The creation and expression of identity (or of multiple identities) in immersive computer-mediated environments (CMEs) is rapidly transforming consumer behavior. The various social networking and gaming sites have millions of registered users worldwide, and major corporations are beginning to attempt to reach and entice the growing flood of consumers occupying these virtual worlds. Despite this huge potential, however, experts know very little about the best way to talk to consumers in these online environments. How will well-established research findings from the offline world transfer to CMEs? That's where "Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior" comes in. Written by two of the leading experts in the field, it presents cutting-edge academic research on virtual social identity, explores consumer behavior in virtual worlds, and offers important implications for marketers interested in working in these environments. The book provides special insight into the largest and fastest growing group of users - kids and teens. There is no better source for understanding the impact of virtual social identities on consumers, consumer behavior, and electronic commerce.

An examination of the relationship between space, place and consumption offers important insights into some of the most powerful forces constructing contemporary societies. Space and place are made and remade through consumption. Yet how do cultures of consumption discover space, and how do they construct place? This book addresses these questions by exploring the implications of conceptualizing consumption as a spatial, increasingly global, yet intensely localized activity. The work develops integrative approaches that articulate the processes involved in the production and consumption of space and place. The result is a varied, engaging, and innovative study of consumption and its role in structuring contemporary capitalist political economies.

Packaging is ephemeral - its purpose is to be 'wasted' once we've removed the product it contains. Whilst we are encouraged to 'reduce, re-use and recycle', Designing for Re-Use proposes that domestic re-use is the 'Cinderella' of this trinity, because it is under researched and little understood. The re-use of packaging could have a significant effect on the quantity of material that enters the waste stream and the energy and consequently carbon that is expended in its production - every re-used item is another item not purchased. The authors demonstrate that we do re-use - but usually despite, rather than because of, the actions of government and designers. The book shows that by understanding the ways in which actions of this sort fit with everyday life, opportunities may be identified to enhance the potential for re-use through packaging design. The authors itemize the factors that affect the re-use of packaging, and analyse the home as a system in which objects are processed. Some of these factors relate to the specifics of the design, including the type of materials used and the symbolism of the branding. Other factors are more obviously social - for instance the effects on re-use of different consumer orientations. The book provides practical guidance from a design perspective, in the context of real-life examples, to provide professionals with vital design recommendations and evaluate how a practice orientated approach to understanding consumers' behaviour is significant for moving towards sustainability through design.

"Utopian in theme and implication, this book shows how the practices of critical, interpretive inquiry can help change the world in positive ways . This is the promise, the hope, and the agenda that is offered."--Norman K. Denzin, From the Foreword

"Its focus on learning, education and pedagogy gives this book a particular relevance and significance in contemporary cultural studies. Its impressive authors, thoughtful structuring, wide range of perspectives, attention to matters of educational policy and practice, and suggestions for transformative pedagogy all provide for a compelling and significant volume."--H. Svi Shapiro, University of North Carolina Greensboro

Distinguished international scholars from a wide range of disciplines (including curriculum studies, foundations of education, adult education, higher education, and consumer education) come together in this book to explore consumption and its relation to learning, identity development, and education. Readers will learn about a variety of ways in which learning and education intersect with consumption. This volume is unique within the literature of education in its examination of educational sites both formal and informal where learners and teachers are resisting consumerism and enacting a critical pedagogy of consumption.

The creation and expression of identity (or of multiple identities) in immersive computer-mediated environments (CMEs) is rapidly transforming consumer behavior. The various social networking and gaming sites have millions of registered users worldwide, and major corporations are beginning to attempt to reach and entice the growing flood of consumers occupying these virtual worlds. Despite this huge potential, however, experts know very little about the best way to talk to consumers in these online environments. How will well-established research findings from the offline world transfer to CMEs? That's where "Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior" comes in. Written by two of the leading experts in the field, it presents cutting-edge academic research on virtual social identity, explores consumer behavior in virtual worlds, and offers important implications for marketers interested in working in these environments. The book provides special insight into the largest and fastest growing group of users - kids and teens. There is no better source for understanding the impact of virtual social identities on consumers, consumer behavior, and electronic commerce.

How do drugs get to the market? What controls are there and what procedures for monitoring their effects? And how adequate are the regulators in protecting public health when new drugs have serious side effects? The Therapeutic Nightmare tells the story of the sleeping pill Halcion - a story which is far from over. First marketed in the 1970s, Halcion has been taken by millions of patients around the world. For many years it has been associated with serious adverse effects such as amnesia, hallucinations, aggression and, in extreme cases, homicide. Thirteen years after its first release, it was banned by the British government. It remains on sale in the United States and many other countries. This book explains why patients have come to be exposed to Halcion's risks and examines the corporate interests of the manufacturers, the professional interests of the scientists and medical researchers and the interests of patients in safe and effective medication. It reveals how these contending forces shape the regulatory decision-making process about drug safety. As the number of new drugs and health products grows, a major challenge facing regulators and the medical profession is how to put the interests of public health decisively and consistently above the commercial interests of the drugs industry, while becoming more accountable to patient and consumer organizations.

This is the first comprehensive account of the development of consumer credit. Consumer credit is a vital force driving the development of our economic system. Rather than look at consumer credit solely as an economic phenomenon, Klein examines the social impact of the consumer credit industry within the framework of economic and cultural change. His analysis offers a concise examination of the industry from the perspective of marketing, the creating of material and experiential products, and the product distribution mechanisms. The discussion of changes within the bankruptcy structure accounts for the creation of overzealous consumer spending and the implementation of controls over individual consumer credit. This will be of interest to scholars or students concentrating in economic sociology, stratification, and cultural studies.

Interpretive consumer research usually proceeds with a minimum of structure and preconceptions. This book presents a more structured approach than is usual, showing how a simple framework that embodies the rewards and costs associated with consumer choice can be used to interpret a wide range of consumer behaviours from everyday purchasing and saving, innovative choice, imitation, 'green' consumer behavior, to compulsive behaviors such as addictions (to shopping, to gambling, to alcohol and other drugs, etc). Foxall takes a qualitative approach to interpreting behavior, focusing on the epistemological problems that arise in such research and emphasizing the emotional as well as cognitive aspects of consumption.

The author argues that consumer behaviour can be understood with the aid of a very simple model that proposes how the consequences of consumption impact consumers' subsequent choices. The objective is to show that a basic model can be used to interpret consumer behaviour in general, not in isolation from the marketing influences that shape it, but as a course of human choice that is dynamically linked with managerial concerns.

This is the first scholarly book to fully address the topics of the psychology of deceptive persuasion in the marketplace and consumer self-protection. Deception permeates the American marketplace. Deceptive marketing harms consumers? health, welfare and financial resources, reduces people's privacy and self-esteem, and ultimately undermines trust in society. Individual consumers must try to protect themselves from marketers? misleading communications by acquiring personal marketplace deception-protection skills that go beyond reliance on legal or regulatory protections. Understanding the psychology of deceptive persuasion and consumer self-protection should be a central goal for future consumer behavior research.

The authors explore these questions. What makes persuasive communications misleading and deceptive? How do marketing managers decide to prevent or practice deception in planning their campaigns? What skills must consumers acquire to effectively cope with marketers? deception tactics? What does research tell us about how people detect, neutralize and resist misleading persuasion attempts? What does research suggest about how to teach marketplace deception protection skills to adolescents and adults?

Chapters cover theoretical perspectives on deceptive persuasion; different types of deception tactics; how deception-minded marketers think; prior research on how people cope with deceptiveness; the nature of marketplace deception protection skills; how people develop deception protection skills in adolescence and adulthood; prior research on teaching consumers marketplace deception protection skills; and societal issues such as regulatory frontiers, societal trust, and consumer education practices.

This unique book is intended for scholars and researchers. It should be essential reading for upper level and graduate courses in consumer behavior, social psychology, communication, and marketing. Marketing practitioners and marketplace regulators will find it stimulating and authoritative, as will social scientists and educators who are concerned with consumer welfare.

Post-Mao China has been characterized in literature and the media as a burgeoning consumer society. Consuming China investigates this characterization by examining the cultural significance of consumption and consumerism in the People's Republic of China today. In questioning the notion of consumption, this impressive work suggests that it is not simply a symptom of economic reform within China neither a product of the emergence and transformation of contemporary Chinese capitalism. Rather, the essays offer a new perspective on Chinese consumption by focusing on more than just consumerism, looking at the practices of consumption in relation to different manifestations of social and cultural change.
Drawing on case studies from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China, Consuming China affords a greater understanding of the practice of Chinese consumption and will appeal to China scholars and anthropologists, and to those with an interest in cultural and gender studies.

Consumption forms a major part of people's lives. As such, geographers, historians of technology and sociologists have devoted much attention to trying to figure out what makes consumption meaningful. By contrast, economists have been content to hold onto theories of consumption that depend on a self-interested representative agent making utility maximizing decisions. Pietrykowski develops this alternative account through the recovery of past attempts to forge a different analytical approach to the study of consumption. In particular, theories of consumption espoused by home economists, psychological economists and Regulation school theorists are critically reviewed. These research projects, marginalized by the mainstream, are the precursors of contemporary scholarship in feminist, behavioural and radical political economics. Reclaiming this work greatly enlarges the scope for contemporary research in consumer behavior. Pietrykowski then provides a richly textured set of case studies of green automobility, slow food and alternative/local currency in order to explore the diversity of user cultures and to highlight resistant forms of consumer practice. By carefully interweaving historical and interdisciplinary research Pietrykowski creates a lively and incisive critique of mainstream economics This monograph will be of interest to academic economists, sociologists, historians and graduate students. In addition, the economics of consumption would also be of interest to readers in management, marketing and schools of business administration.

Buying for the Home is a book about the experiences and also the polarities of shopping and the home. It analyses the ways in which the agencies and discourses of the retail environment mesh with the processes of physical and imaginative re-creation that constitute the domestic space, teasing out the negotiations and interactions that mediate this key arena. The study examines how the strategies of retailers were both arbitrated by and negotiated through the actions and desires of the homemaker as consumer. Drawing on the recent CHORD (Centre for the History of Retail and Distribution) colloquium on shopping and the domestic environment and including two specially commissioned pieces, the book draws on a wide selection of interdisciplinary work from established scholars and new researchers. Organised around four key themes - retail arenas and the everyday; identity and lifestyle; fashioning domestic space; and cultural practice - the ten case studies cover a range of cultural encounters and locations from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Through these interdisciplinary but linked case studies, Buying for the Home forces us to consider the fractured space that existed between the world of goods and the middle- and working-class home and in so doing interrogate how middle-class and plebeian homemakers view, imagine and ultimately occupy their domestic spaces in early-modern, modern and post-modern society.

This book examines modern consumption, focusing on concepts of autonomy and rationality. In recent years, conventional ideas of 'free will' have come under attack in the context of consumer choice and similarly, postmodernists have sabotaged the very notion of consumer rationality. Oa (TM)Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy adopt a moderating perspective, reviewing and critiquing these attacks in order to work towards a more nuanced view of the consumer: neither entirely autonomous nor perfectly rational.

While the first part of this book concentrates on assailing critiques of 'free-will', the second part takes issue with the postmodernist emphasis on the non-rational. The authors situate these critiques in the context of key academic debate, examining the logic and empirical bases for their claims thus leading to a deeper understanding of 'bounded' rationality and the potential of the adaptive unconscious to affect consumer choice.

The System of Objects is a tour de force-a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day-offering a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society.

The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption by Gad Saad applies Darwinian principles in understanding our consumption patterns and the products of popular culture that most appeal to individuals. The first and only scholarly work to do so, this is a captivating study of the adaptive reasons behind our behaviors, cognitions, emotions, and perceptions. This lens of analysis suggests how we come to make selections such as choosing a mate, the foods we eat, the gifts that we offer, and more. It also highlights how numerous forms of dark side consumption, including pathological gambling, compulsive buying, pornographic addiction, and eating disorders, possess a Darwinian etiology. Engaging and diverse in scope, the book maps consumption phenomena onto four key Darwinian modules: survival, reproduction, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism. As an interesting proposal, the author suggests that media and advertising contents exist in their particular forms because they are a reflection of our evolved human nature - negating the notion that they exist through the reverse causal link, as proposed by social constructivists. The link between evolutionary theory and consumption behaviors is detailed throughout the book via an examination of (among many others): appearance-enhancing products and services; financial and physical risk-taking; use of sexual imagery and the depictions of women in advertising; and television programs, movies, songs, music videos, literature, religion, and art. The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption will appeal to evolutionists who desire to explore new areas wherein evolutionary theory can be applied; consumer and marketing scholars who wish to learn about the ways in which biological-and evolutionary-based theorizing can be infused into the consumer behavior/marketing/advertising disciplines; as well as other interdisciplinary scholars interested in gaining knowledge about the power of evolutionary theory in explaining a wide range of behavioral phenomena.

In this fascinating work, Louise Purbrick offers an alternative analysis of contemporary domestic consumption. She investigates the ritualized presentation of objects upon marriage, and their subsequent cycles of exchange within the domestic sphere. Focusing on gift-giving in Britain from 1945 to the present, comparative context is provided by material from North America and Europe. Presenting new material on the enactment of exchange relationships within everyday domesticity, the book makes significant historical, theoretical and methodological contributions to the analysis of contemporary consumption. It also re-evaluates consumption theory as well as examining the methodology of recent studies in consumption and domesticity, pressing for a more rigorous approach to the use of case studies. By considering how the specific contexts in which consumption occurs, such as married domesticity, can limit possible versions of selfhood, The Wedding Present tests the assumption that consuming creates individual identities. Thus, the book argues, consumption cannot be isolated as an explanation of individual or social formation.

This book position itself within Experiential Marketing. It differs from its competitors by the way it examines the phenomenon of consumer experience. US competitors consider any consumption experience as necessarily dependent on the acquisition of products and services from the market, this book acknowledges that everyday life is largely comprised of experiences based on elements acquired in other ways (the family, friends, the state). Where its US competitors suggest to companies that they have to build a long series of strong emotions and unforgettable and extraordinary experiences for the consumers, this book highlights the need of letting the consumers construct their experience themselves, instead of pre-planning extraordinary experience for them. This book is less of a 'how to do' text and more comprehensive that its competitors. Experiential marketing is a topic that encapsulates several previous lectures or courses such as 'Store Design', 'Brand Management' (see the notion of Brand Experience) and 'E-marketing' (see the notion of Virtual Experience). We expect this topic to become on a par with Relationship Marketing. Already, CEM (Customer Experience Management) is challenging CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Thus, the number of Experiential Marketing courses could increase in the near future especially as one of the Advanced Marketing Courses. Comprehensive and accessibly written, this text takes an international, although predominantly European approach. Its unique contribution to this emerging subject will be invaluable to all students engaged with customer experience management, relationship marketing and brand management.

This book position itself within Experiential Marketing. It differs from its competitors by the way it examines the phenomenon of consumer experience. US competitors consider any consumption experience as necessarily dependent on the acquisition of products and services from the market, this book acknowledges that everyday life is largely comprised of experiences based on elements acquired in other ways (the family, friends, the state). Where its US competitors suggest to companies that they have to build a long series of strong emotions and unforgettable and extraordinary experiences for the consumers, this book highlights the need of letting the consumers construct their experience themselves, instead of pre-planning extraordinary experience for them. This book is less of a 'how to do' text and more comprehensive that its competitors. Experiential marketing is a topic that encapsulates several previous lectures or courses such as 'Store Design', 'Brand Management' (see the notion of Brand Experience) and 'E-marketing' (see the notion of Virtual Experience). We expect this topic to become on a par with Relationship Marketing. Already, CEM (Customer Experience Management) is challenging CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Thus, the number of Experiential Marketing courses could increase in the near future especially as one of the Advanced Marketing Courses. Comprehensive and accessibly written, this text takes an international, although predominantly European approach. Its unique contribution to this emerging subject will be invaluable to all students engaged with customer experience management, relationship marketing and brand management.

With growing awareness of environmental deterioration, atmospheric pollution and resource depletion, the last several decades have brought increased attention and scrutiny to global consumption levels. However, there are significant and well documented limitations associated with current efforts to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, ranging from informational and time constraints to the highly individualizing effect of market-based participation. This volume, featuring essays solicited from experts engaged in sustainable consumption research from around the world, presents empirical and theoretical illustrations of the various means through which politics and power influence (un)sustainable consumption practices, policies and perspectives. With chapters on compelling topics including collective action, behaviour-change and the transition movement, the authors discuss why current efforts have largely failed to meet environmental targets and explore promising directions for research, policy and practice. Featuring contributions that will help the reader open up politics and power in ways that are accessible and productive and bridge the gaps with current approaches to sustainable consumption, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption and the politics of sustainability.

Post-Mao China has been characterized in literature and the media as a burgeoning consumer society. Consuming China investigates this characterization by examining the cultural significance of consumption and consumerism in the People s Republic of China today. In questioning the notion of consumption, this impressive work suggests that it is not simply a symptom of economic reform within China neither a product of the emergence and transformation of contemporary Chinese capitalism. Rather, the essays offer a new perspective on Chinese consumption by focusing on more than just consumerism, looking at the practices of consumption in relation to different manifestations of social and cultural change.

Drawing on case studies from Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People s Republic of China, Consuming China affords a greater understanding of the practice of Chinese consumption and will appeal to China scholars and anthropologists, and to those with an interest in cultural and gender studies.

Standard economic theory of consumer behaviour considers consumers' preferences, their incomes and commodity prices to be the determinants of consumption. However, consumption takes time and no consumer has more - or less - than 168 hours per week. This simple fact is almost invisible in standard theory, and takes the centre stage in this book.

How do people communicate their romantic feelings? Gift giving is one way. Giving and receiving of gifts is a characteristic of intimate relationships. Gifts are a message, a form of communication with a tangible material object, about love, affection, or concern for the recipient. The "romantic gift" evokes a multitude of intertwined meanings: passion, intimacy, affection, persuasion, care, celebration, altruism, and nostalgia. They can also connote the negative images of obligation and reciprocity. Romantic gift giving may be practiced at rituals, during rites of passage, or for casual occasions, to affirm the continued importance of the romantic relationship. We may even romanticize the giving of gifts to the self, to nonhuman companions, and to others we do not know personally. If loving and giving are a practice, then romantic gift giving is a practice of loving with intimate-or would-be intimate-others. This book addresses gift giving among consumers attempting to express and construct romantic love. It lies at the intersection of consumption, markets, and culture. In societies shaped by the globalizing neo-liberal economic order, increasing wealth disparity, and a partially digitized social environment that they help to co-construct, it may be time to rethink romantic love. Gift giving is a key arena to do so, as gifts make love tangible and act as carriers of meaning as well as cultural symbols. In gift giving the meanings of romance are renewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed. Gifts, Romance, And Consumer Culture demonstrates a wide variety of scholarly work bearing on romantic gift giving using an interpretive consumer research perspective. The book introduces critical studies by scholars in this unfolding and new interdisciplinary field.

Ever since the dawn of the Hollywood star system in the early 1920s, consumers have been fascinated by film stars and other celebrities and their seemingly glamorous private lives. The public demand for celebrities has become so pervasive that it is arguably an essential element of our everyday culture and market economy, and the focus of increasing study. This book explores the widespread phenomenon of celebrity fandom and provides a deeper understanding of why individual consumers develop an emotional attachment to their favourite celebrity and what this parasocial fan relationship means in their life. Based on an in-depth insider study of a consumer's fan relationship with a film actress, the book provides unique insights into the celebrity-fan relationship, revealing the meaning it has for the consumer in everyday life, and how it evolves and expresses itself over time. While this book is primarily located within the field of consumer research, fandom and celebrity are of interest to a variety of academic disciplines. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience from marketing and consumer research, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.

Eco-labelling is one of the key tools used by policy-makers in many parts of the world to encourage more sustainable production and consumption. By providing environmental information on products and services, eco-labels address both business users and consumers and range from mandatory approaches, such as required product declarations, to voluntary approaches, such as national eco-labels. Eco-labels can play an important role in environmental policy. They reward and promote environmentally superior goods and services and offer information on quality and performance with respect to issues such as health and energy consumption. Eco-labels fit well into a multi-stakeholder policy framework - as promulgated recently by the EU's integrated product policy (IPP) - since the development of criteria for labels and the acceptance in the market requires the involvement of a wide range of different parties, from government and business, to consumers and environmental organisations. However, many eco-labelling schemes have had troubled histories, and questions have been raised about their effectiveness. So, are eco-labels an effective tool to foster the development, production, sale and use of products and to provide consumers with good information about the environmental impacts of those products? Is eco-labelling useful to business as a marketing tool? What factors contribute to the development of successful schemes? More than ten years after its establishment, can the EU Flower be considered a success? Are national eco-labels such as the German Blue Angel and the Norwegian White Swan more effective? Should eco-labels be harmonised? Are eco-labels achieving their original aim of fostering sustainable production and consumption? For which product groups are ISO type I eco-labels appropriate and inappropriate? Are other labels, such as mandatory, ISO type II and ISO type III labels more effective in some cases? Are eco-labels focusing on the main environmental policy targets or just on "low-hanging fruit"? Are eco-labels really linked to other tools of IPP? The Future of Eco-labelling provides answers to all of these questions. Based on a major EU research exercise, the book plots a course for policy-makers to address some of the historic problems with eco-labelling, to learn what works and what doesn't and to move forward with schemes that can make a real difference to sustainable production and consumption.The book analyses the conditions under which eco-labelling schemes-both mandatory and voluntary-are or can become an efficient and effective tool to achieve given objectives; assesses previous experiences with eco-labels in different European countries and the relationship of these schemes with business strategies, IPP and market conditions; defines strategies aimed at linking eco-labels with other IPP measures; explores how eco-labels can be used to encourage sustainable consumption patterns, create green markets, foster innovation and development of green products and services, and implement multi-stakeholder initiatives; and sets out detailed recommendations for the future of eco-labelling.The book will be required reading for policy-makers, businesses involved with eco-labelling schemes and researchers interested in the development of sustainable production and consumption and IPP worldwide.

This book approaches consumer psychology from a unique perspective - it covers the entire lifespan, from birth to old age. Childhood and youth are not discussed as areas special, different and remote from the rest of consumer research but are integrated into our development as humans. Consumption is viewed as a process by groups and individuals with the cycle continuing through to disposal or ownership and possession. The author discusses how people's natural lifespan influences their relationship to the things they own, how preferences are developed from childhood and how motivations for purchases change throughout their lives from childhood to old age. This book brings together the most recent findings and theories on child and youth consumption, including children's understanding of advertising and marketing, teen and youth identities and their consumption tastes. Moving through Erikson's life stages chapters continue on to adulthood, the mid-life 'crisis' and possessions and ownership in older consumers. This is a deeply interdisciplinary work that will be of interest to scholars across the fields of psychology, business and marketing, as well as to the more general consumer.