Shining the spotlight on marketplace rituals: a review and research agenda

ABSTRACT

Although rituals are commonplace in marketer-consumer interactions, extant research devotes limited attention to how ‘marketplace actors’ or MAs (marketers and stakeholders enacting the roles of marketers) leverage these events in the marketplace. We scrutinise this gap by examining literature in the top 50 major marketing journals. We ask: What functions do marketplace rituals fulfil for MAs, as they leverage these rituals when shaping customer experiences? Our analysis finds MAs leverage rituals to support seven broad functional categories that pertain to customer experience: cognitive, cultural, emotive, logistical, relational, social, and transformative. We illuminate how MAs leverage these functions to meet specific goals. We propose an agenda for future research on marketplace rituals.

KEYWORDS:

• Rituals
• marketplace rituals
• marketplace
• consumer-marketer interaction
• events

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arun Sreekumar

Arun Sreekumar is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He holds a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is in the domains of transformative consumer research, social marketing, and consumer behavior in resource-constrained contexts. His articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, among others. Before joining academia, he supported the product development and marketing activities of hundreds of microentrepreneurs in rural India and East Africa through his work in a non-profit.

Robert Alfonso Arias

Robert Alfonso Arias is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a PhD in Business Administration (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) with a concentration in marketing. His areas of interest include social/societal influences on consumer behavior, consumer belongingness, and security consumption. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Consumer Affairs and the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cele C. Otnes

Cele Otnes is Professor Emerita/Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Honorary Professor at the University of Stirling (UK). Her research primarily focuses on how ritualistic consumption shapes consumer and practitioner experiences. Her work appears in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Retailing, and other publications. She co-authored Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture with Pauline Maclaran, and Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding with Elizabeth Pleck. She is co-editing with Russell W. Belk the Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, 2e.

Linda Tuncay Zayer

Linda Tuncay Zayer is a Professor of Marketing and John F. Smith Chair in Business Administration at the Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include gender, advertising, consumer culture, and transformative consumer research. She has been published in the top journals in the field and serves on several editorial boards. Her expertise and scholarship have been featured in media outlets across television, newspapers, radio, books, podcasts and other digital media and she is the co-editor of the book Gender, Culture and Consumer Behavior.