Browsing by Author "Wohlfeil, Markus"

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    The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal
    (Emerald, 2019-06-06) Wohlfeil, Markus; Patterson, Anthony; Gould, Stephen J.
    To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.
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    And May the Odds Be Always in Your Favour: What ‘The Hunger Games’ Can Teach Us about Today’s Marketing Academia
    (Academy of Marketing, 2014-07) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Some consumer researchers suggested in the 1980s that fictional novels and artworks would tell us more about consumer behaviour, life and the human condition than scientific papers in our top-tier journals. Following in their tradition, this critical paper argues that “The Hunger Games”-trilogy provides a perfect mirror for The Publishing Games that haunt marketing academia in recent years. Just like the Hunger Games are the means by which the Capitol’s ruling elite subdues Panem’s wider population, the Publishing Games seem to reinforce the dominance of what an established scholarly elite perceives to be the appropriate marketing thought and methodology – perhaps to the detriment of innovation, creativity and broader impact within marketing academia. This paper suggests that marketing scholars have the choice: Either to sacrifice your integrity and play the game or to subvert the system. Perhaps a new consumer behaviour odyssey is needed to rekindle a new way of thinking…
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    Between Authenticity and Entertainment: The Film Studio as a Brand Land Experience – A Photographic Essay
    (Academy of Marketing, 2012-07) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Since the birth of Hollywood in 1912, film studios have provided interested film audiences with studio tours to satisfy the public’s demand for first-hand insights and experiences into the world of film and filmmaking. However, as substantial industrial changes within the film industry since the 1950s have turned film studios into clearing-houses, economic pressure caused by declining income from auxiliary markets has meant that they are increasingly required to commercialise their corporate brand and intellectual film properties in the form of studio tours and theme parks, which attract millions of visitors worldwide every year. But how do the brand land experiences offered by film studios cater to the inherent needs and desires that consumers seek to fulfil? Based on the researcher’s personal experiences and observations at two major Hollywood studios, this paper uses an introspective photographic essay approach to take a closer look at how consumers experience and engage with the world of film that film studios provide in the form of either studio tours or theme parks.
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    The Book of Stars: Some Alternative Insights into Celebrity Fandom
    (Academy of Marketing, 2008-07) Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan
    While consumers have had a keen interest in the works and private lives of celebrities since the dawn of the Hollywood star system in the early 1920s, some consumers experience a significantly more intensive level of interest and admiration for a particular celebrity and, subsequently, become what are commonly known as fans. However, scant attention has been paid to how the relationship between fans and celebrities expresses itself in everyday consumer behaviour. This paper is taking an existential-phenomenological perspective to discuss fan behaviour as a holistic personal lived experience from a fan’s point of view. By using subjective personal introspection, the lead author provides hereby insights into his private lived consumption experiences as the fan of the young and talented actress Jena Malone, which were obtained and recorded as contemporaneous data over a period of 15 months. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how drawing on narrative transportation theory may provide a deeper understanding on the nature of celebrity fandom. The study found that a consumer’s fan experiences derive from one’s personal engagement with the celebrity’s artistic work and public persona, which is essentially the consumer’s personal intertextual reading of what s/he perceives to be relevant and reliable media texts.
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    The Book of Stars: Understanding a Consumer’s Fan Relationship with a Film Actress Through a Narrative Transportation Approach
    (Association for Consumer Research, 2011-06) Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan
    Although consumers have always been fascinated by the works and private lives of film stars, scant attention has been paid as to how the relationship between fans and film actors expresses itself in everyday consumer behaviour. This paper sets therefore out to explore celebrity fandom as a holistic lived experience from an individual fan’s insider point of view. Using subjective personal introspection, the lead author provides insights into his own private everyday lived fan relationship with the actress Jena Malone. The findings indicate that the fan engages with the film star’s public persona through a personal intertextual reading of ‘reliable’ media texts, which can even result in a feeling of ‘knowing’ the celebrity like a personal friend – and even ‘love’.
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    Celebrity Fans and Their Consumer Behaviour: Autoethnographic Insights into the Life of a Fan
    (Routledge, 2018-01-29) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Ever since the dawn of the Hollywood star system in the early 1920s, consumers have been fascinated by film stars and other celebrities and their seemingly glamorous private lives. The public demand for celebrities has become so pervasive that it is arguably an essential element of our everyday culture and market economy, and the focus of increasing study. This book explores the widespread phenomenon of celebrity fandom and provides a deeper understanding of why individual consumers develop an emotional attachment to their favourite celebrity and what this parasocial fan relationship means in their life. Based on an in-depth insider study of a consumer’s fan relationship with a film actress, the book provides unique insights into the celebrity-fan relationship, revealing the meaning it has for the consumer in everyday life, and how it evolves and expresses itself over time. While this book is primarily located within the field of consumer research, fandom and celebrity are of interest to a variety of academic disciplines. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience from marketing and consumer research, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.
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    Celebrity Fans and Their Consumer Behaviour: Autoethnographic Insights into the Life of a Fan (Paperback Issue)
    (Routledge, 2020-02) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Ever since the dawn of the Hollywood star system in the early 1920s, consumers have been fascinated by film stars and other celebrities and their seemingly glamorous private lives. The public demand for celebrities has become so pervasive that it is arguably an essential element of our everyday culture and market economy, and the focus of increasing study. This book explores the widespread phenomenon of celebrity fandom and provides a deeper understanding of why individual consumers develop an emotional attachment to their favourite celebrity and what this parasocial fan relationship means in their life. Based on an in-depth insider study of a consumer’s fan relationship with a film actress, the book provides unique insights into the celebrity-fan relationship, revealing the meaning it has for the consumer in everyday life, and how it evolves and expresses itself over time. While this book is primarily located within the field of consumer research, fandom and celebrity are of interest to a variety of academic disciplines. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience from marketing and consumer research, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, and sociology.
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    Communicating Brands Through Engagement with “Lived” Experiences
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006-04-01) Whelan, Susan; Wohlfeil, Markus
    As the recent years saw the rapidly decreasing effectiveness of traditional brand communications, event-marketing has emerged as a new breed of communication strategy, which involves target audiences as active participants on a behavioural level. By using a participatory case study method, this paper demonstrates the nature, scope and benefits of event-marketing in differentiating and enhancing customer-brand relationship relationships in relation to a German university. The study concludes that event-marketing facilitates customer engagement with the brand through informal dialogues and personal first-hand brand experiences. Implications for managers are discussed and avenues for further research offered.
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    Confessions of a Movie-Fan: Introspection into a Consumer’s Experiential Consumption of ‘Pride and Prejudice’
    (Association for Consumer Research, 2008-03) Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan
    As people enjoy movies for various reasons, this paper is taking an existential-phenomenological perspective to discuss the consumption of movies as a holistic personal lived experience. By using subjective personal introspection, the author provides hereby insights into his personal lived consumption experiences with the recently released movie Pride & Prejudice. Although the introspective data suggest that a complex tapestry of interconnected factors contributes to a consumer’s movie enjoyment, this study found a consumer’s personal engagement with the movie narrative and its characters to be of particular importance. This personal engagement not only allows for a momentary escape from reality into the imaginative movie world, but is even further enhanced through intertextuality, by which the consumer connects the movie to one’s personal life experiences.
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    Consumer Motivations to Participate in Event-Marketing Strategies
    (Taylor and Francis, 2006-06-01) Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan
    As part of the Adidas goes street-campaign, the Adidas Predator Cup was a fun-soccer tournament designed to "reconnect the youth in Germany with Adidas and the soccer sport by enjoying the pure fun, freedom and personal happiness of playing an informal soccer match with friends". Despite knowing that the Adidas Predator Cup was designed to communicate the same commercial messages they would have actively avoided otherwise, the young target audience participated in large numbers in this event-marketing strategy. The current study investigates why young consumers are motivated in such large numbers to experience the hyperreality of the Adidas soccer brand by feeling for an afternoon like being Ronaldinho, Beckham, Ballack or Keane. Using Wohlfeil and Whelan's conceptual model, four predispositional involvement dimensions are identified as motivational drivers and tested, before interesting results are discussed.
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    Consumer Motivations to Participate in Marketing-Events: The Role of Predispositional Involvement
    (Association for Consumer Research, 2006-03-30) Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan
    Confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of classic marketing communications, event-marketing has become an increasingly popular alternative for marketers in dealing with a changing marketing environment. Event-marketing is defined as the creation of 3-dimensional, interactive brand-related hyperrealities for consumers by staging marketing-events, which would result in an emotional attachment to the brand. However, as a pull strategy within marketing communications, successful event-marketing strategies require a thorough understanding of why consumers are motivated to voluntarily participate in those marketing-events. To narrow this information gap, this research, based on a thorough literature review, has developed a conceptual model suggesting that consumers’ motivations to participate in marketing-events are determined by their predispositional involvement either in the event-object, the event-content, event-marketing or the expected social interaction at the event. Thus, the main contribution is to the involvement and experiential consumption literature.
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    Consuming Spontaneity in Extraordinary Experience
    (ANZMAC, 2023-12-06) Mills, Scott; Patterson, Anthony; Quinn, Lee; Wohlfeil, Markus
    Marketing regularly evokes notions of spontaneity to engage consumers and sell products and services, yet scant scholarly attention has been paid so far to this concept and its influence on consumption. Indeed, a close reading of the literature on the seminal theoretical construct of extraordinary experience indicates that spontaneity is a central, but latent, element that requires further investigation. Hence, the purpose of this article is to understand the role of spontaneity in extraordinary experience. Drawing upon a 14-month ethnographic study into participating in live grassroots stand-up comedy, we tentatively introduce The Three Ss of Spontaneity: singularity, sociality, and speculation. As such, this paper contributes an original and emergent theorisation of spontaneity in extraordinary experience. Moreover, our study illuminates spontaneous action in marketing theory and practice by demonstrating it to be a positive and productive force in consumption.
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    Ecotourism, Motivations and Impacts on Consumers’ Identity
    (ANZMAC, 2022-12-07) Bouzidi, Rayane; Takhar, Amandeep; Wohlfeil, Markus
    This paper explores the motivations of tourists to choose ecotourism destinations and how their experience affects their attitudes and environmental behaviour. Also, the paper presents the concept of “practice of purification” (Canniford & Shankar, 2007) as a potential reason the tourist may have for seeking the ecotourism experience. The paper shows that little research has sought so far to explore the effects of ecotourism on the process of constructing consumer’s self-identity and how this phenomenon occurs within different cultural contexts. Understanding the ecotourism experience from consumer’s perspective is therefore vital to develop ecotourism further and to comprehend the relationship between ecotourism, identity and culture.
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    Escaping the “Iron Cage” of Digitalized Music Platforms: A Weberian Perspective on the Vinyl Resurgence
    (Academy of Marketing, 2024-07-05) Wohlfeil, Markus
    By drawing on Weber’s conflict theory, this study aims to explore how the growing popularity of vinyl records with mainstream consumers may be an escape from an ‘iron cage’ increasingly imposed by digital music providers. We found that mainstream consumers increasingly feel oppressed, exploited and trapped into an iron cage created by the digital music providers’ irrational rationalization of their services. The resulting tensions encourage them to turn to vinyl records’ materiality for comfort.
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    Escaping the “Iron Cage” of Movie/TV Streaming Providers
    (Australian-New Zealand Marketing Academy, 2024-12-05) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Although marketing scholars and media experts have championed the digitalized access to filmed entertainment, recorded music and books for the past 25 years as a disruptive technology that is revolutionizing and ‘democratizing’ how consumers would now read books, listen to recorded music and watch movies and TV shows, the persistent popularity of printed books and the recent resurgence of vinyl records have called this dominant discourse into question. But while the deep resonance of vinyl records with consumers has received some scholarly attention in recent years, hardly any research looked at whether similar trends occur in relation to other entertainment industries such as movies/TV shows. Drawing on the author’s autoethnographic insights and phenomenological interviews with 12 informants, this ethnographic study draws on Weber’s conflict theory to explore whether consumers may increasingly experience filmed entertainment providers’ streaming subscription services as an(other) ‘iron cage’ limiting their access to filmed entertainment. We found that filmed entertainment streaming providers are in the powerful position of producing their own movies and TV shows that they increasingly use as exclusive ‘subscription bait’. Hence, consumers increasingly feel trapped an ‘iron cage’ of multiple streaming subscription services they are no longer able to escape from.
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    Even Better than the Real Thing?: Tribute Bands and Authenticity
    (Academy of Marketing, 2023-07-06) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Despite often being dismissed as ‘clones’, tribute bands have over the past 30 years become a popular consumer culture phenomenon. This ethnographic paper explores how tribute bands seek to achieve authenticity in their truthful recreations of the original’s live performances and being judged by audiences as an authentic representation, although they are, by definition, just unaffiliated replications. We found that consumers are happy to judge a tribute band’s recreation as being authentic when a) the latter meet consumers’ personal expectations of the original, b) members of the original band publicly endorse the tribute band, i.e. by joining them on stage, and c) the tribute band release their own songs.
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    Event-Marketing as Innovative Marketing Communications: Reviewing the German Experience
    (Westburn Publishers, 2005-07-01) Wohlfeil, Markus; Whelan, Susan
    As a result of significant changes in their marketing environments and in consumer behaviour, marketers are confronted with the decreasing effectiveness of their classic marketing communications and, consequently, in need of new ways to position their brands in consumers’ minds. Because nothing is more convincing than personal experiences, event-marketing creates new brand-related realities by staging marketing-events with which consumers interact. This would result in an emotional attachment to the brand. However, while event-marketing as an experience-oriented marketing communication strategy has become very popular among German marketing professionals and academics, researchers and marketers in English-speaking countries have widely ignored this innovative communication strategy so far due to a different understanding of the term. Nevertheless, some European companies have successfully launched in recent years their first event-marketing campaigns in Ireland, the UK and the US, suggesting a much broader appeal than previously recognised. Thus, this paper is introducing event-marketing to an international audience by outlining its constitutive features and discussing its role in marketing communications, based on the lessons learned from the German experience, that are presented using mini-case studies.
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    Ever Fallen in Love with Marketing: Marketing in Punk, Marketing of Punk
    (Academy of Marketing, 2016-09) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Ever since it first came apparently from nowhere to shock the establishment back in the 1970s, punk has come a long way and been the subject to many popular myths, stereotypes and media imageries. Interestingly, the vast majority of those myths have actually had their origins within punk culture itself. But because punk is primarily an umbrella for a range of different, independent punk subcultures, each of those myths seems to carry very different, often contradictory meanings across those individual punk subcultures and communties. Historically, understanding the social and communal roles of popular myths and beliefs has offered researchers a meaningful lens into how members of a (sub)culture/community construct, foster and maintain their communal identity, heritage and/or moral value system. Popular myths tend thereby to understood as historical heritage with universal meanings that provide a culture/community with its communal identity. This working paper outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the researcher’s ethnographic study, whose aim it is to explore how and why popular myths are created, disseminated, interpreted, reinterpreted and adopted within different individual punk communities as part of communal identity and heritage.
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    Filmed Entertainment Providers’ Streaming Subscription Services as an “Iron Cage” With No Escape – A Weberian Perspective
    (Academy of Marketing, 2025-07-10) Wohlfeil, Markus
    By drawing on Weber’s conflict theory, this research seeks to explore whether mainstream consumers may experience the digital filmed entertainment providers’ streaming subscription services as an(other) ‘iron cage’ limiting their choice of accessing movies and TV shows. We found that filmed entertainment providers, as producers of popular movies/TV shows, are in the powerful position of using them as exclusive ‘subscription bait’. Consumers increasingly fear of becoming trapped forever in the ‘iron cage’ of multiple streaming subscription services.
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    From ‘Spiral Scratch’ to PledgeMusic: The Birth & Rebirth of Punk Culture’s Entrepreneurial Spirit
    (Academy of Marketing, 2017-07) Wohlfeil, Markus
    Punk has come a long way from its prematurely declared death in the early-1980s to being not-so-dead after all in the 1990s to still being ‘alive, loud and kicking' today. This paper examines how punk culture's inherent entrepreneurial DIY spirit has kept it alive after returning to its underground origins. While much has been made in the recent literature about social media and the digital revolution's role in democratising the access to the marketplace, (self-)branding, entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing and co-creation of products and meaning have been at the heart of punk culture since its beginning - and long before people ever dreamed of digitalisation. Buzzcocks' self-funded EP ‘Spiral Scratch' is widely credited with being the first independent and crowdfunded record ever to hit the marketplace. Although most classic punk bands were actually signed by major record labels, numerous independent record labels have followed the ‘Spiral Scratch' business model ever since. In recent years, after being dropped by their labels, many of those bands have moved to PledgeMusic, not only to crowdfund and sell their new albums, but also to revive the entrepreneurial spirit of the past that has truly 'democratised' the marketplace. Interestingly, PledgeMusic's most popular music format is vinyl.