Consumer Fantasy Research Articles

Consumer fantasies, feelings, fun …, and death? How mortality salience invokes consumers' fantastical thoughts about luxury products

Consumer fantasies, feelings, fun …, and death? How mortality salience invokes consumers' fantastical thoughts about luxury products

Consuming the Caribbean: Tourism, Sex Tourism, and Land Development in Nicole Dennis-Benn's Here Comes the Sun

In Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Behn explores the interplay of structural inequalities and questions who benefits from the commoditization of land and women’s bodies. The author utilizes the space of a fictional resort, a site where racial and economic tensions play out, to examine asymmetrical power relations. The novel situates sexual exploitation and environmental devastation as parallel forces and demonstrates that the stigma against homosexual intimacy functions as a site of social control. This article extends scholarship on the trope of Caribbean paradise by reading the service economies in the novel as a set of consumptive industries that are reliant on consumer fantasies. My analysis considers the novel in light of recent scholarship on the relationship between landscape and power, the function of racial-sexual economies in the Caribbean, and the construction of the Caribbean picturesque. I argue that Dennis-Behn positions Jamaican citizens as perpetrators as well as beneficiaries of extractive and exploitative practices to complicate understandings of intersecting systems of oppression.

We beat the cops in GTA: Po(ludic)al activism in the age of video games

This article explores how individuals reflect on their digital experiences of actualizing fantasies to make sense of their everyday actions, particularly in the context of video gaming. Our study takes a qualitative approach to understanding the context of materializing consumer fantasies, as initially experienced and actualized in video games, and how these fantasies are transformed into material reality, through an investigation of an illustrative case of mass street protests, the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey. The findings suggest that digital virtual experiences in video games have obvious manifestations in the material world, as consumers travel on the borders of reality, moving back and forth into the liminoid terrain of the digital virtual, and provide a deeper understanding of how the blurred boundaries between the virtual and material are established in practice.

Hollywood Made in China by Aynne Kokas

Reviewed by: Hollywood Made in China by Aynne Kokas Karen Fang (bio) Aynne Kokas. Hollywood Made in China. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xxii, 245 pp. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-0-520-29401-1. Paperback $29.95, ISBN 978-0-520-29402-8. Electronic $29.95, isbn 978-0-520-96729-8. China's influence in Hollywood arose so rapidly and massively that it is sometimes hard to grasp the exact circumstances of its impact. In 2015 for example, the Matt Damon blockbuster The Martian was the object of derision for its perceived pandering to China, as suggested by the heroic role that country plays in the film's plot as well as a general proliferation of Chinese characters and settings that had become increasingly ubiquitous in American movies since the early 2000s. Ironically, though, while audiences who had seen movies like Looper, Transformers 4, Skyfall, and The Dark Knight Rises were correct in suspecting that this recent Hollywood trend for Chinese imagery has economic and political motivation, in the case of The Martian such a suspicion was wrong. The film version of The Martian merely reproduces a plot development in the original novel on which the film is based. Thus while the Chinese plot cameo in the movie may indeed have been attractive to studios and investors when the novel was optioned for cinematic adaptation, for debut sci-fi author Andy Weir, China's key role in his novel arose as part of his studied projection of future global developments, including how the nation's explosive prosperity and political ascension in the past few decades would catapult China as a leading player in global—now galactic—geopolitics. These connections between cinematic and geopolitical Sino-US relations are the subject of Aynne Kokas's Hollywood Made in China, a superb account of how business encounters between two leading film industries demonstrate growing economic interdependency between these two superpowers. As Kokas shows, China is increasingly flexing its muscle in Hollywood and Hollywood is increasingly dependent upon Chinese revenue. These conditions structure mass culture and media content in both countries, and because media is a defining sector of developed economies like the United States it also is a telling index by which we can gauge how China both emulates and diverges from its major interlocutor. It is that latter aspect of difference and similarity, moreover, on which Kokas is particularly illuminating, as Hollywood Made in China explores how the two nations' relative prioritizing of capitalism and political ideology complicate any intersection between the two countries and industries. As Kokas puts it, while in the United States "media industries . . . drive the government," in China "government intervention drives the media industries" (p. 27). The above-noted Hollywood embedding of Chinese cast and locations, which reflect incentivized content guidelines by which global filmmakers [End Page 70] conform in order to gain access to the lucrative mainland market, are just some of the examples that Kokas explores. Other case studies include professional forums like industry conferences and "pitch sessions" and the unique contributions of "above-the-line" and "below-the-line" workers (respectively, industry parlance for leading creative figures like talent and producers or specialized technical and service workers like grips, continuity advisors, or stunt persons). Branding is a unifying concept throughout the volume, familiar from advertising and other business discourse but which Kokas applies to nations, industries, and individual professionals as well. As Kokas explains, because "Hollywood's presence in China is about the expansion of vertically and horizontally integrated media conglomerates" (p. 5), sites of encounter range from public and private, official and unofficial, commercial and civilian forms. In chapter 2, for example, Kokas examines Disney's encroachments in China through a wide variety of ventures beyond its marquee brand manifestation in amusement parks and film and entertainment media. Tracking commercial projects that include merchandise, non-recreational infrastructure, and even English-language schools for young children, Kokas shows how the peculiarity and power of Chinese clout incites one of the world's most powerful brands to adopt local attributes, precisely because that adaption enables Disney to propagate its consumer fantasies through quasi-domesticated channels such as the young children indoctrinated in Disney...

Service Quality Level as the Determinant of Consumer Emotional Loyalty and Fantasy in South Africa’s Pick & Pay Chain Stores

Despite the increase in research focusing on service level in retailing sector, there seem to be lack of studies that have investigated the influence of service quality level on customer emotional loyalty and fantasy in the African retailing context. Therefore, using a data set of 151 from athletes in Gauteng Province of South Africa, this study examines these relationships. All the posited two hypotheses are supported. The results indicate that retailer service level has positive and significant influence on consumer emotional loyalty and consumer fantasy. The research paper discusses both academic and managerial implications of the results and future research directions are suggested. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n3p579

Calling Local/Talking Global: the cosmo-politics of the call-center industry

This article considers dramatic performances of cosmopolitan encounters within the transnational framework of the call-center industry in India. Have the virtual intimacies generated by new media and market technologies ushered in a cosmopolitan connectivity? What utopic gestures do we glimpse from portrayals of cross-cultural contact in the age of the copy? By considering the intersection of consumer fantasy, global capital, and the neoliberal state, this article tracks the affinities between economic globalization and cultural cosmopolitanism.

Fairies and a Flâneur: J. M. Barrie’s Commercial Figure of the Child

J. M. Barrie's The Little White Bird (1902) a fantastical narrative of romantic sentiment, nostalgia, and childish whimsy, not to mention the book that gave literary birth to the famous Peter Pan. The novel narrated by Captain W - , an aging bachelor retired from the military who voyeuristically observes the courtship of a young woman, Mary A - , and her artist fiance and then befriends their young son David. Noting the couple's poverty, the captain secretly provides for them and becomes something of a surrogate father to David, buying him gifts from infancy to school age, overseeing his early rearing by parents and nursemaid, and sharing adventure stories with the boy. Much of the novel in fact unfolds from the fantastical tales told by the captain or by David of the adventures in Kensington Gardens had by the fairies and the lost boy Peter Pan as well as of the amusing organization of birds led by one wise old Solomon. The close bond that the captain develops with the child, however, from the beginning tinged with a profound ambivalence tied to possession: the narrator wants to hold on to the innocent child, and yet that attachment comes with the acknowledgment that David will eventually go off to school, grow up, and leave him. The novel thus shuttles between the often uncanny - indeed, beautifully strange - stories associated with the fantasy and children's literature of the period on the one hand and the captain's sense of impending loss that colors his sentimental attachment to the child figure on the other hand.But this only part of a bigger, and perhaps stranger, story. In Barrie's novel, the captain's melodramatic attachment to the child also expresses a curious market logic. Although he doesn't explain his attachment to the child in explicitly economic terms, their bond develops and finds expression, alternately, through the phantasmagoria of the market - exemplified by toy shops - and through fairy tales. In both cases, Barrie dramatizes an Edwardian commercial fantasy of endless consumption as play and suggests how the child figure constructed to license that consumer fantasy in the service of economic optimism and market growth often associated with the period.In general, then, this essay concerns itself with how modern British society has shaped often conflicting images of the child and what those constructions of childishness can tell us about the larger cultural preoccupations across the period. Indeed, from the Victorian era through the twentieth century, the child figure plays a curious and shifting role in the British cultural imaginary. As Jacqueline Rose and James Kincaid have shown, the figure of the child often acts as a kind of vessel for containing or displacing adult anxieties associated with sexuality, industrialization, and class difference. In The Case of Peter Pan, Rose argues that Peter Pan, and much of its textual and cultural history, is a front - a cover not as concealer but as vehicle - for what most unsettling and uncertain about the relationship between adult and child. It shows innocence not as a property of childhood but as a portion of adult desire.1 That is, the image of the child set up to stave off and keep at bay any challenges to normative adult sexuality.2 This process of disavowal requires staking a claim on the child, holding it in place as a category of innocence to bear the weight of and elide anxieties of the uneasy relationship between adult and child regarding questions of sexual origins and unconscious polymorphous desire.3 In Child-Loving, Kincaid similarly posits the child as a category that works to hold at bay Victorian anxieties concerning sexuality, and he shows how the construction of the child figure takes shape through discourses that sexualize the child in the very act of making her or him innocent. That constructed sexual innocence also intersects with and wards off anxieties of class difference and capitalist exploitation in a period still wrestling with problems of child labor and the like. …

The Thinking Voice: When Listening Trumps Celebrity

In the brief span of 1952–68, Puerto Rico sped through its industrialization process. Middle-class residential construction dotted the city of San Juan. Hotels replaced the mansions along its Condado waterfront. The spanking new Medical Center promised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—Operation Bootstrap—desperately needed, as it endeavored to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual labor force to American capital. The “Golden Mile,” the financial district established in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey, emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. The mythic mall of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a cattle ranch that bred cows for the milk industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers and magazines were filled with consumer fantasies of every variety. Along with everything else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop star.

When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (review)

{ 160 } BOOK REV IEwS At the end of her book, Leon leaves us with a very fine piece of dissident advice: “Don’t touch Molière is a warning that theater directors and historians alike should not heed” (143). This is a book by a theatre historian who clearly has considerable sympathy for theatre practitioners as distinct from those “present-day venerators of Molière” who still govern much of what is written about Molière. The Revolution abolished both the Académie and the ComédieFran çaise, but they were soon back,functioning at their worst as the crypt within which high culture is entombed. (And that story could be a sequel to this book, which I would like to see Leon write.) Mutable, ever changing, unstable, even incoherent, combining high and low, academic and popular, low and vulgar farce with refined comedy, all of these at once, Molière, as Leon suggests, belongs to all of us, not exclusively to Ces Messieurs de l’Académie. Exhuming Molière, getting him out of the stultifying mausoleum of high culture, remains one of the great joys of working with and playing Molière. —MICHAEl SPINGlER Clark University \ When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture. By Marlis Schweitzer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 344 pp. $39.95 cloth. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interrelatedness of fashion and entertainment is ubiquitous.Whether through product placements in movies, performer spokespersons, or the plethora of magazines, television programs, and Web sites dedicated to the close scrutiny of celebrity fashion, we are inundated with examples of how the entertainment industry is intimately connected to and informed by consumer culture. In When Broadway Was the Runway, theatre historian Marlis Schweitzer traces the emergence of this phenomenon a century earlier by examining the collaborative, and sometimes competitive, relationship between the theatre and other consumer institutions such as department stores as well as “the more intimate interactions among theatre critics, managers , advertisers, designers, performers, and audiences that influenced the circulation and shaped the meaning of theatrical commodities” (10). Through exhaustive research and engaging prose, Schweitzer exposes the role that commercial Broadway theatre played in modern American consumer culture and addresses { 161 } BOOK REV IEwS the experiences of female performers,designers,and consumers negotiating not only their relationship with fashion but also with modern womanhood. Schweitzer artfully interweaves the careful analysis of specific examples, such as a vinegar valentine criticizing matinee girls for their love of fashion, with the contextualizations needed to situate the particular in the larger social and cultural landscape. From the“competing discourses on the relationship between art and commerce” to “the standardization and rationalization of labor processes” and from “the effect of foreign commodities on American industry ” to “the growing influence of the female consumer,” Schweitzer deftly explains changes in professional theatre and gender norms (14). Following in the footsteps of historians such as Dorothy Chansky, Nan Enstad, and Kathy Peiss, Schweitzer shows how concerns over the feminization of cultural institutions fueled the devaluation of female tastes and interests, such as the matinee girl’s proclivity toward large hats and frothy romances. She then turns her attention to the symbiotic relationship between the department store and the theatre.Tracking late-nineteenth-century business partnerships on the Ladies’ Mile and the development of separate although still interconnected shopping and entertainment districts (Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street, respectively), Schweitzer addresses the gendering of consumption in New York City, showing how spectacles of consumer fantasy in both arenas took place against the backdrop of labor unrest. Creative staging and display techniques were used to divert attention away from social strife, offering instead “a new social imaginary that privileged individual choice and expression over collective social advancement” (80). While the department store employed theatrically influenced show windows to dramatize their merchandise, Broadway’s commercial theatres relied upon actresses as the primary vehicle for fashion display and as objects of desire. Due to the popularity of theatrical realism , actresses had to sport designer fashions rather than imitations. Actresses such as Ethel Barrymore, Jane Cowl, and Maxine Elliott rose to the occasion, becoming style icons whose opening nights drew society women, dressmakers...

Fashion, Feminism, and the Pleasures and Perils of Consumer Fantasy

Fashion, Feminism, and the Pleasures and Perils of Consumer Fantasy

Telepresence and fantasy in online apparel shopping experience

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the roles of telepresence and fantasy in an online apparel shopping experience. Online apparel consumers undergo a virtual product experience (telepresence) that simulates the product experience in a brick‐and‐mortar store. Fantasy entails the pleasurable mental imagery involving product use.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 86 female university students completed a survey after browsing a stimulus web site in a laboratory setting. Path analysis was used to identify hypothesized relationships between telepresence, fantasy, shopping enjoyment, willingness to purchase, and willingness to patronize the online retailer.Findings – Results showed that telepresence influenced consumer fantasy and both telepresence and consumer fantasy led to shopping enjoyment (experiential value). Telepresence, fantasy, and shopping enjoyment directly contributed to willingness to purchase from the online retailer, whereas telepresence, fantasy and shopping enjoyment cont...

Consuming the Reality TV Wedding

This article investigates the intersection of weddings, the wedding industry, consumption, and reality TV by considering the reality TV series,Trista and Ryan’s Wedding.This show featured the real-life wedding of Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter, who met on the seriesThe Bachelorette.The author argues that reality TV’s emphasis on the “real,” its narrative techniques (including product assimilation), and the wedding industry’s stress on having a “unique” wedding converge on this show to mobilize consumer fantasies and dreams of the traditional white wedding around specific consumer products. She concludes that examinations of weddings in North American culture must take into account not only the practices and rituals involved in these social and cultural events, but also consider the ways in which popular cultural forms such as reality TV work to produce particular kinds of images.

Digital Play and the Actualization of the Consumer Imagination

In this article, the authors consider emerging consumer practices in digital virtual spaces. Building on constructions of consumer behavior as both a sense-making activity and a resource for the construction of daydreams, as well as anthropological readings of performance, the authors speculate that many performances during digital play are products of consumer fantasy. The authors develop an interpretation of the relationship between the real and the virtual that is better equipped to understand the movement between consumer daydreams and those practices actualized in the material and now also in digital virtual reality. The authors argue that digital virtual performances present opportunities for liminoid transformations through inversions, speculations, and playfulness acted out in aesthetic dramas. To illustrate, the authors consider specific examples of the theatrical productions available to consumers in digital spaces, highlighting the consumer imagination that feeds them, the performances they produce, and the potential for transformation in consumer-players.

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

The Essence of Cooking Shows: How the Food Network Constructs Consumer Fantasies

Television has a history of creating stories that invite viewers to engage in fantasy. But the most commonly analyzed television programs have been fiction. This article examines the nonfiction programming aired on the Food Networkto discover the fantasy food consumer worlds it creates through production conventions and narrative. This nonfiction media relies on a similarly fictitious construction of consumer realities in an attempt to build a viewer base beyond the traditional cooking show audience. The network offers the possibility of pleasure through creating the fantasy of an intimate connection to viewers and the promise of satisfaction through consumption. It is argued that the networkisan important element in the intricate web of discourses that sustain consumer culture as viewers are told their dreams should be realized through the acquisition and use of particular goods.

Ludic Agency and Retail Spectacle

Spectacular, themed environments have been theorized as places where play is limited and consumer agency is overpowered. In a multiperspectival ethnographic engagement with ESPN Zone Chicago, we find consumers resisting the rules, but only to a limited degree. Spectacular consumption possesses a do‐it‐yourself quality unrecognized in prior theory. Technology and screens are important to this form of play, which exhibits a transcendent character built of liminoid elements and consumer fantasy. Yet, even in ostensibly overpowering spectacular consumption environments, consumption still is negotiated dialectically; consumer and producer interests are embedded in one another in a process of “interagency.”

Consumption and the Self-Concept

Consumption and the Self-Concept

‘Superbrides’: Wedding Consumer Culture and the Construction of Bridal Identity

This paper examines the role of the media in articulating and sustaining the tension between romance, fantasy and reason as key dimensions of wedding consumption. Two types of media are analysed as evidence of the development of a popular wedding consumer culture in Britain. First, I cite examples of the coverage of celebrity and unconventional weddings in the popular presses to highlight the current media emphasis upon the wedding as a spectacular, within-reach consumer fantasy. I then provide a more sustained analysis of six British bridal magazines, part of the ideological output of the contemporary wedding industry, which do not exist in a vacuum from those other media sites transmitting wedding imagery. In doing so, I deconstruct the recently formed consumer identity of the ‘superbride’ to reveal two underpinning aspects of her personality: the rational ‘project manager’ existing alongside the emotional ‘childish fantasiser’. This leads me later in this paper into a more general discussion about the roles of reason and emotion, rationality and romance in wedding consumption.

The Experiential Aspects of Consumption: Consumer Fantasies, Feelings, and Fun

This paper argues for the recognition of important experiential aspects of consumption. Specifically, a general framework is constructed to represent typical consumer behavior variables. Based on this paradigm, the prevailing information processing model is contrasted with an experiential view that focuses on the symbolic, hedonic, and esthetic nature of consumption. This view regards the consumption experience as a phenomenon directed toward the pursuit of fantasies, feelings, and fun.