Platformisation, dominated by Global North Silicon Valley firms, is central to technocapitalism, yet its heteronormative organising logic remains under-theorised in marketing. This omission is particularly acute for queer consumers operating within Global South platform infrastructures. Addressing this gap, this paper theorises queer survival under platform capitalism in China. Despite institutional differences from Western neoliberal models, China's state-led techno-capitalism produces distinct yet equally urgent crises of platformised heteronormativity. This paper asks: how do queer users navigate and rework such power?Drawing on five years of online observation of queer content creators, platform stakeholders, and secondary interviews, I develop the concept of queer survivalscapes: gong sheng (symbiotic), ji sheng (parasitic), and ye sheng (feral). I theorise queer consumers as precarious yet strategic actors who redistribute risk through relational, performative, and affective labour, advancing technology and queer consumer studies beyond Western-centric accounts of platform power.
This paper examines how Camembert de Normandie, a symbol of French gastronomic heritage, becomes contested amid tensions between microbial life, intellectual property, and branding. At the heart of this trouble is the system of Geographical Indications (GIs), which legally protect terroir-based products while prescribing specific multispecies entanglements. Drawing on more-than-human perspectives and Haraway's call to "stay with the trouble", we trace how raw milk bacteria are alternately celebrated, disciplined, or erased in regulatory and marketing practices. We analyze both domestic disputes between artisanal and industrial producers and international trade conflicts where GIs are framed as monopolistic barriers. These conflicts reveal divergent framings of microbial agency, shaped by legal, scientific, and marketing discourse. The paper contributes to critical market studies by foregrounding the microbiopolitics of place-based commodities, demonstrating how they enact troubled nature-law-value relations. It also highlights how consumers are responsibilized as moral arbiters of risk, taste, and authenticity.
The literature on consumer-object relationships is extensive, but new avenues for research can be inspired through object poetry reading. Reading poems that attend closely to objects allows researchers to access the experience of "lingering," a form of engagement with objects that contrasts with the existing disjunction between individuals and tangible goods. This paper introduces the Imagist movement of early twentieth-century poetry, the object poetry style, and the "Red Room Poetry Object" project - a poetry-writing competition for young people and their teachers in Australasia - to illustrate how marketing scholars interested in consumer - object relationships can be inspired by object poetry reading. The article concludes with a discussion about how engagement with published poems can inspire consumer researchers more broadly.
This article analyzes the historical shift in promotional emphasis in the Anglo-American literary field, and in particular the transition from the label "award-winning book" to "award-winning author" as the dominant determinant of value. Using a mixed-methods approach from the field of culturomics, the study combines quantitative diachronic analysis of the Google Books Ngram corpus (1950-2008) and the NOW corpus (2010-2025) with qualitative historical criticism. Data shows that in the mid-1990s, in the context of awards the word "author" became more common than "book," which coincided with the rise of personal branding ideology. We argue that this change is paradoxical: while commercial brands have evolved toward anthropomorphization, authors are encouraged to adopt instrumental, standardized branding models in order to function effectively in the market. The article concludes by discussing how this commodification of the author is intensified by the affordances of social media and artificial intelligence.
Drawing on an in-depth field study of low-income Muslim households in Turkey, this research theorizes poverty as a cultural enactment rather than a purely economic state. Our findings show that consumers mobilize religious and moral frameworks to interpret, relationally evaluate, and materially manage deprivation in ways that render hardship emotionally sustainable and socially dignified. Through moral enactments (e.g. divine testing, gratitude, prohibitions against waste), relational enactments (e.g. moralized social comparison and recalibrated needs), and embodied enactments (e.g. thrift, repair, reciprocity, and stewardship), participants transform objective scarcity into lived sufficiency and moral coherence. These culturally grounded processes reveal how poverty becomes meaningful, virtuous, and socially validated, challenging deficit-based assumptions that low-income consumers uniformly experience deprivation as psychologically damaging. By conceptualizing poverty as a culturally enacted moral order, this study offers a new framework for understanding how consumers sustain dignity, agency, and emotional resilience under structural constraint.
Utilizing a colonial lens, this study critically investigates the factors contributing to Jakarta's positioning as a trigger city within the global music value chain. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders in the Indonesian music market, as well as data from news articles, commentaries, reports, and podcasts, the findings highlight how Jakarta's colonial legacy, its development into a global city embedded in a neoliberal system, and the rise of a culturally omnivorous middle class, alongside industry-level dynamics such as platformization and playlist politics, create conditions for global music companies to appropriate and exploit local musical tastes and behavior. The study advances the literature on coloniality in marketing by revealing new forms of neocolonial exploitation, particularly within the context of digital capitalism. By introducing the concept of mediating target markets, this paper offers a lens to examine how digital capitalism reconfigures sociocultural hierarchies and facilitates new forms of value extraction.
This commentary calls on our scholarly community to rethink what Fascism might be in the twenty-first century, and what its origins in social media consumption might have to tell us about the connection between neoliberal market cultures and political instability. I argue that Fascism is still a relevant concept for analysing our present moment, as long as it is not framed by early twentieth-century definitions. Rather than use Fascism as a convenient label, it should be understood as a manifestation of a particular post-Enlightenment form of conduct, namely cynicism. It is this mindset, that of the cynic, which ought to be at the centre of current analyses of the causal relationship between digitally mediated consumption forms and the carious fragmentation of formerly stable democratic institutions. The commentary concludes by outlining the contours of a research programme on consumer cynicism.
There are ethical worries concerned with reducing food to a product in the market. Food is an essential part of the social lives of people, and reducing it to a commodity is reducing something which is an intimate part of human experiences. The implications of a situation where certain aspects of the social lives of humans become prone to market domination would be problematic. There is a reason for this belief. Market values are infiltrating social spheres like institutions, persons, relationships, ideas, intellect, creativity, labor, body parts, prostitution and friendships. Treating any of the above as commodities in the industrial context results in the de-contextualization of food from its social and cultural dimensions. A pressing issue relating to food is concerned with popularizing an understanding of food as a commodity in market rhetoric, and this threatens the richness of understanding food in its entirety.
This provocation piece calls for a fundamental shift in marketing and consumer research, arguing that the discipline must address the urgent and systemic injustices embedded within global consumption practices. Building on discussions from the 2023 CCT Conference, we urge scholars to redirect attention from mainstream consumer narratives to the peripheries where injustices are often rendered invisible. Through collective reflection, we identify three intersecting realms where injustices proliferate: underprivileged beings, peripheral places, and non-hegemonic epistemologies. By embracing reflexivity and acknowledging the field's entanglement in sustaining these injustices, we invite scholars to approach consumption critically and advocate for impactful research that disrupts oppressive structures. This work aims to move consumption injustices from the periphery to the core of consumer research, fostering scholarly discourse that prioritises ethical urgency and societal relevance over traditional academic hierarchies.
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are promoted as a sustainable way of transport claiming to be environmentally friendly, with different governments in India launching several schemes to promote them. Recent studies reveal that EVs release more toxic emissions than their non-electric counterparts. Furthermore, the batteries result in the extraction of minerals from the Global South. In this article, we draw from Marxist criticisms of consumerism, sustainable development, and technological fetishism to interrogate how notions of sustainability are legitimised to support EV consumption in India. Dependency theory has been employed to study how policies to provide a sustainable means of life for a few are enacted at the expense of most. By examining India's EV policies within global dependency relations, the article demonstrates how EV promotion represents a form of commodity fetishism reproducing unequal development patterns.
Gender categorisations permeate markets and fuel gender inequalities. A marketplace strategy to address this is gender-bending, whereby marketers reposition products targeted to one gender to another. In this paper, we explore whether gender-bending challenges or reinforces the gendered norms that maintain gendered inequalities. We examine this through a qualitative research study of dolls designed for boys. Our study demonstrates that gender-bending traverses hybrid masculinities that both challenge and reinforce masculine norms. Specifically, whilst the signalling of alternative masculinities challenges masculine norms, these norms are still reinforced through the signalling of hegemonic masculinities used to render the gender-bended product more palatable. Our paper demonstrates that gender-bending is more than a gender reversal and can involve the navigation of complex gender dynamics in the marketplace. Further, we advance understandings of hybrid masculinities in consumer culture by highlighting the capacity of gender-bending to disrupt gender hierarchies - especially for boys.
This editorial introduces the contributions to the special issue on Marxism, Marketing and Consumer Research. It provides a brief introduction to Marxism and its influence on marketing and consumer research to set the scene for seven provocative papers. Each tackles the seemingly perverse challenge of combining Marxism with marketing and consumer research.
Inspired by decolonial studies, this paper explores how Eurocentric coloniality shapes marketing management practices and, in turn, how these practices enact colonial ontologies within the cultural space of Brazilian football. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a major Brazilian football club, we demonstrate that marketing management was introduced into football administration as a Eurocentric reference of modernity. By colonizing managers, marketing practices and discourses engineer a symbolic and material apparatus that positions subjects within a colonial matrix of power. This apparatus operates by establishing three interconnected colonial ontological conditions: spatial-material, behavioral, and rational. These conditions work to colonize supporters' imaginaries, bodies, and rationalities, hierarchizing local supporting culture, its materiality, and its subjects as an inferior "other" in relation to imagined Eurocentric modernity. Our conclusions expand decolonial marketing studies by revealing the specific colonial ontological conditions produced and enacted by marketing management, culminating in the coloniality of being.
How do new companies attempt to captivate customers in a food market they are substantially seeking to transform? Plant-based meat has been marketed as a revolutionary food product that will not only transform markets but also provide better health and reduced environmental harms. Building on conceptualizations of captivation, we analyze video ads from leading brands. Our results highlight four modalities of consumer captivation that we refer to as (a) Cali-ology, emphasizing a "West Coast" lifestyle filled by lively gatherings of people enjoying food together; (b) scientism, mobilizing technology and turning chemistry into magic; (c) celebritism, emphasizing health, athletes and a-list celebrities as supporters of plant-based meat; and (d) tasteology, defining sensory knowledge and pleasure as developed by social practices and what is inside foodstuffs. Inferring a transition from matters of concern, such as health and environment, to consumers' sensory pleasure, these modalities together make up what we term plant capitalization.
Under more financial pressure than ever, audiences are looking for ways to budget, save, and invest online. Enter Personal Finance influencers. We find that while viewers might look for straightforward advice on saving and budgeting, they will inevitably encounter a wide range of topics, including the car and housing markets, inflation, the Federal Reserve, and geopolitics. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, including machine learning and a qualitative analysis of YouTube videos from four top influencer channels. Drawing on the history of neoliberalism and influencer studies, we find top videos focus on personal minimalism as an approach to wealth building while making macroeconomic predictions such as the prospect of an impending recession or the collapse of the U.S. dollar. The YouTube platform, which requires constant content creation, pushes influencers to make implicit economic judgments about financial topics. As a consequence, Personal Finance influencers exemplify a neoliberal transformation of expertise through the attention economy of social platforms, which further entrenches the market as the validator of Truth.
This essay rethinks poetry in consumption studies, not as a methodological tool or reflexive supplement, but as the intrinsic logic in the capitalist economy of desire. It contends that poetic language allows creative expressions of desire within the limits of a language itself. Poetry therefore plays with the limits of a language whereas transgression exceeds them. By extending a poetic logic to economic analysis, this essay claims that a "poetic economy of desire" can stretch into new areas of desiring while simultaneously holding on to its integrity - thus mirroring capitalism's remarkable dynamicity and capacity of self-renewal, which nonetheless never threatens the axiom of capital. Therefore, any vision of a post-capitalist economy must adapt an equally dynamic poetics as capitalism itself, but its inviolable limit - its claim for a new axiom - must be something socially and environmentally fairer.
This article explores how the global idea of "clean" and "modern" energy promoted by Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) is reinterpreted in Langas, a Kenyan informal settlement shaped by internal migration and postcolonial legacies. The Kenyan government embraced SDG7's vision, promoting liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) bottles as a "clean" and "modern" energy solution to displace polluting fuels like firewood, charcoal and kerosene. However, ethnographic fieldwork in Langas reveals that residents consume LPG bottles not solely for their practical use, but as aspirational objects signifying social distinction and access to Western lifestyles. Their material features - colour, shine and shape - carry symbolic weight, expressing a local sense of "modernity" that diverges from that of global energy narratives. By examining the meanings ascribed to LPG bottles in Langas, this article contributes to debates on the consumption of ideas in postcolonial contexts, highlighting the limits of universalist approaches to energy transition projects.
