Disability is one of the largest minority groups, with a spending power of approximately £273bn every year. Consequently, many advertisers are now weaving people with disabilities into brand narratives. These narratives often evoke feelings of pity or portray people with disabilities as inspiring, solely or in part on the basis of their disability. Meanwhile, social media has emerged as a vessel for social change. Through the netnographic study of twelve influencers with visible impairments, complex personhood is proposed as a social ontology by which disabled lives are acknowledged in less confined terms. Our findings illustrate how social media influencers with disabilities may draw on narratives based on empowerment, playfulness, resistance, and responsibility to present themselves as neither victims nor superhuman agents but as complex human beings. We thus bring forward a complex model in market-mediated representations of disability, beyond the misrepresentational narratives based on pity and ‘inspiration porn’. 

Representation is key in the politics of mass-mediated consumer society. Although previous research has noted that representation in advertising generates greater societal visibility for people with disabilities, focus has largely been on negative unintended consequences from a psychological or socio-cultural perspective. The purpose of this study is to explore the complexities involved in the making of a collective psyche related to disability, pointing instead to how the psychic and the social are mutually constitutive. By focusing on market-mediated representation in the form of advertising campaigns, we highlight both potentials and pitfalls of social transformation such as reducing stigma. We use, as revelatory cases, two relatively recent campaigns that sought to include people with disabilities on the Swedish market. We build upon Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic theorizing to offer a novel approach of studying market inclusion in the context of disability representation. By delineating the social crypt, we elucidate two processes by which stigmatized narratives enter the public consciousness: incorporation (i.e., a process by which stigma is reproduced in the collective unconscious) and introjection (i.e., a form of gradual awareness leading to destigmatization). We find that the inclusion of disability in advertising can potentially work to reduce stigma, but also to inadvertently serve as a subtler form of market exclusion by intensifying the cultural semiotics of capitalized ableism.

Consumer understanding of the past often revolves around myths or sanitized versions of history. Consumers resort to these fantasies to connect with values they feel are lost in modern life. Interpreted, however, such imaginations may also invoke moral dilemmas. Findings from interviews conducted on-site at a Viking-themed restaurant indicate that this is the case with the Viking myth, which has been misappropriated by white supremacists. Using Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” as a theoretical lens, findings suggest that the Viking myth, in addition to nostalgia, may evoke feelings of collective guilt when inscribed in a present-day ideological landscape. Findings also show that consumers can resolve such mythological tension by employing atonement as a self-authenticating act. The theoretical framework of collective guilt as a hauntology explains relationships between consumer myth-making and nostalgia that have not been recognized by prior research on past-themed consumption. 

In 1966, Jean Rhys returned from the dead. After the war, the author of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) had mistakenly been presumed dead. She was a revenant, a zombi, a living dead haunting the pebbly beaches in Cornwall, herself haunted by memories of her Creole upbringing. She might have developed a taste for rum cocktails—she was briefly put in a mental hospital after attacking a neighbour with a pair of scissors—but she also had a mission; to bring justice to Mrs. Rochester, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Accordingly, Jean Rhys’s best known work, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Brontë’s original. In this paper, we advance theory on gender marketing and the decolonisation of marketing through a reading of Rhys’s late literary masterpiece, hoping to grant her spectres a hospital memory out of a concern for justice.

Authenticity is often considered the holy grail in marketing. Prior research has focused on authenticity in consumption and marketing communications based on countercultural images of personal freedom, including mythologies based on resistant rebels and social outlaws. In turn, research has constructed an androcentric view of authenticity using only one-half (i.e., the masculine/agentic) of its inherently ambivalent dialectic of meaning. Little is known about the authentication of more feminine/communally gendered consumers such as stigmatized seekers and other marginalized consumer segments. In that respect the literature on authenticity in consumer research is highly problematic, because the dominant worldview tends to essentialize an exotic version of the Other recognized as authentic while knowing next to nothing about the Other beyond this stereotypical image.

This thesis fills an important gap in knowledge regarding the circuit of cultural ideologies around authenticity, particularly in relation to brand culture and consumers’ authenticating acts. Through a patchwork ethnography consisting of data collected in different empirical contexts (e.g., the Viking myth, queer cinema, disability in ads, etc.), the aim is to deconstruct the androcentric gaze on authenticity. Findings help pave the way toward a more empathic marketing theory and practice in which the Other is less confined by the harmful depiction of stereotypes. These findings are important because we live in times when brands are increasingly purpose-driven and expected to engage in activism (e.g., by taking a stand on socio-political issues even if they are not directly related to their business), while our social institutions are becoming more and more like brands. Indeed, recent marketing tendencies indicate a shifting cultural economy in which myths of personal freedom have been replaced with commodity activism in the “woke” discourse of authenticity in contemporary brand culture.

I contribute to consumer research and conversations concerning the politics of authenticity, emphasizing issues of ethical representation and responsibility toward the Other, which may alleviate androcentric failings in previous research. I do this through thinking rooted in a deconstructive ontology, a feminist epistemology, and a transformative consumer research axiology.

Twenty-five productive years have passed since the late Barbara Stern called for marketing scholars to take the topic of brand authenticity into consideration. Brand authenticity is now believed to be a core asset in mainstream marketing, yet confusion surrounds the nature and usage of the term. Using the Antecedents, Decisions and Outcomes format initially developed by Justin Paul and Gabriel Benito as an organizing framework, this article seeks to consolidate an area of thought characterized by multiplicity and excess of disparate meanings. Based on the extensive coverage of studies published over a period of 25 years between 1994 and 2019, extant literature on brand authenticity is reviewed. Three primary streams of research are identified: (1) characteristics that distinguish the ‘real thing’ from the fake, (2) the legitimizing function of authenticity and (3) emotional and moral aspects of authentication. Despite substantive contributions over the last 25 years, many areas of brand authenticity remain underexplored. By synthesizing extant literature, the aim of this study is to identify gaps in knowledge about brand authenticity and to prepare for a future research agenda guided by intersectionality.