Special Issue: Design, Consumption, and Marketing

Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 33, 2017, Issue 3-4

Editorial: Design, consumption and marketing: outcomes, process, philosophy and future directions
Michael B. Beverland, Gerda Gemser & Ingo O. Karpen
Read more >

Articles

Tales of seduction and intrigue: design as narrative agent of brand revitalisation
Sarah J. S. Wilner & Aysar Ghassan
“We explore the role of design in market performances by examining a case in which a shift in the zeitgeist threatened a flagship packaged good’s long-standing brand identity. In this instance, the destabilisation of brand identity and threats to brand equity arose when prevailing cultural narratives became significant enough to disrupt existing brand narratives. To investigate the impact of the changing cultural narratives, we present a modified brand genealogy, examining the iconic brand’s positioning in cultural context over time and culminating with the strategic response marketers made to ameliorate the unanticipated shift in their product’s connotations. In particular, we focus on the role of design as a mechanism for facilitating new associations and possible attributions about the brand in the face of semantic crisis …”  Read more >

Exploration and exploitation activities for design innovation (OPENACCESS)
Kasia Tabeau, Gerda Gemser, Erik Jan Hultink & Nachoem M. Wijnberg
This paper focuses on design innovation: that is, the development of products that are new in terms of products’ appearance, the emotions products evoke, and/or the way they enable customers to express their identity. Although prior research acknowledges the importance of design innovation for product and organisational performance, studies on how to manage design innovation are relatively scarce. The present study attempts to fill this gap by investigating design innovation and its management in terms of the degree of exploration and exploitation activities and designers’ decision freedom when developing new offerings …”  Read more >

Design and the creation of meaningful consumption practices in access-based consumption
Adèle Gruen
“Within the rising access economy, products that were traditionally owned are now accessed, shared, rented or swapped. A recent research has shown that access-based consumption, when consumers pay a fee to have access to a product or service, threatens the relationship between consumers and objects. Specifically, access prevents consumers from enacting practices of appropriation and from gaining anything other than utility from this type of consumption. To address this issue, this research draws on the discipline of design and the theory of practice to examine how users form relationships with objects they use …”  Read more >
Read the Blog >

Objects of desire: the role of product design in revising contested cultural meanings
Sarah J. S. Wilner & Aimee Dinnin Huff
We explore the link between product design and market legitimation by examining the evolution of a product market that has been shrouded by cultural taboo. Conducting media analysis and selected visual audits of sex toys over a recent 25-year period, we find that innovations in the design of these products – materials, form and function – can facilitate evolution of a mainstream market …”  Read more >

Commentaries

‘With great power comes great responsibility’ when we co-create futures
Yoko Akama
“Design, marketing and consumption are forceful fields that are shaping people’s lives and futures. This power carries a responsibility for those implicated, to interrogate what social priorities are expressed and how cultural values are invisibly inscribed into their ways of making change …”  Read more >

Market sense-making in design practice: exploring curiosity, creativity and courage
Charlotta Windahl
“This paper introduces the three interrelated design catalysts of curiosity, creativity and courage, and explores how they actuate market sense-making activities in design practice. Drawing on the interplay between action and meaning dimensions in design practice and service-marketing theory, it specifically investigates when desirability, rather than feasibility or viability, is the locus of innovation activities …”  Read more >

Technology-driven evolution of design practices: envisioning the role of design in the digital era
Giulia Calabretta & Maaike Kleinsmann
“The rapid evolution of information and communications technologies (ICT) has changed the way in which companies innovate and generate value for their customers. As a key function within innovation, design has also evolved in order to better support companies in dealing with the pace and complexity of technological, economic and societal change. Particularly, while design core principles of human centredness, collaboration and use of prototypes has remained the same over time, the way in which they are put into practice has adapted to the innovation challenges of the time. In this article, we describe how design practices related to human centredness, collaborativeness and prototyping are (and have been) executed across three eras: the industrial era, the service era and the digital era …”  Read more >

Design sweets, C-suites, and the Candy Man factor
Daved Barry
“Designerly design, e.g. design as taught in professional design schools, is becoming a mainstay within the world’s executive suites, where it is being used to form organisational structures, strategy, change, policy and more. The speed and extent of its uptake have come as quite a surprise to the traditional, analytically driven design disciplines within business studies; as is sometimes said of earthquakes, no one saw it coming…”  Read more >

This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, unless otherwise stated. Third party materials remain the copyright of the original rightsholder.

Disclaimer: Any views expressed in this posting are the views of the Author(s), and are not necessarily the views of the JMM Editors, Westburn Publishers Ltd. or Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.