Journal of Marketing Management Constituting ...

This article was downloaded by: [Durham University Library] On: 13 June 2015, At: 09:02 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Marketing Management Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjmm20

Constituting Marketing and Customer Experiences a

Mark Tadajewski & Paul Hewer

a

a

Durham University and University of Strathclyde Published online: 11 Oct 2012.

To cite this article: Mark Tadajewski & Paul Hewer (2012) Constituting Marketing and Customer Experiences, Journal of Marketing Management, 28:11-12, 1243-1248, DOI: 10.1080/0267257X.2012.734735 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2012.734735

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Journal of Marketing Management Vol. 28, Nos. 11–12, October 2012, 1243–1248

Downloaded by [Durham University Library] at 09:02 13 June 2015

Constituting Marketing and Customer Experiences In this issue of the Journal of Marketing Management, we have papers dealing with a host of cutting-edge topics that will appeal to scholars, practitioners, and public policymakers alike. Our first paper explores the issue of consumer vulnerability. This is an absolutely fascinating stream of research that has great potential to make marketing and consumer research more inclusive. Elms and Tinson provide us with an exemplar study, one which is truly interesting to read, as well as rigorously conceived and researched. Their paper is exploratory in nature, revealing the trials and tribulations that accompany a serious degenerative disease, and they highlight how this impacts on the individual, their partner, and family relationships. Using multiple methods, Elms and Tinson offer us a view of the life and consumption world of Danni and her husband as she tries to negotiate her roles as mother, partner, and consumer using technology to assist her. What their in-depth study underscores is that the Internet is not necessarily a tool for emancipation; that supermarkets, their employees, and customers make negotiating the retail space much more difficult for those using wheelchairs than it needs to be. And by being profitdriven in terms of engaging in frequent restructurings of the retail space, retailers can alienate shoppers like Danni (see also Saatcioglu & Ozanne, in press). We would encourage readers to digest this paper carefully in conjunction with the contribution by Johnstone which follows it. The latter author conceptually and empirically touches upon some of the issues that Elms and Tinson flag up in their articulation of Danni’s shopping experiences. The key difference is where Danni seeks to avoid shopping at certain times and in particular locations due to the fact they are too busy and she dislikes being overtly different from the mass of shoppers because of her wheelchair, other groups – mothers and some vulnerable groups – actually seek out such busy locations. The shopping centre, for example, can provide those of us who live alone with a degree of human contact. Marketing ‘places’ such as servicescapes are not just the physical architecture that constitute the structure and layout of the environment. To be sure, these are important. As many contributions to this Journal testify, the retailscape and tenant mix are key in attracting people to a given location (Runyan, Kim, & Baker, 2012; Teller & Elms, 2012; Varman & Belk, 2012); atmospherics can encourage us to act in particular ways and not others (McGoldrick & Pieros, 1998; Turley & Chebat, 2002); and the smell of a retail outlet can modify our shopping behaviour (Teller & Dennis, 2012). Equally important are the people and the potential interactions that we have there; this is what can make them special places which we revisit with friends, family, and so forth (see also Goulding, Shankar, Elliott, & Canniford, 2009; cf. Cronin, 2008).

ISSN 0267-257X print/ISSN 1472-1376 online © 2012 Westburn Publishers Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2012.734735 http://www.tandfonline.com


1244

Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 28

On the flip side, it is also true that the people who inhabit such locations may lead us to engage in avoidance tactics, shifting our patronage to environments that we deem more salubrious (cf. Saatcioglu & Ozanne, in press). We might, for example, want to avoid a salesperson who has been rude or threatening in the past (Daunt & Harris, 2012; Harris & Daunt, 2011). What is important about Johnstone’s paper is the fact that such ‘people’ issues are taken seriously, rigorously conceptualised via an interdisciplinary literature review that draws from, among others, cultural geography. It illuminates how places can fulfil our need to connect with other people, our memories, and when we need to reaffirm a sense of self. Clearly, as anyone who has read Ralph Nader’s (1973) Unsafe At Any Speed will testify, the products and services that are offered by large corporations are sometimes not likely to satisfy us completely, but sometimes harm us and to do so severely (see also Pereira & Heath, 2008). Gao et al.’s account of a product-harm crisis reminds us that companies, their supply chains, and inadequate government oversight can cause literal physical harm and considerable psychological trauma when profit concerns override consumer safety or appropriate safeguards are bypassed or ignored. In a novel contribution that speaks to the issues previously raised by Yannopoulou, Koronis, and Elliott (2011), Gao et al. draw upon the historically and culturally loaded concept of the scapegoat to explore how particular companies (and not others) are attributed with greater levels of blame for problematic incidents that result in consumer harm. Moving quickly after the initial reporting of the problems confronting the milk industry in China, Gao et al. surveyed a large number of Chinese consumers in an attempt to unpack whether any firms were subject to a greater degree of scapegoating than others. Suffice to say, the managerial implications that they derive from their empirical research are essential reading for those companies and marketing managers that are unfortunate enough to have to deal with such a product-harm case. The next paper, by Manyiwa and Brennan, deals with the issue of fear appeals in social marketing campaigns. Focusing on advertising communications, the authors highlight how the evidence to date regarding the effectiveness of fear appeals is extremely mixed. Some studies claim they are very useful; others find that it might actually exacerbate the problematic behaviour concerned. Using such ambiguous findings as their basis for further research, Manyiwa and Brennan study the relationship between consumer self-efficacy (i.e. whether people actually feel like they can give up the problematic behaviour, in this case smoking), the ‘perceived ethicality’ of such fear appeals, and likely changes to behaviour as a result of using such a communications approach. This is a paper well worth reading if you have an interest in the ethics of advertising and specifically of fear appeals in social marketing because it appears that, with higher levels of self-efficacy, people are more inclined to view fear appeals as ethically appropriate. Simintiras et al. provide an insightful study of the factors that influence how committed salespeople are likely to be to their job and the organisation employing them. One of the benefits of selecting people who actually enjoy what they do, and how they do it, is that they will spend longer doing it, are likely to perform better, and will frequently provide customers with a level of service that helps cement the kinds of relational bonds widely praised within the literature (e.g. Grönroos, 1994; Theron, Terblanche, & Boshoff, 2008). Their contribution lies in the fact that they study various factors such as selling skills, job liking, and tenure in post, explicating how this does or does not impact upon affective commitment. Their findings enable


Editorial

them to offer highly useful advice to sales and marketing managers interested in maximising employee affective commitment. The next paper is a theoretically sophisticated reinterpretation of Schwartz’s Values Theory, which can be used to examine consumer decision-making in general, but until now has not been tailored to a specific product category. Krystallis et al. modify the values instrument produced and refined by Schwartz over multiple publications, utilising their instrument in a major survey of consumer decision making in relation to organic food purchasing and consumption. Their modification of the original Values Theory is both conceptually appropriate and the empirical research demonstrates its robustness. For the marketing manager, their modification and utilisation of Values Theory suggests an alternative means of segmenting the market for this product category. The work of Rentschler, Jogulu, Kershaw, and Osborne explores the value of a turn to art galleries as a site for the analysis of new ways of thinking marketing management contexts. Employing a critical case study methodology, they seek to bring together insights from the museology literature base with marketing theory. Rather than viewing museums as beyond the realms of business and culture, we witness the extent to which museums deploy metaphor as a device to shapeshift perceptions and ways of seeing. Through an analysis of archival material (1861–2010) from the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, the authors reveal how the metaphor of spirituality is a critical sense-making device for such institutions and their marketing practitioners – a recurrent motif that has proven rich in meaning and value, but sometimes contradictory in usage, moving from moments of positive to negative association. But ever-present through such turns of history, we witness how such a trope was deployed in sustaining the contemporary gallery brand. Museums by this reckoning continue to act as critical social hubs (Taheri, Jafari, & Von Lehm, in press) but also as beacons for transformation and preservation, operating as Harvey (2000) considers in a different context, as Spaces of Hope. If such enterprising and commercial spaces matter, it is no surprise that material objects long overlooked as trivial and beyond the confines of marketing management research are receiving a renaissance of attention. For it is surely through our interactions with material objects that we fashion our lives. The work of Turley and O’Donohoe explores the continuing salience and resonance of what Miller (2008) terms The Comfort of [such] Things. Miller’s (2001) work on Home Possessions continues in this vein, considering anthropology as a discipline which best foregrounds a sense of empathy and humanity (cf. Tadajewski, 2010a, 2010b). Perhaps it is time to place such an ethos and spirit as essential to the analysis of markets and market phenomena, that is, to see them as critical devices for the sustenance of social relations. The emergent discipline of Market Therapeutics is the term coined by one of the co-editors (Hewer) for this shift in marketing mentalities and sensibilities towards the making sense of the everyday concerns of those we inspect and dissect through our increasingly theory-tainted lenses (cf. Corus & Ozanne, in press; Maclaran & Stevens, 2008; Ozanne & Anderson, 2011; Ozanne et al., 2009; Ozanne, Moscato, & Kunkel, in press; Ozanne & Saatcioglu, 2008). For such a field of inquiry, Turley and O’Donohoe’s paper would surely be required reading for it displays the skills of the interpretive researcher at work with keen eyes on the significance of popular culture and the solace to be found in the consumption of objects. Here Seamus Heaney’s (1984) remark on the ‘uncertain business of

1245


1246


identity’ is surely brought to the foreground of academic practice. As through a critical analysis of popular culture texts, in their case Joan Didion’s (2006) The Year of Magical Thinking, we are taken on a journey into the forms of worlding that goods perform in grieving practices. Here the trivial and mundane moments of the everyday become rich in sentiment and significance. The language of goods as auguries, as talismanic agents, as harbingers of moments of presence and intensity seek to capture and make sense of the constantly unfolding character of such critical contexts. Critical contexts in which goods, be they a long-forgotten photograph, a braided belt, a torn raincoat, or a Poundland toy, are sedimented into the creases of past, present, and future imperfect lives. The work of Donaldson, Lee, and Wright analyses the strategic and organisational determinants of sophistication as deployed through sales-force automation systems within three UK industry sectors: financial services, pharmaceuticals, and building/construction. From a sample of 220, the authors seek to problematise the strategic importance of sales, integration of IT and sales, levels of information, and marketing orientation. In this respect, the authors suggest that it is crucial to distinguish between market orientation and marketing orientation. Whereas market orientation refers to the organisational deployment of intelligence and the dissemination of such knowledge across departments, the authors consider marketing orientation as the choosing of markets and the management of productive capacities, but also more crucially a strategic long-term commitment and philosophy which embraces customer demands and matches these with company objectives and capabilities. However, their study reveals that often markets and customers are not central to sales-force automation; rather such systems are more typically driven by informational requirements, that is, the desire to gather information. However, as the authors contest, often such ways of thinking are not sufficient, as company survival increasingly depends upon adding value and perceived quality to one’s offerings. The motto being always Know thy customer and Know thy Cultural Context which often becomes lost within organisational systems and styles of management and marketing. The paper by Hodgkinson, Hughes, and Hughes further contributes to this theme of problematising and critiquing notions of market orientation as practiced within competitive environments and critical contexts. Through the application of the concept to the public leisure sector, the authors suggest that intelligence generation strategies can affect the performance returns to an organisation through responsiveness to market intelligence. Intelligence generation can sometimes have a negative and what they term a ‘destructive’ impact on the response–performance relationship. The authors offer up an alternative explanation to the linear portrayal of market orientation and its deployment, one in which the appreciation of the complexity of its deployment are foregrounded. This more nuanced account suggests that excessive information generation can sometimes prove counterproductive for increasingly overloaded leisure managers who, rather than being enabled by such information gathering, are constrained in their decision-making capabilities. Sometimes it appears the market orientation–performance relationship does not hold, and discrepancies and unintended consequences emerge in the exercise of marketing management. Much like the value and significance we attribute to the construct of market orientation within our discipline, brand personality operates as a familiar and much-loved way of thinking brand–consumer relationships. Both seem to draw upon the information-processing perspective as a way to best conceptualise and


Editorial

understand consumers and market phenomena. In this respect, the suggestion of the paper by Kum, Bergkvist, Hwai Lee, and Meng Leong is that brand personalities enable marketers to compete by raising the stakes of competition beyond mere functional benefits to the symbolic and expressive qualities of brands. However, drawing on categorisation theory, the authors argue that brand personality inferences are different for symbolic versus functional products. As the authors propose, for symbolic products, the brand level serves as the basic level of categorisation for personality inferences, as opposed to the product-type level for functional products. In this way, for functional products, we are told it is the product type which may influence the personalities consumers infer for brands in such a category. In this manner, brand managers in such categories operate with less latitude to adopt diverse and expressive personalities for their most cherished brands. Once again, it is consumer value which rules the roost and delimits the best-laid plans of marketing practitioners and academics. Mark Tadajewski and Paul Hewer Durham University and University of Strathclyde

References Corus, C., & Ozanne, J.L. (in press). Stakeholder engagement: Building deliberative and participatory spaces in subsistent markets. Journal of Business Research. Cronin, A. (2008). Calculative spaces: Cities, market relations, and the commercial vitalism of the outdoor advertising industry. Environment and Planning A, 40, 2734–2750. Daunt, K.L., & Harris, L.C. (2012). Exploring the forms of dysfunctional customer behaviour: A study of differences in servicescape and customer disaffection with service. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(1–2), 129–153. Didion, J. (2006). The year of magical thinking. New York: Vintage Books. Goulding, C., Shankar, A., Elliott, R., & Canniford, R. (2009). The marketplace management of illicit pleasure. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 759–771. Grönroos, C. (1994). Quo vadis, marketing? Towards a relationship marketing paradigm. Journal of Marketing Management, 10(5), 347–360. Harris, L.C., & Daunt, K.L. (2011). Deviant customer behaviour: A study of techniques of neutralisation. Journal of Marketing Management, 27(7–8), 834–853. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Heaney, S. (1984). Preoccupations: Selected prose 1968–1978. London: Faber & Faber. Maclaran, P., & Stevens, L. (2008). Thinking through theory: Materialising the oppositional imagination. In M. Tadajewski & D. Brownlie (Eds.), Critical marketing: Issues in contemporary marketing (pp. 345–361). Chichester, England: Wiley. McGoldrick, P.J., & Pieros, C.P. (1998). Atmospherics, pleasure and arousal: The Influence of response moderators. Journal of Marketing Management, 14(1–3), 173–197. Miller, D. (2008). The comfort of things. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, D. (Ed.). (2001). Home possessions: Material culture behind closed doors. Oxford: Berg. Nader, R. (1973). Unsafe at any speed: The designed in dangers of the American automobile (Rev. ed.). London: Bantam. Ozanne, J.L., & Anderson, L. (2010). Community action research. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 29(1), 123–137. Ozanne, J.L., Corus, C., & Saatcioglu, B. (2009). The philosophy and methods of deliberative democracy: Implications for public policy and marketing. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 28(1), 29–40.

1247


1248


Ozanne, J.L., Moscato, E.M., & Kunkel, D.R. (in press). Transformative photography: Evaluation and best practices for eliciting social and policy changes. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. Ozanne, J.L., & Saatcioglu, B. (2008). Participatory action research. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 423–439. Pereira, T.M., & Heath, M. (2008). (Mis)trust in marketing: A reflection on consumers’ attitudes and perceptions. Journal of Marketing Management, 24(9–10), 1025–1039. Runyan, R., Kim, J.-H., & Baker, J. (2012). The mall as bazaar: How kiosks influence consumer shopping behaviour. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(1–2), 85–102. Saatcioglu, B., & Ozanne, J.L. (in press). A critical spatial approach to marketplace exclusion and inclusion. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. Tadajewski, M. (2010a). Critical marketing studies: Logical empiricism, critical performativity and marketing practice. Marketing Theory, 10(2), 210–222. Tadajewski, M. (2010b). Toward a history of critical marketing studies. Journal of Marketing Management, 26(9–10), 773–824. Taheri, B., Jafari, A., & Von Lehm, D. (in press). Cultural consumption, interactive sociality and the museum. Journal of Marketing Management. Teller, C., & Dennis, C. (2012). The effect of ambient scent on customers’ perceptions, emotions and behaviour: A critical review. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(1–2), 14–36. Teller, C., & Elms, J.R (2012). Urban place marketing and retail agglomeration customers. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(5–6), 546–567. Theron, E., Terblanche, N.S., & Boshoff, C. (2008). The antecedents of relationship commitment of relationships in business-to-business (B2B) financial services. Journal of Marketing Management, 24(9–10), 997–1010. Turley, L.W., & Chebat, J.-C. (2002). Linking retail strategy, atmospheric design and shopping behaviour. Journal of Marketing Management, 18(1–2), 125–144. Varman, R., & Belk, R.W. (2012). Consuming postcolonial shopping malls. Journal of Marketing Management, 28(1–2), 62–84. Yannopoulou, N., Koronis, E., & Elliott, R. (2011). Media amplification of a brand crisis and its affect on brand trust. Journal of Marketing Management, 27(5–6), 530–546.