In postmodernity, consumption is a prime site for the negotiation of conflicting themes of freedom and control. Explores the consumption of symbolic meaning through five consumption dialectics: the material versus the symbolic, the social versus the self, desire versus satisfaction, rationality...

Purpose – An oral history to examine the evolution of the empowered consumer and brand consciousness from 1918 to 1965 as a critical analysis of mass consumer culture in Britain. Design/methodology/approach – The authors trace the changing experience of consumer empowerment and importantly...

Purpose – The paper seeks to explore empirically the lived experience of trust in consumer brands and to develop a model focusing on functional and symbolic brands. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents an exploratory, grounded theory approach and the study conducted in‐depth...

Advertising research has focused exclusively on the solitary subject at the expense of understanding the role that advertising plays within the social contexts of group interaction. We develop a number of explanations for this omission before describing the results of an ethnographic study of...

The Commissioner's application raised a number of legal issues, including the threshold and analysis for establishing that a merger has prevented future competition...Richard Elliott (Davies Ward)

This exploratory study examines Chinese consumers’ perceptions of authenticity. Extended interviews reveal that Chinese consumers do not evaluate products based on a perceived binary relationship between authentic and inauthentic products. The results suggest, instead, Chinese consumers view...