Transformative consumer research in the new era of marketing: An introduction to the special issue

Orientation: This article provides a rationale for considering transformative consumer research as a research approach for investigating the relationship between consumption and consumers’ well-being in South Africa.Research purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the principles underlying transformative consumer research, including how it differs from traditional research methods and pointing out some established research areas in this field.Motivation for the study: Apart from pointing to a lack of literature, this article highlights the relevance of this approach for emerging countries by investigating the principles and practices embedded in transformative consumer research. It provides some indication of how an investigation of these areas may contribute to enhancing the relevance of consumer research to its various stakeholders.Research design, approach and method: The author used a literature review to conduct the study.Main findings: It appears that consumer research currently lacks external and internal relevance. A transformative consumer-research approach may address some of the fundamental problems in the way consumer psychologists plan and conduct their research, contributing to this lack of relevance.Practical/managerial implications: Most stages of the traditional research approach may need to be adapted for transformative research purposes. Some approaches appear particularly suited to transformative consumer research, including revelatory, incendiary, policy, participatory and coalition research. Contribution/value-add: This study’s primary contribution stems from suggesting a rather novel additional approach to enhance the relevance of consumer research in South Africa, pointing out some established practices in the field of transformative consumer research and suggesting how they may augment consumer research in South Africa.

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate how transformative consumer research can help entrepreneurs reach markets that are often left out of marketing strategies, with a focus on sustainable development. Theoretical Framework: This paper addresses transformative consumer research and design thinking as tools to bring entrepreneurs and companies closer to their markets. The concept of information as power and the need to adapt marketing strategies to the context of the 21st century are discussed, with an emphasis on social responsibility and sustainability. Method: The methodology adopted is descriptive in terms of objectives and bibliographic in terms of procedures. Articles and other publications between 2010 and the present were analyzed, with data sources from Google. Results and Discussion: The results indicate that companies should integrate transformative consumer research into their strategies to obtain relevant data that drive the success of marketing actions. The need to promote responsible and sustainable consumption, in line with the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), is also highlighted. Research Implications: The practical implications suggest that companies that use transformative consumer research can generate value for all potential customers, including the most vulnerable, and contribute to sustainable development. Originality/Value: This study contributes to the literature by highlighting how transformative consumer research can be an innovative strategic tool, with the potential to generate sustainable impacts on business practices.

Applying a transformative consumer research (TCR) perspective urges scholars to adopt a critical praxis. In this chapter we explore what a TCR approach entails and how the proposed Transformative Gender Justice Framework is well suited to help practitioners and scholars address gender-based injustices. We highlight topics in marketing and consumer behavior studies within TCR that might benefit from the addition of a gender focus, and research on gender outside of TCR that might gain from the integration of a transformational perspective. We conclude by reflecting on the activism and praxis orientations that this integration could help stimulate both outside and within academia. Keywords: transformative consumer research, critical praxis, gender justice, inequality, recognition theory, capabilities approach, critical feminism, intersectionality theory, marginalized genders and marginalized identities

This critical literature review incorporates a transformative consumer research (TCR) perspective in highlighting selected transgressions in corporate social responsibility that touch on (1) wealth consolidation, (2) environmental degradation, (3) commodification, (4) semiotic contamination, and (5) an erosion of accountability. It argues for a participatory approach among stakeholders in sustaining marketing research and assessing consumer policy that is both ethical and critical for academic marketers and practitioners alike. Transformative consumer researchers work to ensure that advertisements, messaging, and integrated marketing communications play a key role in promoting honesty and transparency. At the same time, transformative consumer research recognizes that advertising often masks the underlying costs incurred by society in general, and consumers in particular. TCR practices presently exist, and examples are presented to highlight these practices in consumer policy.

Objective: Completing 15 years of Transformative Consumer Research in 2020, this article aims to present an overview of the Brazilian scientific production about how the fat body was approached from this research perspective in this period between 2005 and 2019.Method: To analyze the national scientific production of the fat body in TCR studies from 2005 to 2019, an integrative literature review was carried out according the review steps indicated by Cooper (1984). Thus, a search for the terms "Transformative Research", "Transformative Consumer Research" and "TCR" was carried out in the annals of the main administration events; national journals registered in the SPELL database with Qualis/CAPES 2013-2016 ratings in the strata from B5 to A2 in the area of Administration; and the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD).Findings: The results point to a significant growth of publications in TCR in the years 2018 and 2019 but indicate the need to study other groups of vulnerable consumers, in addition to those with some disability, such as consumers of the fat body archetype.Originality: The present study has merit since the results are important to broaden the discussion about the fat body within the theme of consumption, allowing to give visibility to this debate and bringing the theme to the knowledge of managers and market professionals who can contribute to expanding access to consumption by this public; in addition to, specifically, contributing to the propagation of studies from the perspective of transformative research and social marketing, encouraging new researchers and new studies within the aforementioned scopes.

Julie L. Ozanne is the Sonny Merryman Professor of Marketing, Virginia Tech (e-mail: jozanne@ vt. edu). The author appreciates valuable input from Laurel Anderson, Terry Cobb, Brennan Davis, Ron Hill, David Mick, and Lucie Ozanne. The essays in this special issue originated from the second Transformative Consumer Research Conference held at Villanova University in 2009 that Ron Hill, Madhu Viswanathan, and I organized. Transformative consumer research (TCR) is a new academic movement that aims to advance the well-being of consumers through research that employs rigorous theories and methods (Mick 2006). Transformative researchers study the problems most relevant and pressing for consumers and society and then disseminate usable research findings to stakeholders who are best poised for constructive action (Mick et al. 2012). Thus, it is unsurprising that a natural affinity exists between TCR and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. This journal is one of the finest academic homes for research that aims to advance consumer well-being because of its special relationship to public policy makers who are important agents of social change. In many ways, the 2009 Transformative Consumer Research Conference deviated from the traditional conference format in which scholars present relatively finished research. Instead, the task for the conference participants was to assess the current state of research and then envision future research directions to inspire work on the most important social problems of our time. Scholars who are passionate about and committed to these persistent problems led the tracks: Dipankar Chakravarti and Jose Rosa on poverty; Rohit Deshpande and Cliff Shultz on developing markets; Bill Kilbourne and Andy Prothero on sustainable consumption; Jim Burroughs and Lan Chaplin on materialism; Punam Keller and Debbie Scammon on health; Lauren Block and Sonya Grier on food and well-being; Betsy Moore and Connie Pechmann on at-risk groups; Laurie Anderson and Dave Crockett on immigration, culture, and ethnicity; and Linda Scott and Jerome Williams on social justice. In each track, we also invited either guest scholars with established research records, such as Alan Andreasen, or researchers who hail from related fields, such as Ellen Kennedy from the Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies. Conference participants earned entrance into these tracks by submitting a bold vision for conducting impactful research on the substantive issue appropriate for their track. To facilitate meaningful exchanges, the tracks were designed to be small, containing approximately a dozen people or fewer. We welcomed more than 100 intrepid researchers to participate in a novel conference format: a dialogical conference where they engaged in a remarkable activity—deeply listening to one another. Encouraged by the gracious financial support of Halloran Philanthropies, which fully funded this conference, we were emboldened to conduct a conference so devoid of the normal trappings of an academic conference, such as formal presentations and luncheons, that this meeting barely resembled a traditional conference at all. For a day and a half, small groups of scholars engaged in dialogue on issues of shared concern. In this essay, I begin by describing this unusual gathering and how colleagues were able to meet with other researchers, in conversation, and then leverage their distributed knowledge to chart new directions for TCR. A dialogical conference was particularly well suited for the tasks facing the TCR community—building a strong social network of researchers, sharing practical wisdom among scholars who seek to translate research into action, and inspiring new scholars on the promise of social change research. I close with a challenge to rethink our traditional notion of research and envision new forms of engaged scholarship based on the premise that we have a stake in forging workable solutions to these important social problems.

Eco-design packaging: An epistemological analysis and transformative research agenda

In contrast to understanding consumer behavior for the benefit of business organizations, transformative consumer research (TCR) seeks to understand consumer behavior for the benefit of consumers themselves. Following Mari’s (2008) call for the incorporation of TCR in doctoral programs in marketing, this article outlines the relevance of TCR to the undergraduate consumer behavior course experience and develops topical and structural recommendations for implementation. Empirical evidence indicates positive student perceptions of TCR-based course projects in terms of complementing traditional projects, personal relevance, awareness of social responsibility issues, and marketing applications.

In order to understand the connection between development, marketing and transformative consumer research (TCR), with its attendant interest in promoting human well-being, this article begins by charting the links between US ‘exceptionalism’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modernisation theory, demonstrating the confluence of US perspectives and experiences in articulations and understandings of the contributions of marketing practice and consumer research to society. Our narrative subsequently engages with the rise of social marketing (1960s-) and finally TCR (2006-). We move beyond calls for an appreciation of paradigm plurality to encourage TCR scholars to adopt a multiple paradigmatic approach as part of a three-pronged strategy that encompasses an initial ‘provisional moral agnosticism’. As part of this stance, we argue that scholars should value the insights provided by multiple paradigms, turning each paradigmatic lens sequentially on to the issue of the relationship between marketing, development and consumer well-being. After having scrutinised these issues using multiple perspectives, scholars can then decide whether to pursue TCR-led activism. The final strategy that we identify is termed ‘critical intolerance’.

Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) has emerged to fill the gaps and overcome fragmentation in the field of consumer research in the well-being domain. This movement gave rise to Transformative Service Research (TSR), which is aimed at identifying and evaluating the well-being effects arising from the services. The objective of this paper was to map the scientific production on TCR and TSR, based on a bibliometric analysis and a content analysis of a sample consisting of 114 studies available in the Scopus, SciELO and SPELL databases. Our study offers a map of the most productive journals and authors, the most impactful studies and an analysis of thematic categories and some network analyses. The results show a slight increase in the interest on the topic, which indicates the need for intensified research in the field, especially focused on areas of study such as economic vulnerability, obesity, alcohol and drug consumption, individuals with physical disabilities, environmental practices, and adoption of sustainable strategies, technology and social services. In the Brazilian context, we identified the need to disseminate the themes in the academic field, that is, postgraduate programs in marketing area, scientific journals and conferences. Finally, our study is considered a call for a change in the perspectives of researchers and journal reviewers in the field of consumer studies.

This practice-based ethnographic thesis advances knowledge about sustainable consumption through the use of practice theory as ontology. Consequently, this study accounts for consumption not exclusively through human entities but through practices as a relational compilation of different (non-) human entities. In centring practices as unit of analysis instead of the consumer, this study joins an existing family of what might be termed materially oriented –flat– ontologies in consumer research. This study further stresses that committing to practices as ontological units of analysis is not enough on its own to account for phenomena because practices themselves are merely the fabric through which social phenomena transpire (Schatzki, 2012, 2016). Therefore, the practice approach of this study is innovatively paired with Gramsci’s (1971) and Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) political theories of hegemony and social antagonism to better account for the understudied relations between, or politics of, (un-)sustainable practices (Hargreaves, 2011, Hargreaves et al., 2013, Gram-Hanssen, 2011). The empirical part of this study looks at urban cycling in Las Palmas, Spain, where car driving is the unsustainable dominant form of transport. According to a practice ontology, the research question was reframed from ‘why don’t people choose to cycle’? to ‘why is the sustainable practice of urban cycling marginalised?’ Guided by two definitions of practices from social theory (Schatzki, 1996, Shove et al., 2012), and a research design from organizational studies (Nicolini, 2009a), fieldwork and data analysis were of a hybrid inductive nature in exploring the detailed and relational character of the practice elements ‘meanings, competence and materials’. Methods included mobile visual ethnography, historical analysis, participant observation, unstructured (group) interviews, netnography and documentary data analysis. Findings suggest that to understand why urban cycling as a sustainable practice is marginalised we need to first examine the relationship between practice elements inside practices and second the politics of relations between related practices. Consequently, the evolution of urban cycling is hindered by both, internal and external conflicts between practices. Several practices compete with urban cycling for material, skilful, and symbolic resources, such as stealing, policing, schooling and lobbying. These seem to bundle together supporting the dominant unsustainable practice of car driving, the most obvious resource-rival to urban cycling. Building on concepts taken from Gramsci and Laclau and Mouffe, this study introduces the term ‘synergist practices’ to show that the existence of a sustainable (antagonist) practice is conditioned by several practices (synergists) instead by a mere dualist relationship with unsustainable practices (agonist). The introduction of a practice ontology for the study of sustainable consumption yields three essential contributions to Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) and Macromarketing. Firstly, this study reveals how hierarchies and partnerships among practices iv have the ability to constrain or enable sustainable consumption. This study thereby extends the notion of ‘flattening’ out consumption studies as it assesses how the equal split of agency among practice-elements, i.e. material, competence and meanings does not necessarily indicate the absence of hierarchies and domination among practices as entities. Secondly, understanding (un-)sustainable consumption as the outcome of complex relationships between different competing practices instead of agentic consumer choice, deconstructs empirically the underlying neo-liberalistic assumptions of CCT, Macromarketing and TCR and accompanying beliefs about behaviour change. Sustainable consumption, the study suggests, depends on the (im-)possibilities of sustainable practices and their constitutive resources not on the will of the individual. This offers an alternative view on the ‘green behaviour gap’ (Moraes et al., 2011, Claudy and Peterson, 2014) in that consumers, although deliberately wanting one thing, are not always able to follow through with their ‘beliefs’ Thirdly, transformational research to achieve well-being might best target the well-being of practices primarily to achieve effective social change for humankind. This innovative thinking also contributes to Macromarketing in that it provides a way out of the ‘Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP)’ (Kilbourne et al., 1997) arguing for a form of ‘post-capitalistic thinking through practices’. Sustainability as priority for human kind should not be framed around choices, profitability or attractiveness to consumers, which merely perpetuates the commodification of sustainability. A practice based view of sustainability then requires a rejection of a market ideology and may possibly provide a workable alternative framework.

Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) has emerged to fill the gaps and overcome fragmentation in the field of consumer research in the well-being domain. This movement gave rise to Transformative Service Research (TSR), which is aimed at identifying and evaluating the well-being effects arising from the services. The objective of this paper was to map the scientific production on TCR and TSR, based on a bibliometric analysis and a content analysis of a sample consisting of 114 studies available in the Scopus, SciELO and SPELL databases. Our study offers a map of the most productive journals and authors, the most impactful studies and an analysis of thematic categories and some network analyses. The results show a slight increase in the interest on the topic, which indicates the need for intensified research in the field, especially focused on areas of study such as economic vulnerability, obesity, alcohol and drug consumption, individuals with physical disabilities, environmental practices, and adoption of sustainable strategies, technology and social services. In the Brazilian context, we identified the need to disseminate the themes in the academic field, that is, postgraduate programs in marketing area, scientific journals and conferences. Finally, our study is considered a call for a change in the perspectives of researchers and journal reviewers in the field of consumer studies.

O presente artigo investiga a relao de crianas e adolescentes com os alimentos na hora do recreio. Essa investigao realizada sob a perspectiva do bem-estar alimentar, que surge em estudos realizados no contexto da Pesquisa Transformativa do Consumidor (PTC). Esta pesquisa exploratria foi desenvolvida utilizando uma combinao de observao no-participante e entrevista em profundidade como tcnicas de coleta de dados. Os dados levantados foram cotejados em relao a cada um dos cinco parmetros do bem-estar alimentar propostos por Bublitz et al. (2011). Este estudo pretende contribuir com o avano da PTC aplicando os parmetros do bem-estar alimentar aos hbitos de crianas e adolescentes em relao aos alimentos na hora do recreio.

This dissertation explores how value co-destruction impacts consumer-supplier well-being in the sharing economy, particularly in P2P accommodation. By adopting a qualitative research approach and collecting data from Australian guests and hosts, this study explored the value co-destruction drivers and the manner in which they impact consumer perceived values and consequently consumer-supplier well-being. The study contributes to knowledge in the emerging research fields of ‘value co-destruction’, ‘Transformative consumer research’, to service-dominant logic, and the wider tourism and hospitality industry, for which several theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

Situated at the intersection of markets and development, this commentary aims to promote a cross-fertilization of macromarketing and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) that directs attention to the sociocultural context and situational embeddedness of consumer experience and well-being, while acknowledging complex, systemic interdependencies between markets, marketing, and society. Based on a critical review of the meaning of development and an interrogation of various developmental discourses, the authors develop a conceptual framework that brings together issues of development, well-being, and social inequalities. We suggest that these issues are better understood and addressed when examined via grounded investigations of the role of markets in shaping the management of resources, consumer agency, power inequalities and ethics. The use of markets as units of analysis may lead to further cross-fertilizations of TCR and macromarketing and to more comprehensive theorizing and transformational impact. Two empirical cases are provided to illustrate our framework.