This volume brings together research on retailing, shopping and urban space; themes that have attracted wide interest in recent decades. The authors argue that the 'modernity' of the nineteenth century is often over-emphasised at the expense of recognising earlier innovation.

Unprecedented changes in consumer shopping habits pose major challenges for retailers who need to consider the multidimensional nature of shopping in order to design and provide engaging consumer experiences. The intersection between in-store and online shopping is also fundamental to meet the fast-changing consumer behavior. Comprehending how environmental and sensory dimensions, leisure, entertainment, and social interactions influence shopper emotions may enhance the shopping experience. Emotional, Sensory, and Social Dimensions of Consumer Buying Behavior is an essential reference source that discusses methods for enhancing the shopping experience in an era of competition among shopping offline- and online-destinations, as well as predicting emerging changes in consumer behavior and shopping destinations and new technologies in retailing. Featuring research on topics such as consumer dynamics, experimental marketing, and retail technology, this book is ideally designed for retail managers, designers, advertisers, marketers, customer service representatives, merchandisers, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, students, and practitioners.

Colonialism, globalization and consumerism have devastated large parts of our world. For the past five centuries, the West has nurtured self-worth through the accumulation of worldly goods, serving our own selfish interests and exploiting others. This has been disastrous not only to human beings but to the whole ecology of the planet. Consumerism drives trade, but consumer buying is now like an unchained beast with tooth and claw causing han (unjust suffering) for exploited peoples as well as for other species and even for planet Earth. This book will examine ways of rethinking and reimagining ourselves, helping us to work in more just directions for a safer, sustainable planet. Empowering ourselves to act more justly includes reimagining and renewing our inspiration from God who is the transformative Spirit who gives, sustains and empowers life to all.

Providing a detailed account of contemporary outdoor advertising and its relationship with urban space, this book examines what the outdoor advertising industry tells us about the commercial production of urban space, what industry practices reveal about contemporary capitalism, and how ads and billboard structures interface with spaces of the city.

Color is a visible technology that invisibly connects so many puzzling aspects of modern Western consumer societies-research and development, making and selling, predicting fashion trends, and more. Building on Regina Lee Blaszczyk's go-to history of the "color revolution" in the United States, this book explores further transatlantic and multidisciplinary dimensions of the topic. Covering history from the mid nineteenth century into the immediate past, it examines the relationship between color, commerce, and consumer societies in unfamiliar settings and in the company of new kinds of experts. Readers will learn about the early dye industry, the dynamic nomenclature for color, and efforts to standardize, understand, and educate the public about color. Readers will also encounter early food coloring, new consumer goods, technical and business innovations in print and on the silver screen, the interrelationship between gender and color, and color forecasting in the fashion industry.

How did consumer culture become synonymous with westernised societies? Iqani argues that it is the way it is promoted by media texts. She provides a detailed analysis of publicly displayed consumer magazine covers and engages with big questions about the public, power and identity in mediated consumer culture.

Scandals in food, growth of supermarket power, new technologies and crises in obesity have shaken popular trust in food across Europe. The BSE epidemic, concern over GM foods, dioxin scares and avian flu have placed consumer trust and how to restore it at the top of government agendas. Uncovering surprising differences between countries, "Trust in Food" examines these issues to challenge the idea of the consumer as a sovereign individual and to demonstrate how consumption is institutionalized within societies.

"A fascinating investigation that explains semiotics, the science of signs, and shows how it can help us understand the way marketing and advertising shape our behavior as consumers and the way we use brands to help create our public identities. Semiotics deals with the messages we are always sending about ourselves by the clothes we wear, our facial expressions, our body language, and the objects we purchase. It also helps us learn how to interpret the messages that others are always sending to us. The book also analyzes a number of the "objects of our affection" such as toasters, teddy bears, hamburgers and computers. In the appendix, there are a number of learning games and activities that involve using semiotics to better understand consumer culture"--Provided by publisher.

Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Journalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism -- and the anxieties over it -- date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups -- including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves -- helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism. Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships -- sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.

A well-planned marketing orientation strategy that keeps customers informed is the first step to building a long-term relationship with customers and providing them with appropriate incentives. The difficulty with providing a winning strategy in a highly competitive market, however, stems from responding to the specific needs of the customers. Customer Satisfaction and Sustainability Initiatives in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an essential reference source that links together three highly relevant topics in the business of modern economy-innovation, customer satisfaction, and sustainability-and analyzes their synergies. Featuring research on topics such as e-business, global business, and sustainable innovation, this book is ideally designed for business consultants, managers, customer service representatives, entrepreneurs, academicians, researchers, and students seeking coverage on directing sustainable companies.

To varying degrees, classic religions are associated with critique of materialistic values. Onto this opposition of the market and the temple other binaries have been grafted, so that 'North' and the 'West' are portrayed as secular and materialistic, 'South' and 'East' either as 'tigers' pursuing western-style affluence and economic growth or locked into retrospective fundamentalisms. These characterisations are called into question in a context of diversity and global movements of peoples and goods. In this collection this complexity is addressed in an analysis of the interconnections between religious and consumption practices and cultures, and the ways in which both are responding to the ecological threat posed by continuous economic growth. International in scope, the book combines empirical and theoretical work in its attempt to interrogate the traditional opposition of spiritual and materialistic values, and to explore the interplay of religious and consuming passions in contemporary cultures. This analysis leads to a consideration of the ways in which religions and secular spiritualities can contribute to a new ecological consciousness, and to the adoption of less destructive and rapacious ways of life.

Drawing on a wide range of studies of Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, the contributions gathered here consider how political history, business history, the history of science, cultural history, gender history, intellectual history, anthropology, and even environmental history can help us decode modern consumer societies.

Although social marketing is generally associated with communication activities and mass media, there exists a broader scope of social marketing that utilizes a systematic approach to defining concepts, behaviors, and products for promotion and distribution. Dynamics of Competitive Advantage and Consumer Perception in Social Marketing explores important social issues that call for reform such as healthcare, self-perceptions, and corporate responsibilities to the environment. This publication will guide readers in the understanding and appreciation of social marketing and give insight to how it can be used to positively alter social conscience and create social change.

The rewards of success in emerging markets are potentially huge, and as luxury companies continue to expand their global reach, they will need to continually assess if their current strategy is delivering competitive advantage. This text presents a repository of knowledge that brings clarity to key issues and trends for practitioners, academics and students of luxury brands. It sets out to decode the luxury markets in the primary emerging markets (BRICs) and provide a rich resume of the key factors that influence the effectiveness of luxury brand strategies.

Technology and Household Consumption is a comprehensive text that provides insights into technology's impact on consumer behavior and the household environment. Consumption and consumer behavior has become a very important subject of study that is now covered in many disciplines including family economics, culture studies, and feminist/women studies.

In the first section, this book provides a historical perspective on how consumer behaviors have changed because of technology and how technology itself has changed. Data on ownership and expenditures is detailed in describing the penetration of technology in the household and changes over time. In the examination of demographics and social changes, an emphasis is placed on women and children. As it is important to understand the entry paths and factors that influence them, the book also introduces a research framework to understanding the adoption and utilization of household technologies. In the second section, the book examines specific household technologies and consumption experiences including shopping choices and behaviors, entertainment outlets and availability, communications technologies, and working at home. The book concludes with a section on the relationships between marketers and consumers.

Consumer culture influences virtually all activities within modern societies and has become an important area of study for businesses. Logical analysis of consumer behavior is difficult as humans have different reasons for repeatedly buying products they need or want, and it is challenging to follow why they buy unneeded or unwanted products regularly. Without a comprehensive understanding of consumer culture as the basis, market discussions become empty and produce little insight into the power consumers hold in affecting other individuals and society. Multifaceted Explorations of Consumer Culture and Its Impact on Individuals and Society provides emerging research from different perspectives on the basis and ramifications of consumer culture, as well as how it affects all aspects of the lives of individuals. While providing a platform for exploring interpersonal interactions and issues related to ethics in marketing, readers will gain valuable insight into areas such as consumer vs. producer mentality, the effects of consumerism on developing countries, and the consequences of consumerism. This book is an important resource for marketing professionals, business managers, sociologists, students, academicians, researchers, and consumer professionals.

How much and which goods are acceptable to consume? Who should be entitled to more and on what basis? These questions have been raised throughout history with answers varying widely across time and space. They were at the centre of concerns over luxury in Ancient Greece and continue to inform modern debates on the environmental effects of consumption. At the same time they have also been subject to mundane discussions conducted around the dinner table about how much the family should save, what kind of wedding would be appropriate, and whether or not family members in torn jeans are acceptable at the dinner table at all. What are consumption norms about, how do they develop and why do they change? This book addresses these questions, by bringing together sociological, historical, anthropological and economic studies on consumption.

Consumers are not usually incorporated into the sociological concept of 'division of labour', but using the case of household recycling, this book shows why this foundational concept needs to be revised.

Ronny Someck is an enormously popular poet and radio host in Israel. Born in Iraq, he spent his childhood in a transit camp for new immigrants. This is his first full-length book to appear in English; his Sephardi voice is rich with slang, hot music, street gangsters and army commandos, and the odors of falafel and schwarma. In what other poet could we find Tarzan, Marilyn Monroe, and cowboys battling with Rabbi Yehuda Halevi for the hearts and souls of Israelis?

The fads, fashions, and media in popular consumer culture frequently make recreational and ideological "fun" of poverty and lower class living. It is a phenomenon that puts poor whites, poor blacks, women, gays, handicapped people, and other traditional minorities back in "their place" by prioritizing self-aggrandizing materialism and individual desires over the collective good and constitutes a form of cultural denial. In this book, Halnon delineates how incarceration, segregation, stigmatization, cultural and social consecration, and carnivalization work in the production and consumption of inequality.

Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people's ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.

In Consumption, Cities and States: Comparing Singapore with Asian and Western Cities, Ann Brooks and Lionel Wee focus on the interrelationship of consumption, citizenship and the state in the context of globalization, calling for greater emphasis to be placed on the citizen as consumer. While it is widely recognized that citizenship is increasingly defined by gradations of esteem, where different kinds of rights and responsibilities accrue to different categories and subcategories of citizens, not enough analytical focus has been given to how the status of being a citizen impacts the individual s consumption. The interface between citizen status and consumer activity is a crucial point of analysis in light of the neoliberal assertion that individuals and institutions perform at their best within a free market economy, and because of the state s expectations regarding citizens rights and responsibilities as consumers not just as producers. In this remarkable comparative study, the authors examine these relationships across a number of cities in both Asia and the West."

This book argues that Western class categories do not directly apply to China and that the new Chinese middle class is distinguished more by socio-cultural rather than by economic factors. Based upon qualitative interviews done in Guangdong in South China, the study looks at entrepreneurs, professionals, and regional party cadres from various age groups, showing the complex networks among these different groups and the continuing significance of cadres. The study also explores generational differences, exposing how older generations are pragmatic and business-oriented, rather than personally oriented in their consumption whereas the younger generations appear more flexible and hedonistic and tend to be more individualistic, materialistic and oriented towards personal gain. In neither older or younger generations is there much evidence that the new Chinese middle class is taking on a political role in advocating political reform alongside market reforms as is suggested by some Western stratification theorists. Despite being in the vanguard of consumption, they are the laggards in politics.