Relational Gifting: Conceptual Frameworks and an Agenda for a New Generation of Research

Journal of Consumer Research · 2024-07-04 · 13 citations

Abstract Relational gifts are given among known social connections and are oriented toward relationship work and care. An abundance of gifting research over the past 50 years has focused on gift selection and reception, most recently on variables driving mismatches between what givers and recipients think make good gifts. That work lays an essential foundation. However, important opportunities remain to deepen understandings by broadening the focus. This entails viewing gifting as a relational, social, and often longitudinal process that is intertwined within evolving social and cultural contexts. This article conceptualizes three under-researched areas of opportunity on relational gifting: (1) understanding the evolving and contextualized experience of a gift in recipients’ lives, (2) tracing the gift circuit, the dynamics of gifting within social relationships over time, and (3) mapping relational gifting as a dynamic gift system that reflects and reinforces social structure and networks of care. Together, these three areas present important ground for future psychological, sociological, and anthropological consumer research that deepens understanding of when, how, and why relational gifts matter and the relational work that these gifts enable. Ultimately, the goal of this article is to set an agenda for a new generation of relational gifting research.

Crowdfunding as a Market-Fostering Gift System

Journal of Consumer Research · 2023 · 17 citations

• Marketing
• Business
• Economics

Abstract Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such materially unfavorable conditions, why do consumers transfer their money to these producers? The present research answers this question by introducing the concept of a “market-fostering gift system”: a social contract that entices consumers to fund the creation and enhancement of market offerings by mobilizing the logic and practices of gift-giving. This conceptualization includes the core stakeholders, processes, outcomes, and shortcomings of reward-based crowdfunding, providing theoretical structure to this consequential articulation of platform capitalism. In addition, this conceptualization advances theory about how gift and market economies intersect. Whereas previous research emphasizes the tensions that characterize their interface, this article brings to the fore the complementary, scalable relationship between gift-giving and market exchange.

The platformed money ecosystem: Digital financial platforms, datafication, and reimagining financial well‐being

Journal of Consumer Affairs · 2022 · 14 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business

Abstract Digital financial platforms have become an integral part of consumers' lives–resulting in the datafication of everyday life and potential for uniquely impacting financial well‐being. Extending previous transformative consumer research, we suggest financial well‐being must center the ways digital financial platforms and their resulting data are increasingly enmeshed with financial decision making and consumption. Drawing on a theoretical lens of platformization, we propose the Platformed Money Ecosystem, which accounts for increased embeddedness of digital financial platforms within consumers' lives and the subtlety of how everyday life is transformed into data: producing data at the micro‐level, monetizing data at the meso‐level, and regulating data at the macro‐level. In conceptualizing the Platformed Money Ecosystem, we identify three data‐informed considerations for scholars and policymakers to reimagine financial well‐being: protecting consumer data, limiting data biases, and supporting data literacy.

Cultural Systems of the Food Supply Chain

Journal of Business Anthropology · 2022-05-05

Supply chains are complex relational networks of raw material suppliers (i.e., farmers, ranchers, etc.), manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and end consumers as well as the intermediaries that go between them. The network engages in a complex dance to meet each other's needs, and it generally operates effectively. The Covid-19 pandemic upended these networks and, in doing so, laid bare what was often less visible and rarely problematized in functioning supply chains: the complexity of the relationship networks and the latent cultural system of norms, values, practices, and underlying assumptions that orient the players in this network. Traditional supply chain research tends to overlook these cultural factors in favor of a more economically rational approach to understanding this aspect of the capitalist system

The Cultural Knowledge Perspective: Insights on Resource Creation for Marketing Theory, Practice, and Education

Journal of Macromarketing · 2022-01-04 · 4 citations

Marketing researchers and marketers have long focused on the importance of resources: organizations having enough raw materials, advertising budget, distribution and supply facilities, data, technology, money, connections, time, or employees. However, these only become valuable to the organization when people identify them as potential resources and then use them adeptly. In this conceptual paper, we argue that understanding the process of identifying and creating resources is essential to understanding organizational success. We introduce the Cultural Knowledge Perspective. The perspective refocuses attention on the process by which people use and extend their cultural knowledge to identify latent materials, materials that have resource potential, and the process by which cultural knowledge is used to activate latent materials to create actual resources. We bring together and build on disparate research in marketing, sociology, and management to show the importance of understanding how the cultural knowledge of marketers and consumers is deployed for resource creation. In doing so, we show how this perspective opens avenues for hiring marketing talent, product development, marketing communications, and marketing education.

The role of paid media, earned media, and sales promotions in driving marcom sales performance in consumer services

Journal of Business Research · 2022 · 25 citations

• Marketing
• Business

Advertising and Promotional Effects On Consumer Service Firm Sales

Journal of Advertising Research · 2019-05-29 · 4 citations

<h3>ABSTRACT</h3> This study focuses on the effects of different marketing-communications tools on company performance, namely how advertising-execution quality, media spending, and sales promotions differentially influence changes in sales revenue. The analysis employs five years of aggregated monthly data on nine leading brands in a consumer-services sector, quick-serve restaurants, an often-overlooked area with high marketing-communications expenditures. The findings illustrate that advertising spending and then execution quality mattered most for changes in sales revenue. Internet advertising had no effect for most companies, and sales promotions either were not significant or were related negatively to changes in sales.

Consuming for an Imagined Future: Middle-Class Consumer Lifestyle and Exploratory Experiences in the Transition to Adulthood

Journal of Consumer Research · 2017-02-23 · 95 citations

Abstract This study examines middle-class consumption and lifestyle during the transition to adulthood in the United States. Based on analysis of qualitative data from interviews with emerging adults between adolescence and settled adulthood, we argue that middle-class emerging adulthood is marked by a focus on exploratory experience consumption: the consumption of novel experiences with cultural capital potential. This tacit, embodied orientation is rooted in a habitus developed during entitled childhoods but is also shaped by an anticipated shortage of opportunities for exploration after they marry and have children. Accordingly, middle-class emerging adults voraciously consume exploratory experiences in the present with their imagined future selves in mind. The class basis for this orientation is examined through our analysis of interviews with working-class emerging adults whose lifestyles are characterized not by exploratory experience consumption but by a desire for the familiar, a fear of the unknown, and a longing for stability. The discussion focuses on how the middle-class consumer orientation toward exploratory experiences reinforces class (dis)advantage, life trajectories, and inequality.

Gifts: intertwining market and moral economies and the rise of store bought gifts

Consumption Markets & Culture · 2016-09-29 · 4 citations

Gifts are a major part of both economic and social life. This intertwined relationship between the market and moral economies has long been unsettling to those concerned about rationalized marketplace meanings contaminating and eroding the sacred social role of gift giving. Consumer researchers have analysed the important relationship work done through gift giving in the moral economy and the ways that the marketplace facilitates such work (or not). However, little has explored when, how, and why a store bought gift, rather than a homemade one, actually became acceptable. This article uses three case studies from the early to mid-1800s to trace the rise of the store bought gift in the American marketplace. It highlights how the sociocultural context, marketing innovations, retailers, and meanings surrounding gifting all helped to ensconce gift giving as both a central component in the contemporary marketplace and a tool for symbolic communication in social life.

How Publicity and Advertising spending Affect Marketing and Company Performance

Journal of Advertising Research · 2015-12-01 · 13 citations

This research investigated the relative effects of marketing communications on a chain of “marketing-productivity” measures—metrics that evaluate the influence of marketing at the consumer, market, financial, and company levels. Results of the study, which combined five industry data sets, revealed that publicity—specifically, via newspaper and magazine articles—and advertising spending have unique and different relative effects on the so-called marketing-productivity chain. On average, publicity had a stronger relative importance compared with advertising for several indicators, although the effects for any individual company can vary. These findings have implications for the marketing-communications environment, which increasingly is saturated with publicity from a variety of sources.