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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (73)
Purpose
Digital markets are increasingly constructed by an interplay between (non)human market actors, i.e. through algorithms, but, simultaneously, fragmented through platformization. This study aims to explore how interactional dynamics between (non)human market actors co-codify markets through expressive and networked content across social media...
The COVID-19 crisis has resulted in physical distancing regulations, disrupting traditional practices of establishing and maintaining social relationships. We draw attention to digital nomadism as a mature case of navigating sociality in uncertainty to investigate how the linking value of materiality establishes social proximity without geographic...
This study investigates social and material anchors of solidity manifesting in the lives of digital nomads as the vanguard of postmodern liquidity. Drawing upon narrative interviews and netnography, we illuminate how these cosmopolite consumers integrate sources of stability and security to sustain their mobility projects across space and time.
How do CEOs, entrepreneurs, managers, celebrity bloggers, and other brand leaders acquire charismatic authority in the marketplace? Grounded in a multi-perspective, in-depth case study of the charismatic CEO of an Austrian shoe manufacturer, this article introduces a sociocultural mechanism called charismatic entrainment. Charismatic entrainment in...
This study unmasks the paradoxical nature of luxury moments in conditions of postmodern boundlessness. Building on paradox theory and interview data with digital nomads, this research sheds light on how the playful bricolage of contradictory yet interwoven dynamics produces flavors of luxuriousness in fluid cosmopolitan settings.
How is luxury conceived in a modern and changing world? While luxury is a well-researched area in the domain of consumer goods, research on more consumer-focused forms of luxury is still nascent. Yet today luxury experiences drive the development of luxury markets and inconspicuous, private consumption of luxury is rising. In order to address these...
There is a need for continuous renewal of attracting physical retail environments to keep up with change. Usually, retail chains use the same standardized designs to help consumers recognize the brand. However, this approach can lead to unattractive retail environments, which is likely to encourage a switch to competing offerings and to on-line sho...
This study advances an unconventional perspective on the experiential essence of luxury, with the aim to uncover different types of luxury moments and shed light on their shared qualities and momentousness, independent of consumption styles or contexts. The findings of an interpretive study identify five types of luxury moments: interrupting, clima...
This paper investigates how the digitized fashion market is transformed through hashtagged visual and textual brand and consumer conversations on Instagram. The study draws on assemblage and performativity theory to investigate how the American Apparel brand and its consumers develop a common visual rhetoric in opposition to mainstream fashion disc...
Consumers increasingly seek out the spiritual to enlighten their inner
emptiness and find their inner selves. We add a physiological, embodied perspective, which has been commonly overlooked in extant
research as a valuable opportunity for individual consumer spirituality. Interpretative investigation of body-transforming consumers
uncovers a power...
SESSION OVERVIEW
Technological advancements, such as the emergence of social media networks, and new ways of life and consumption have fundamentally altered the way consumers relate to brands. Consumer- brand relationships have been found to be increasingly ephemeral (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2017), and to be less tight then prior research suggested (A...
Despite growing literature on social entrepreneurship there is scarce research on how potentially conflicting social and economic objectives manifest on a micro-level and affect everyday management of social enterprises. Applying a strategy as practice perspective we identify sources of, and responses to, temporary and complete breakdowns in Die Bä...
This study aims to investigate into the role of brands as mediators of ideological edgework
on social networking sites. Our analysis focuses on the visual and textual discourse that enfolds on the Instagram account of American Apparel. We analyze the visual performances of the brand, as well as brand-mediated consumer practices, and how these pract...
This paper enhances the understanding of how brands and consumers engage in brand-mediated ideological edgework on Instagram. Our study uses a performativity lens to investigate how the fashion brand American Apparel and consumers performatively (re-)construct the aestheticized social body. We identify six brand and consumer practices of brand-medi...
This article provides in-depth insights into the dynamic, performative co-construction of stakeholder and brand identity in the context of the LEGO brand. Based on detailed considerations of individual and social identity theory, a critique of research on brand identity, and a review of current performative approaches to branding, this study applie...
Transition to motherhood deeply affects women’s lives. Multifaceted and complex, motherhood is ideologized and mystified (Hager 2011), overburdened with cultural meanings, representing what is often characterized as the ultimate in relational and self-devotion (Arendell 2000; Atkinson 2014). Consequently, the transition to motherhood is perceived a...
This study adopts a life course perspective to broaden our current understanding of the complex nature of consumer luxury experiences. Narrative biographical interviews with members of Generation Y elicit how luxury experiences over the life course relate to significant individual life events and illuminate how the macro- and micro-environment brin...
Not all brands have the potential to develop into meaningful objects for consumers. They need to serve certain psychological and symbolic functions in order to qualify as passion brands. They need to help consumers define and express their personality, combine potentially conflicting social roles or experiment with new roles. Brand passion is lived...
Merz, He, and Vargo (2009) have introduced a new conceptual logic of brands as collaborative co-creation processes in a network of stakeholders. Picking up the thread, Mühlbacher and Hemetsberger (2013) presented a process model of brands as social representations consisting of co-creation processes of brand meaning, the co-generation of brand mani...
Faced with major changes in life due to role
transitions, consumers not only re-construct
their identities, but also change consumption
patterns and brand preferences. Especially in
liminality, tensions between social compliance
and individuality seeking become visible.
Existing literature analyses role transitions
retrospectively, when consumers h...
This study inquires how consumers’ experiences of luxury relate to consumers’ selves. The
objective is to broaden our contemporary understanding of luxury experiences by departing from
the traditional view of conspicuous luxury consumption as a marker of social class. Consumer
diaries provide fundamental insights into the complex nature of luxury e...
Our netnographic study of an open-source marketing community investigates collective practices of authentication. We find that the community embraces emerging contradictions-open closedness, professional amateurs, market logic of doing good, and a faceful mass-instead of solving them and thus constantly fuels collective authentication practices. Ou...
This study assumes that individuals' desires for autonomy as well as concessions to conformity inform consumers' attempts to create consumption styles that are different. Our interpretive study investigates into male consumers' pursuit of being different and finds willful ignorance, non non-conformity (provocative conformity, wearing the old and ou...
Recent theorizations on the social construction of markets (Benkler 2006; Penaloza and Venkatesh 2006), the democratization of economy (Arvidsson 2008;2010), entrepreneurial consumer communities (Hemetsberger 2007), consumers as creative crowds and marketers (Kozinets, Hemetsberger and Schau 2008; Kozinets, deValck, Wojnicki and Wilner 2010), shari...
This article introduces the concept of branded communities. A qualitative study of Apache, an Open Source software community, revealed that creative communities not only create brands but have become brands themselves. We conclude that we should incorporate branded communities and their members in an extended theory of brands and branding.
This article seeks to enhance understanding of consumer devotion through an extended, elaborate conceptualization of the concept. It draws on the extant literature on devotion as well as related concepts in consumer behavior, and adds psychological and theological insights. A synthesis carves out the psychological functionality of devotion, its emo...
This article addresses the question why young consumers favor retro brands although they had no consumption experience with the original counterpart. Interviews with young consumers revealed that retro brands are perceived to be special possessions which help young consumers coping with ambiguities in their search for identity. Retro brands are per...
Online collaboration is often organized without strong predetermined rules or central authority, which is why coordination and ways of organizing cooperation become crucial elements of collaboration. This article investigates how online projects can overcome problems of dispersed work, solve inherent contradictions and utilize tensions in the activ...
Heutzutage steht eine Vielzahl von konventionellen und virtuellen Methoden zur Verfügung, die für eine optimale Kundenorientierung
im Innovationsprozess sorgen sollen. Kunden werden beobachtet, befragt oder zu Workshops eingeladen und aufgefordert aktiv
an der Innovationsentwicklung teilzunehmen. Je nach Frage- und Aufgabenstellung kommen dabei die...
Die schlanke weiße Frau in der Werbung als soziales Symbol für Schönheit und weibliche Eleganz dominiert die Werbelandschaft
seit Jahrzehnten (Redmond 2003), ganz besonders natürlich in der Mode- und Schönheitsindustrie. Der Schönheits- und Pflegeproduktmarkt
ist ein hart umkämpfter Markt, in dem sehr große Unternehmen wie z. B. der Marktführer L’O...
Consumer devotion and brand love have recently attracted rising interest in consumer research. Due to their high emotional attachment, brand devotees love and adore their brands and even fervently defend them against all odds. Yet, some of these relationships break down. This article addresses the question why strong emotional bonds with brands are...
Past theories of consumer innovation and creativity were devised before the emergence of the profound collaborative possibilities of technology. With the diffusion of networking technologies, collective consumer innovation is taking on new forms that are transforming the nature of consumption and work and, with it, society and marketing. We theoriz...
Contemporary marketing literature overwhelmingly describes brands from either a managerial or a consumer-centric perspective. The level of analysis is either individual or social. In most cases brands are conceived as tangible or intangible objects. Another stream of research conceives brands as mental representations or socially shared meanings. E...
Taking Belk and Coon (1993) and recent criticism by Bajde (2006) as starting points, we develop an other-related view of consumer-object relationships. By exploring acts of devotion in the light of the dialectics of self and other, this article draws attention to so far neglected consumer behaviors and their meaning in relation with objects of devo...
Customer integration in new product development processes (NPD) has become a potent idea in the innovation literature and enjoys increasing attention in business. In general, methods of cus-tomer integration can considerably improve a firm's knowledge base for new product develop-ment, particularly when customer knowledge can be incorporated, which...
Purpose. Customer integration in new product development has become a main topic in business-to-business literature. Literature has brought forward a growing body of virtual customer integration methods and tools. Yet, we lack a systematic evaluation of how and when to make use of conventional and virtual methods, and on what grounds. The purpose o...
Free and open source software (F/OSS) communities are self-organizing, social entities that collaboratively create knowledge and innovate. Their fundamentally new approach of developing software challenges traditional principles of collaboration and learning. In contrast to well-organized and planned commercial projects, F/OSS development constitut...
Open-source communities are innovative online communities, some of which have recently attracted increasing attention. The study suggests that members of innovative online communities learn and build collective knowledge through the use of ‘technologies’ and the establishment of discursive practices that enable virtual re-experience. Theories of kn...
Contemporary marketing literature describes brand creation from either a company perspective, or from the consumer's side. We argue that this rather dualistic restriction on either the organization as the dominant driver in establishing brands or the focus on consumers' reaction to marked objects largely ignores the possibility that a more varied g...
Open-source communities are innovative online communities, some of which have recently attracted increasing attention. The study suggests that members of innovative online communities learn and build collective knowledge through the use of 'technologies' and the establishment of discursive practices that enable virtual re- experience. Theories of k...
This article seeks to contribute to the issue of consumer sovereignty by introducing the concept of adversary innovation. The functionality of ideological discourse for the sustainability of new consumer movements is discussed and investigated. Empirical investigation is based on a discourse analysis of online conversation of the free and open-sour...
Free and open source software (F/OSS) communities are self-organizing, social entities that collaboratively create knowledge and innovate. Their fundamentally new approach of developing software challenges traditional principles of collaboration and learning. In contrast to well-organized and planned commercial projects, F/OSS development constitut...
Heutzutage steht eine Vielzahl von konventionellen und virtuellen Methoden zur Verfügung, die für eine optimale Kundenorientierung im Innovationsprozess sorgen sollen. Kunden werden beobachtet, befragt oder zu Workshops eingeladen und aufgefordert aktiv an der Innovationsentwicklung teilzunehmen. Je nach Frage- und Aufgabenstellung kommen dabei die...
accepted for the The Fifth European Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Capabilities in Innsbruck, Austria, 2004, forthcoming.
Virtual communities of consumers increasingly engage in voluntary collaborative production of digital goods and services which became highly successful in recent years. This paper offers a theoretical conceptualization and empirical evidence of the key elements and processes of exchange in those communities. Within a culture of gift-giving and gene...
Our research suggests that knowledge is shared and created in online communities of practice through the establishment of processes and 'technologies' that enable virtual re-experience for the learners at various levels. Three questions guided our research. The first one concentrates on how community members organize content with regard to their da...
long abstract published in: Broniarczyk, S. M. and K. Nakamoto (eds.), (2002). Advances in Consumer Research, Vol.29, 354-356. * Contact person: Andrea Hemetsberger
This article advances our understanding of the motivational sources for consumer involvement in online joint innovation. The `free' or `open-source' software movement is the largest socio-technical network and most visible empirical evidence of this new phenomenon. The paper promotes a behavioral view of involvement and offers a conceptualization a...
Although the desirability of marketing standardization versus adaptation has long been debated in academic and business circles, few empirical studies are available that investigate the circumstances under which each strategy is appropriate. The degree of similarity of customer needs and expectations in different nations largely determines to which...
abstract published in: Keller, P. A. and D. W. Rook (eds.), Advances in Consumer Research, Vol.30, forthcoming. * Contact person: Andrea Hemetsberger Assistant professor of marketing Department of value-processmanagement Marketing group Innsbruck University Universitätsstraße 15 6020 Innsbruck Austria, EUROPE phone: 0043 (0)512 507 7213 Fax: 0043 (...
Projects
Projects (4)
This is an overview of my research projects in the field of luxury, including luxury services and digital luxury (both topics with Jochen Wirtz and Martin Fritze), moments of luxury and luxury escapism (with Carlos Diaz Ruiz and Lisa Peñaloza), value creation in luxury (with Luca Visconti, Christian Grönroos, Blandine Guais, and Aurélie Kessous) as well as unconvential luxury (with Thyra Thomsen, Sylvia von Wallpach, Andrea Hemetzberger and Russel Belk).
