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The purpose of this paper is to continue the emerging stream of literature that has found knockoffs and counterfeits to be unobtrusive or even beneficial to luxury companies by analyzing how they produce paradoxes of meaning and contribute to the renewal of luxury markets. This is done by exploring them as doppelgänger brand images that reappropriate brand imagery for their own purposes.

This is a conceptual paper that focuses on the role of knockoffs and counterfeits in the renewal of luxury markets.

The findings highlight how knockoffs and counterfeits can contribute to the emergence and cyclical diffusion of luxury. As luxury offerings are introduced to the market, knockoffs and counterfeits accelerate the snob effect, aid in anchoring trends and contribute to induced obsolescence. During diffusion, knockoffs and counterfeits can strengthen aspiration, bandwagon and herding effects. In doing so, knockoffs and counterfeits create a paradox as they simultaneously legitimize the idea of the “authenticity” of genuine offerings through their presence in the market and create cyclical demand for novel offerings by undermining the authenticity claims of existing luxury offerings. Thus, knockoffs and counterfeits can be understood as a paradox of luxury markets that contributes to the market cyclicality not despite but because of this paradoxical interplay.

While research on knockoffs and counterfeiting is plentiful in the field of marketing, this is among the few studies that analyze how these offerings contribute to luxury markets and their renewal.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing marketing literature that investigates markets as “configurations”, i.e. networks of market actors engaged in market-shaping practices and performances. As this pioneering work has been largely focused on established mainstream markets and industries driven by large multi-national companies, the present article extends practice-based market theorizing to countercultural market emergence and also to unconventional market practices shaping it.

Insights are drawn from a four-year multi-sited ethnographic study of a rapidly expanding electronic music scene that serves as an illustrative example of emergent countercultural market.

In contrast to mainstream consumer or industrial markets, the authors identify a distinctive dynamic underlying market emergence. Countercultural markets as well as their appeal and longevity largely depend on an inherent authenticity paradox that focal market actors need to sustain and negotiate through ongoing market-shaping and market-restricting practices.

From a practitioner perspective, the authors discuss the implications for market actors wishing to build on countercultural authenticity. They highlight the fragility of countercultural markets and point out practices sustaining them, and also possibilities and challenges in tapping into them.

The study contributes by theorizing the tensions that energize and drive countercultural market emergence. In particular, the authors address the important role of market-restricting practices in facilitating countercultural appeal that has not received explicit attention in prior marketing literature.

This conceptual chapter explores the role of embodiment in phenomenological experience of lived time, and the implications it may hold for studying consumption.

Conceptual chapter.

We argue that though consumer research scholars have become increasingly cognizant of the embodied foundation of temporal experience, the relation between embodied experience of time and consumption activity still remains under-theorized and researched. Through a phenomenological perspective we are able to understand the consumer as temporally directed toward the world where value is realized emergently through embodiment of affordances.

We build an existing work in consumer research to open up a possibility for a phenomenological experience of consumption that is, to a great extent, precognitive, temporal, and based on the ability to experience lived time.

Drawing from recent work on online social networking and communities of consumption, the purpose of this paper is to explore, identify, and postulate key factors facilitating the growth and success of marketing in virtual worlds.

An empirical study was conducted employing netnographic evidence from three different virtual worlds and related user‐generated blog discussions.

The findings suggest mechanisms which enable virtual worlds to gain and maintain the interest of their users and therefore underlie successful marketer practices.

This is an exploratory study based on qualitative and ethnographic online research methods, and therefore the results are of a descriptive nature. The study was conducted to initiate the academic discourse about marketing in virtual worlds. As such, the paper believes that it can act as a reasonable starting‐point for future discussion.

The study suggests that traditional advertising has not proven to be a very effective way to exploit the special characteristics of virtual worlds. There is substantial potential in virtual worlds for new and innovative marketing methods that are highly engaging and take advantage of users' active role in virtual worlds. From the marketing point of view, virtual worlds can be especially used for connecting with customers, contributing to customer learning, and getting customer input.

The paper illustrates that virtual worlds have come to offer marketers new opportunities for engaging their customers into interactive and co‐productive marketplace exchanges. They uncover untapped potential, resources and creative means for building customer relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact that systematization of sales activities through sales process management has, at the firm level, on profitable sales growth in business‐to‐business (B2B) companies. The research aims to compare companies focusing on service offerings to those focusing on product offerings.

The study is based on survey data.

Despite the emergence of service‐dominant logic, B2B service and product companies still differ in how sales process management contributes to firm performance.

The findings suggest that differences between service and product firms in their sales process management stem from the different underlying modes of interaction. The findings are generalizable to B2B companies.

The findings help businesses differentiate between productive sales process management practices in product and service firms.

The study contributes to the wider need of operationalizing ideas about sales process management at the level of organizations and business units.

This paper aims to investigate the role of new value creation mechanisms in a company's sales strategy. Using value creation and strategic marketing as theoretical approaches, the study explores the underpinnings of blue ocean strategy (BOS) and categorizes ways in which BOS is reflected in sales management activities. The link to performance and the influence of contextual moderation are also examined.

The article reports on a study on sales management in a 168‐respondent survey of CEOs and sales directors of Finnish companies across industries. The operationalization is quantitative, and principal component analysis with the varimax rotation method is used to examine the companies' approach to executing BOS and the firms are categorized using the cluster analysis method. Furthermore, the linkage to self‐reported business performance is statistically analyzed.

This study identifies four approaches to using BOS: strategic awareness‐building; customer‐specific solution orientation; enforcement‐orientation; and non‐employment of blue ocean thinking. While only the enforcement‐orientation cluster has superior performance to non‐users of BOS across the entire sample, there are surprisingly notable performance differentials within different combinations of contexts.

The study points out that enforcing BOS at the level of action and implementation in sales management pays off. The findings entail that choosing between the identified BOS approaches and implementing them should be context‐specific. Furthermore, the development of skills is emphasized over knowledge management.

For concepts primarily directed at managerial audiences, the theoretical foundations and empirical testability is often not the primary concern. This study presents investigative work geared at revealing the key factors underlying blue ocean strategies in sales management. The paper represents one of the first verifications of the link between blue ocean strategy and business performance.

The purpose of this paper is to develop videographic methods for the study of alternative entrepreneurship, with a theoretical focus on “ethical uncertainties”, exemplified in this paper by the exploration of evolving actions and unpredictable outcomes in a specific case, the Hungarian company Prezi.

By first situating Prezi’s alternative entrepreneurship in the turbulent Hungarian political context and situation for the Roma population, this study presents how the methodological foundations of organizational videography have affirmed aesthetic immersion, which is of particular use for the study of ethical uncertainty.

Following a methodological exploration of the specific research design and ethnographic reflections on three ways in which ethical uncertainties arise, this study discusses the videographic possibilities to study something as elusive as ethical uncertainty and its link to alternative futures.

The political context in Hungary poses many challenges for organizations that attempt to “do good” and create alternative futures. This paper explains how this political context permeates Prezi’s entrepreneurship and research thereof, by highlighting “ethical uncertainty”. The combined contribution (paper and videography) invites the reader to think differently about the authority of research, become a viewer and reflect on their own experiences of ethical uncertainty in alternative entrepreneurship.