How do brands change in environments defined by increasing consumer heterogeneity? Drawing on assemblage theory, this research develops the concepts of brand morphogenesis and consumer sub-assemblage to explain how heterogeneous consumer groups instigate, reinforce, and hinder the evolution of a brand. This longitudinal case study of a Swedish fashion brand delineates the role of heterogeneous consumer sub-assemblages in the continual process of emergence and transformation of a brand assemblage through space and time—a process defined as brand morphogenesis. The findings detail brand morphogenesis in the sub-assemblage dynamics of exploration, actualization, and habituation of value, as heterogeneous consumer groups form consumer sub-assemblages in interaction with other brand components and interact in patterns of coexisting with, coopting, and contesting other sub-assemblages. By charting consumers’ value negotiations as they play out within and among consumer sub-assemblages, this research contributes to understanding continuity and change for brands that face increasing consumer heterogeneity. 

Prior research has shown how global marketplace ideologies have grown in influence at the expense of the state. This study shows how state ideologies can gain momentum and encourage new forms of consumer agency. Based on Swedish single fathers' everyday childcare, it illustrates how agency is negotiated as fathers navigate between a progressive state ideology of gender equality and a traditional marketplace ideology of intensive mothering. Swedish fathers are drawn to the practice of childcare and forming emotional bonds with their children - yet with a gendered consumer agency of good enough that differs from mothers' agency. The findings have implications beyond the context of Swedish fathers. Firstly, they underscore the importance of taking the state into account regarding consumption, markets and culture. Secondly, they detail the interplay and tensions between ideology and everyday life and thirdly, they illustrate that while traditional gender structures tend to run deep, they can change.

In this article, we explore why the bad boy is a popular archetype inadvertising, erotica, fashion, journalism, movies, songs, television serials, andother forms of commercial culture. First, we interpret the bad boy as acombination of juvenile masculinities (aggression, rebellion, hypersexuality),appealing qualities (charisma, ruggedness, sensitivity), and moral ambiguities(via confusion, contradiction, and cumulation), which keep audiencesengaged. Second, we trace the evolution of these meanings in over acentury of American popular culture. Third, we reveal the many commercialfaces of the bad boy in the contemporary marketplace, including as anarchetypal brand positioning strategy, a transformative protagonist in eroticfiction, an unapologetic voice for macho fantasies, a beguiling object ofirrational love, a journalistic frame for polarizing masculinities, and aninexhaustible source of dramatic tension. In the final analysis, the bad boyarchetype is a contemporary marketplace icon because it has historicallybeen good at channeling all kinds of bad.

In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children’s needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state’s gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settings.

With fatherhood currently in a state of flux, the following chapter on Swedish single fathers cooking for their children shows that these caregiving fathers’ masculinities remain relatively intact. While staying firmly anchored in one’s professional identity, these days the caregiving father fits in with the ideal of Swedish masculinity. But even if it is fairly common among Swedish middle class fathers to share responsibility for their children if the parents separate, fathers’ engagement with their children is not yet taken for granted and expectations are lower than for mothers. The fathers in this study had a rather pragmatic approach to cooking that took departure from their own cooking interest and capabilities. Three themes characterized the men’s various approaches: i) Cooking as an interest; ii) Cooking as a hardship and iii) Cooking as a part of life. Independent of their approach, most of the men’s cooking emerged as instrumental and matter-of-factly. Their relation to the market was characterized by pragmatism rather than worry and they saw no problem in retreating to market solutions every now and then. Without the pursuit of self-sacrifice, their cooking emerged as an expression of love and care for their children.

This qualitative study explores how mothers negotiate ideals of intensive mothering in the context of the family dinner. Findings show mothers involving children in the meal, resulting in an educational and enjoyable experience. Theoretical implications show these collaborations empowering mothers to cope with and challenge the ideals of intensive mothering.

While emotions are a central facet of consumer culture, relatively little is known about how they are tied to the embodied and tacit aspects of everyday living. This article explores how practices organize emotions and vice versa. Pairing Schatzki's teleoaffective structure with emotions understood as intensities that are deeply inscribed in the structural blueprints of practices, we propose that the organization of emotions and practices is recursive and based on three teleoaffective episodes: anticipating, actualizing, and assessing. To illustrate this, we present an analysis of empirical material from an ethnographic study on mothering. The practice-emotion link we unfold contributes to understanding the operation of emotions in consumer culture by specifying how practices and emotions are co-constitutive. This offers novel insights into the embodied and routinized nature of emotions, illuminates the connection between practices and individuals, and highlights the role of emotions in practice change.