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held in Lille, France in July 2016. The diverse interpretive research and theory represented in this volume provides the reader with intellectually stimulating opportunities to examine the intersections between a variety of topics that represent the cutting edge in consumer research. These studies draw on an array of qualitative methodologies and the substantive topics represent crucial issues for our times.

This commentary section presents a dialogical discussion on Appau's (2021) 'Toward a divine economic system', an article in which he explores religious exchanges in the context of a Pentecostal Church in Ghana and proposes 'the divine economy' as an alternative economic system to interrogate and extend scholarship on the relationship between the market and religion. In a thought-provoking conversation, four commentators (including Appau) engage in a critical discussion aimed at generating new ideas on theorizing the complex relationship between the market, consumption, and religion.

In the popular imagination sex sells. Yet, marketing theory has relatively little to say about sexuality per se. Drawing on Žižek's metaphor of critical theory as 'short-circuiting' the dominant discourse, we conceptualise marketing as a field that theorises sexuality only in a series of 'closed circuits'. Knowledge becomes hierarchical when some topics, such as sexuality, are denied the theoretical freedom to roam in wider open circuits alongside other 'mainstream' marketing topics. We identify four ways in which certain topics are enclosed: theoretical, empirical, institutional and neo-colonial. We then seek to short-circuit this state of affairs by bringing together a heterogeneous group of scholars interested in sexuality. By crossing their critical insights like unexpected connections in a circuit, we create sparks of inspiration that challenge the contents, contexts and concepts that relate to marketing theories of sexuality. Our paper makes a specific theoretical contribution in arguing for sexuality to be treated as a phenomenon worth studying and theorising in its own right. However, it also makes a wider methodological and epistemological contribution in showing how various topics within marketing theory might be short-circuited to help flatten the hierarchies of knowledge created by closed and open circuits.

During a roundtable discussion at the 2022 GENMAC Conference, a group of researchers specializing in religiosity and spiritual consumption, using examples from their own fieldwork, reflected on how (i) researchers' subject positioning—including their gender and sexuality—shape fieldwork in multifaceted manners; (ii) investigations of religious/spiritual fields would benefit from a heightened sensitivity to issues of gender and sexuality; and (iii) greater sensitivity to aspects of religion and/or spirituality can help gender and sexuality scholars better understand consumers and markets. Based on the above, in this commentary paper, we call for intersectional reflexivity, attention to vulnerability and discomfort during fieldwork, and critical sensitivity to the religious "context of context" during theorization. Furthermore, we argue that specific spiritual/religious imaginaries can foster new research approaches that can contribute to more nuanced fieldwork and theorization in marketing and consumer research.