Paul Hewer

This paper has three objectives. The first is to deliver a critical review of the work of Zygmunt Bauman on Liquid Modernity and Liquid Times. I argue that Bauman’s work can provide a useful starting point for analysing the ‘unruly’ forces of contemporary society. Bauman’s work, as I have sought to reveal, takes us to the heart of liquid modern darkness. It forces us to take seriously the import of the sociological imagination and the insight that personal troubles are best understood as emerging public issues stemming from structural processes. The second objective, is to explore how consumer culture theorists have taken and in dialogue with these ideas sought to expand upon his initial ideas. Here I review the value of the concept of ‘liquid consumption’ and the ‘fresh start mindset’. The third and final objective, is to demonstrate how reflexive marketing practitioners are responding to such liquid times through rethinking their practice and thereby extending the terrain of marketing. Here I detail how the promise marketing imagination starts not with the darkness of liquid modern times but rather with a far more hope inspired tale to enchant new markets and new audiences on the possibilities and ‘solutions’ of being future oriented and technologically savvy. Finally, it argues that the task of reimagining appears essential given the current zeitgeist, where the climate of anxiety, fear and uncertainty whether it be political, economic, environmental or social threatens to engulf us.

This article has three main objectives. Our first is to turn to sport as a particularly illuminating and revealing example of consumer culture in the making. Marketplace logic suffuses consumer culture, and exploring practices of fandom as performed thus becomes particularly revealing of the tensions and contradictions which are thrown up when passions collide with finance and branding strategies. Our second objective is to mobilise this insight to further research on brand communities through better situating social practices as entangled in this heady nexus of passions, power and cultural politics. Through a netnographic analysis of forum posts from Celtic Football Club’s notorious ‘Green Brigade’ ultras-style fan-group, we focus on how such social formations forge counter-identities, which act not in harmony with the larger brand ethos but serve to legitimate and affirm a counter-philosophy. As such, our final objective is to better understand the roles of brand agitator and brand heretic as key roles within this contested social formation. Fandom as dramatic ritual and social drama brings in its wake contradictions and tensions especially when it goes toe-to-toe with the forces of economics, branding and marketing strategy. Here, a counter-brand community as we reveal mobilises marketplace logic and appears to adopt their own practices of mimicking brand strategising for their own ends, or as they assert, ‘Let the people sing’.

This article explores the production of the ‘Nigella’ celebrity brand through forms of gendered talk performed by means of online community forums. The complexity and appeal of celebrity culinary brands forces us to turn to particular contexts to explore the passions, concerns and enthusiasms that they elicit and excite. As a context for the exploration of such hyper-mediated brands it is useful to explore the social interactions and associations harboured and sheltered within the collective canopy of the forum, in our case the Food Forum of Nigella.com. The emotional fabric of celebrity culinary brands has much to do with the fact that they are created and sustained through a range of multimedia platforms. One such critical stage is that of the online forum, which we explore as a site wherein feminine identities are performed and reimagined; where notions of ‘doing gender’ within culinary landscapes are worked and reworked through networks of affiliation and shared sentiment.

Central to the logic of the aesthetic economy (Entwistle, 2002) is celebrity culture, the two go hand in hand and the boundaries between them are increasingly blurred in the spirit and name of commerce, capitalism and marketing. Celebrity demands a stage, or better, an exhibition space, a frame for further performance and sustainment of appeal, a space to induce inspiration among followers and fans alike. Celebrity by this reckoning is less about advertising and the transfer of meaning through such overly narrow and confined media processes (McCracken, 1989); rather celebrity affect, as we seek to demonstrate in this paper, works through specific stagings, one such being the celebrity fashion exhibition, where the appeal of celebrity is broadened and staged anew to cultivate new forms of attraction, intimacy and public participation.

In this paper, we explore the opportunities and possibilities of Web 2.0 through the theoretical lens of tribes and fandom, arguing that social-networking sites centring on iconic celebrities provide a rich context to explore notions of tribal identities and their forms of interaction, connectivity, and creativity. Employing what we term a Netnographic Imagination, we seek to explore the nature and character of this tribal context to provide insights into the tribal mattering spaces that are constructed around celebrity brands. Our analysis highlights the passions and enthusiasms within such emotional communities and the investments they make in celebrity brands, along with the forms of critique they construct around their associated marketing practices. Finally, we draw attention to the tribal innovations that emerge from the sense of togetherness and belonging made explicit through such tribal affiliations.

Dance forms are a big business, highly marketable commoditized cultural universes, with a plethora of markets constructed around their spirit, vitality and possibilities. In this paper, we explore one particular dance form, that of Salsa, arguing that as consumer researchers we look for a more vibrant vocabulary and mindset with which to capture the experiential and transcendental nature of such social associations. We demonstrate that the metaphor of dancing is useful to revitalize our notions of consumer actions; taking them out of the grey mundane of calculative and rational action into the possibilities of emotional economies constructed around the effervescence and vitality of the social (cf. Maffesoli, 1996). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper contributes to scholarship theorising the sociality of the brand in terms of subject positions it makes possible through drawing upon the generative context of circulating discourses, in this case of masculinity, cuisine and celebrity. Specifically, it discusses masculinity as a socially constructed gender practice (Bristor and Fischer, 1993 Bristor, J. and Fischer, E. 1993. Feminist thought: Implications for consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(March): 518–36. [Google Scholar] ), examining materialisations of such practice in the form of visualisations of social relations as resources for “thinking gender” or “doing gender”. The transformative potential of the visualisations is illuminated by exploring the narrative content choreographed within a series of photographic images positioning the market appeal of a celebrity chef through the medium of a contemporary lifestyle cookery book. We consider how images of men “doing masculinity” are not only channelled into reproducing existing gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality in the service of commercial ends, but also into disrupting such enduring stereotyping through subtle reframing. We acknowledge that masculinity is already inscribed within conventionalised representations of culinary culture. In this case we consider how traces of masculinity are exploited and reinscribed through contemporary images that generate resources for rethinking masculine roles and identities, especially when viewed through the lens of stereotypically feminised pursuits such as shopping, food preparation, cooking, and the communal intimacy of food sharing. We identify unsettling tensions within the compositions, arguing that they relate to discursive spaces between the gendered positions written into the images and the popular imagination they feed off. Set against landscapes of culinary culture, we argue that the images invoke a brand of naively roughish “laddishness” or “blokishness”, rendering it in domesticated form not only as benign and containable, but fashionable, pliable and, importantly, desirable. We conclude that although the images draw on stereotypical premeditated notions of a feral, boisterous and untamed heterosexual masculinity, they also set in motion gender‐blending narratives which test the shifting limits of masculine discourse when set in the mediating context of culinary culture.