Alexandros Skandalis

• PhD at The University of Manchester, Manchester Business School
• Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University

The aim of this paper is to explore how a concert hall can orchestrate and shape individuals’ classical music tastes. The paper is based on an 8-month ethnography at the Bridgewater Hall concert venue in Manchester. Our emergent findings illustrate how classical music tastes are influenced via the spatial meanings of the concert hall. These meaning...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to explore how the paradox of individualism/tribalism is brought into play and negotiated by consumers in the wake of the post-postmodern era. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on netnographic and interview data from the Greek football manager (FM) online gaming community. FM is a simulation strategy game...

Research taking into account the everyday nature of tourism destinations and its impact upon authenticity and attendees’ resulting extraordinary experiences is limited. Drawing upon a 3-year ethnography (including fieldnotes, photos/videos, artifact material) and interviews with festival attendees, we explore the interrelationships between authenti...

In this paper, we challenge the prevalent idea that anti-consumption functions as an ideological act of antagonism. We enlist the work of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher to account for the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer, a politically hollowed-out and knowingly helpless subject endemic to the futureless vicissitudes of semiocapitalist...

Drawing on a netnographic study and in-depth interviews within the online Greek Football Manager community, this paper explores the specific role of reality and fantasy in generating and sustaining brand value co-creation. Inspired by Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory, this study illustrates how value co-creation occurs in-between reality and fanta...

We provide a critical reading of plastic in consumer culture highlighting its furtive omnipresence and supporting role in enabling the consumption of countless products, services, and brands, including many previously identified marketplace icons. We introduce the term “passengerial icon” to explore how the iconicity of plastic is often characteris...

This paper invokes Redhead’s concept of claustropolitanism to critically explore the affective reality for consumers in today’s digital age. In the context of surveillance capitalism, we argue that consumer subjectivity revolves around the experience of fidelity rather than agency. Instead of experiencing genuine autonomy in their digital lives, co...

The aim of this conceptual paper is to discuss the transformation of socialisation processes due to the digitalisation of entertainment and community formation during COVID‐19. More specifically, we focus on alternative modes of touch and contact within the context of queer digital entertainment spaces and question how the world is shaped and sense...

Abstract Purpose – Service research has previously documented service providers’ role in addressing the barriers of technology mediation, mostly at the service delivery level. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding about the role of service providers who hold strategic and operational roles, as well as investigate the impact of c...

Drawing on qualitative interviews with indie music fans in Manchester, UK, we explore how experiences in the indie music field inform spatial and place-specific understandings of musical taste. Inspired by Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, the concept of place-dependent capital incorporates the interplay of the experiential dimensions of taste, and th...

Prior experiential marketing research suggests that extraordinary consumption experiences take place within antistructural frames, i.e. outside the realms of everyday life. This paper challenges that notion, through an ethnographic study of consumers attending the Primavera Sound music festival in Barcelona, Spain. We demonstrate that festival atte...

Purpose This study aims to explore how membership (initially as a consumer) in a given field shapes individuals’ entrepreneurial journey. Design/methodology/approach The research context is cultural and creative industries and, in particular, the independent (indie) music field in which unstructured interviews were conducted with nascent and estab...

Consumer research has largely left implicit the interrelationships of space and place with taste. This multi-sited ethnographic study explores how consumers enact, perform, and further develop their musical tastes via their aesthetic experiences in popular (indie) and classical music places. Our findings suggest that consumers create place-dependen...

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to explore how spatial taste formation and the interrelationships between place and taste can inform the development of contemporary place marketing and/or place management strategies. Design/methodology/approach - The paper draws on previous research conducted within the context of live music consumption and, in...

This presentation aims to discuss the findings of a year-long research project examining the role of music festivals, and the places within which they are organized, in the music industry. To do so their authors interviewed several music professionals from Europe and America in order to understand how music festivals shape and influence the logics...

The aim of this paper is to argue for the development of a more holistic understanding of the role of architecture within experiential consumption research. We review prior marketing and consumer research which touched upon the architectural dimensions of consumption experiences and we further draw upon our own research in the context of music cons...

Prior marketing and consumer culture research has fruitfully employed Bourdieu’s theory of taste to build interpretations of the socio-cultural patterning of consumption. The aim of this paper is to introduce the concept of place-dependent capital in order to explore how individuals accumulate different forms of capital in the indie music field via...

The aim of this paper is to argue for the development of a spatial theory of taste. We posit that taste might be better understood as being spatially formed and performed via consumers’ aesthetic experiences at various consumption places. We illustrate the usefulness of a spatial conception of taste for contemporary consumer research.

This paper enhances our understanding of collective value co-creation in the context of brand-centered communities. Our study is based on a netnographic exploration of the Football Manager (FM) game community. We introduce the concept of brand scouting and describe how it extends and goes beyond current theorizations of value co-creation.

Nowadays, consumers tend to be eclectic, vary according to their needs and habits and difficult to predict. Feelings and emotions play an important role for the understanding of consumers' hidden symbolic meanings to products and/or services. Kansei Engineering is an emotional product design methodology that aims to capture consumers' feelings for...