Purpose This paper aims to examine how the postfeminist contradiction is reorganised under platform conditions and develops the Postfeminist Analytical Framework (PFAN) as a critical framework for analysing this shift within sport media. The focus is not on establishing whether contradiction exists but on examining how it is articulated through athlete-led visibility labour, platform infrastructures, audience interpretation, commercial value and exposure to harm. The PFAN is therefore positioned as a critical relational heuristic for qualitative market research rather than as a stand-alone theory, showing how researchers can trace contradiction systematically across the platformed conditions through which it is produced and made consequential. Design/methodology/approach The paper develops the PFAN from postfeminism as a sensibility into a relational heuristic for qualitative analysis. Rather than treating contradiction as a static textual feature, the framework traces how feminist and antifeminist meanings are produced and articulated across platform affordances, affective dynamics, audience uptake, governance arrangements, value production and harm. The argument is advanced through critical synthesis of feminist sport media scholarship and operationalised through a linked theoretical and analytical matrix. The paper foregrounds method as much as concept by clarifying what researchers should look for, how different analytical dimensions relate and where reflexive judgement remains necessary. Findings The paper shows that postfeminist contradiction remains a recurring feature of digital sport media, but under platform conditions it becomes both representational and infrastructural. Contradictory meanings are organised, circulated and reworked through platform affordances, affective engagement, monetisation, moderation, branding expectations and uneven relations of visibility. The worked illustration further shows how audience responses may reproduce or contest the same articulation, linking interpretation and affect to visibility, value, governance and vulnerability. The PFAN therefore makes analytically traceable not simply the presence of contradiction, but how it is reproduced, modified and made consequential as it moves across representation, circulation and reception. Originality/value The PFAN’s contribution lies in offering a relational analytical heuristic for tracing how postfeminist contradiction is articulated across discourse, platform infrastructures, affect, interpretation, value, harm and governance. It does not claim to replace existing postfeminist scholarship or to discover contradiction anew. Rather, it brings established insights into a coherent, transparent and sport-specific framework that connects conceptual analysis with empirical questions about visibility, value, governance, vulnerability and interpretation in contemporary sport media research. Its originality therefore lies in analytical integration, transparent operationalisation and sport-specific application rather than in claiming an entirely new account of postfeminism.
Purpose Luxury is synonymous with quality, exclusivity and rarity, characteristics which do not hold sustainability as a core consideration in service provision. This study aims to investigate how luxury service brands craft stories on social media around their sustainability practices. Design/methodology/approach In-depth, semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of informants using an interview protocol informed by consultation with literature in storytelling and sustainability marketing as well as four pilot interviews with practitioners in luxury hospitality. Data collection consisted of 29 interviews with individuals from Michelin star restaurants. Transcripts were inductively analysed following Gioia’s methodology, encompassing open- and axial-coding before abductive aggregation into four distinct dimensions based on Dessart and Standaert (2023) strategic storytelling framework. Findings Twelve themes were identified across four aggregate dimensions: aim, actors, aspiration and action (Dessart and Standaert, 2023). Within the aim dimension, luxury service brands tell the stories of their sustainable systems by supporting local producers while always prioritising the quality of their products. Apart from spotlighting their restaurants as central actors in their story, participants highlight suppliers and supporting governing bodies in crafting their sustainability content narratives. The aspiration dimension tells the story of sustainability’s role in restaurants’ heritage, authenticity and service experience. Finally, the discussion centres on owned, earned and co-created content as action elements within storytelling efforts. Originality/value This study builds on previous scholarly work on effective storytelling in providing novel contributions by operationalising the strategic storytelling framework at the confluence of luxury services and sustainability, as well as managerial practice within the restaurant industry and the broader luxury brands and services contexts. This study identifies 12 distinct narrative elements across the four categories of strategic storytelling which serve to provide novel insights for theory as well as a roadmap for practitioners looking to craft their own sustainability narratives on social media platforms.
Purpose Meat consumption is increasingly contested because of health risks, environmental impacts and animal welfare concerns. However, the shift towards plant-based diets remains underexplored in marketing research. This study aims to examine how consumers make sense of their dietary choices – whether to continue eating or to reject meat. Design/methodology/approach This study uses an exploratory qualitative design, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 21 participants representing meat and meat-free dietary profiles. The participants were recruited through purposive convenience sampling. The interview transcripts were systematically analysed using a lexical and thematic approach. Self-awareness theory (SAT) was then mobilised as an interpretive lens, first to make sense of the emerging themes and subsequently to structure a semiotic square analysis, revealing and clarifying the semantic meaning categories underlying dietary choices. Findings The semiotic square identifies four consumer typologies – the Convinced Reflective, the Tormented Silent, the Committed Activist and the Anxious Conformist. These profiles illustrate how meat consumption or rejection relates to the interplay between private self-awareness (self-affirmation versus self-criticism) and public self-awareness (commitment versus conformity). Across the profiles, choices are shaped by intertwined hedonic, utilitarian, social and ecological values. Originality/value By articulating SAT with the semiotic square, this paper sheds light on how private self-awareness and public self-awareness are jointly associated in consumer attitudes and decision-making regarding meat consumption. Moreover, the resulting profiles provide a comprehensive perspective on the heterogeneity of consumer beliefs and behaviours, emphasising the complexity of the cognitive and social processes underlying food-related choices.
Purpose This study aims to examine how marketing professionals organise strategic reasoning in complex, data-rich contexts, using computational thinking (CT) to analyse how specific cognitive operations appear and combine in their accounts of decision-making. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a qualitative design based on 20 semi-structured interviews with experienced marketing professionals. The data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with MAXQDA supporting transcript organisation, coding and retrieval. The resulting themes were interpreted in relation to four CT elements: decomposition, abstraction, pattern recognition and algorithmic thinking. A focused cross-case comparison examined how these operations appeared together in participants’ accounts. Findings The findings show that marketing professionals described strategic work involving CT-related operations, although they did not use CT terminology. A targeted cross-case analysis identified clear instances in which multiple operations were combined within individual accounts of strategic processes. These examples suggest flexible configurations of interrelated cognitive operations rather than a fixed or universal sequence. Practical implications The four CT operations could be used as prompts in campaign planning, dashboard interpretation, strategy reviews and marketing education. Whether these applications improve marketing decision-making or learning requires empirical evaluation. Originality/value The study contributes to the marketing strategy and managerial cognition literatures by making the organisation of strategic reasoning more explicit. Using CT as an analytical vocabulary, it shows how marketing professionals decompose problems, prioritise information, connect experience with current market signals and combine these operations when planning and adapting strategic action.
Purpose This paper introduces the Consumer-Curated Post-Purchase Video (CCPPV) method as a qualitative approach for exploring consumers’ everyday consumption practices. Design/methodology/approach The CCPPV method comprises five stages: participant recruitment, participant-generated post-purchase video recording, video observation and memo-taking, follow-up auto-driving interviews and integrated data analysis. Participants record their post-purchase experiences, which are analyzed using Textual-Visual Thematic Analysis to integrate visual and verbal materials. Findings This paper presents the CCPPV method as an alternative configuration of participant-generated video and auto-driving interviews. The method invites participants to select, arrange and narrate aspects of their post-purchase experiences and treats these representational choices as part of the analytical material. Although curation and self-presentation may also occur in mobile ethnography, video diaries and other participant-generated visual methods, CCPPV foregrounds participants’ selective representational choices through a bounded post-purchase recording task and their subsequent interpretation during auto-driving interviews. Originality/value The paper contributes to qualitative consumer research by conceptualizing consumer curation as an analytically significant practice within a specific post-purchase research design. Rather than claiming methodological superiority over related visual approaches, the paper demonstrates how a bounded, participant-curated video exercise can be combined with memoing, auto-driving and textual-visual analysis to explore how consumers select and frame meaningful aspects of their consumption.
