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The purpose of this paper is to explore the capital-based benefits which arise when acculturating immigrants perform touristic practices, and how these shape their tourism and migration experiences.

Grounded in consumer culture theory, this paper draws on theories of capital consumption to inform a hermeneutic analysis of multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand.

Domestic touristic practices offer three types of capital-based benefits, enabling consumers to index economic capital, accrue social capital and index cultural capital. Additionally, the quest for capital emphasises iconic forms of tourism and supersedes concerns about commodification.

This paper demonstrates the important role of touristic practices not only in short-term mobility, but also for long-term migrants. Further research should investigate how capital shapes the touristic practices of other types of mobile consumers.

Understanding the capital-based benefits of touristic practices in acculturation informs the design of migrant settlement policy and the managerial staging of touristic experiences.

While theorists of liquid modernity have largely treated tourism as a discrete type of mobility, this paper reframes tourism as a key acculturation practice. In contrast to dominant conceptualisations of tourism as a quest for cultural authenticity, this paper reconceptualises tourism as a quest for capital. Finally, while previous studies have focused on how capital constrains acculturation outcomes, this paper explores how a consumption practice enables the expression and accumulation of capital.

This paper aims to explore how marketplace-enabled performances help reconstitute masculinity in the context of transnational mobility.

Grounded in consumer acculturation theory, this paper draws on theories of gender performance to inform a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with skilled migrant men.

To navigate experiences of emasculation, participants performed three remasculation strategies: status-based hypermasculinity, localised masculinity and flexible masculinity.

This study offers insights for the design of migrant settlement policy. Further research should investigate the remasculation strategies of low resource migrant men.

This paper makes two contributions to theories of gendered acculturation. First, while studies of acculturation as a gendered performance have shown how marketplace resources support the gendered identity projects of female migrants and the children of migrants, this paper provides the missing perspective of skilled migrant men. Beyond acting as “resistant” cultural gatekeepers of their family members’ gendered acculturation practices, first-generation migrant men emerge as creative, agentic and skilled negotiators of countervailing gender regimes. Second, transnationally dispersed families, migrant communities and country of origin networks emerge not only as acculturating agents which transmit gender regimes but also as audiences which enable the staging of remasculating performances.

The consumer acculturation literature argues that reconstituting familiar embodied practices from the culture of origin leads to a comforting sense of home for consumers who move from one cultural context to another. This paper aims to extend this thesis by examining further dimensions in migrant consumers’ experiences of home culture consumption.

This paper analyses data gathered through multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand through the conceptual lens of embodiment.

Building on Dion et al.’s (2011) framework of ethnic embodiment, the analysis uncovers home culture consumption as multi-layered experiences of anchoring, de-stabilisation and estrangement, characterised by convergence and divergence between the embodied dimensions of being-in-the-world, being-in-the-world with others and remembering being-in-the-world.

This paper underscores home culture consumption in migration as an ambivalent embodied experience. Further research should investigate how other types of acculturating consumers experience and negotiate the changing meanings of home.

Marketers in migrant-receiving and migrant-sending cultural contexts should be sensitised to disjunctures in migrants’ embodied experience of consuming home and their role in heightening or mitigating these disjunctures.

This paper helps contribute to consumer acculturation theory in two ways. First, the authors show how migrants experience not only comfort and connection but also displacement, in practices of home culture consumption. Second, the authors show how migrant communities do not only encourage cultural maintenance and gatekeeping but also contribute to cultural identity de-stabilisation.

Over the last decade, considerable emphasis has been placed on the importance of relationship marketing. The re‐orientation of marketing has been at the expense of the traditional approach to marketing, that is transaction marketing (the “4Ps”). However, others conclude that transactional marketing is still relevant and practised concurrently with various types of relational marketing. However, no empirical evidence has been provided to support the proposition of a pluralistic approach to marketing. We, therefore, draw on empirical, qualitative case study evidence from the emerging and transforming international food supply chain that supports the proposition. The paper uses two settings from this context to illustrate that both transactional and relational approaches to marketing are employed concurrently. The first case, at the product origin of the supply chain, is based upon research into relationship marketing in the Danish‐UK dairy supply chain. The second case, at the consumer interface of the supply chain, evolves from a study into an interactive home‐shopping supermarket in New Zealand. The paper considers implications and areas for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of a global luxury brand industry and discusses previous conceptualisations of luxury brands. In this endeavour, the study illustrates the unique context of luxury consumption, to highlight several developments in extant literature, and to advocate for the advancement of the consumer-centric paradigm of luxury branding.

The study reviews the emergence of a global luxury brand industry, discusses macro-environmental trends that have influenced luxury brand consumption, critically evaluates the existing literature on luxury brands, and offers directions for future research.

The study highlights that luxury brands have emerged as a special form of branding that conveys the unique sociocultural and individual meanings to their adherents. Moreover, it was found that these meanings have been shaped by a number of important cultural, social, and external trends, which call researchers and practitioners to consider the consumer-centric paradigm of luxury branding.

The study calls for a shift in the focus from the characteristics of luxury brands per se, and towards phenomenological experiences and socio-cultural influences, in the pursuits to understand what brand luxury conveys in the broader context of post-modern consumer culture. The study offers two distinct areas for future research to address these developments.

This paper aims to provide a theoretical analysis of contemporary brand communication for technology products, focused on how the human body functions as a metaphorical and communicative device, to shed insight into how technological brands make their products understandable, tangible, and attractive in interesting ways.

An interdisciplinary conceptual review and analysis focuses on issues of metaphor and the body in marketing research and social theory. This analysis is discussed and applied to the communication of technological brands.

The paper argues that to successfully communicate technological brands requires interdisciplinary insights in order to understand consumption contexts. It proposes an analytic framework for practice and research focused on visual communication for technology brands and products, and demonstrates how advertising both creates and contributes to culture.

Researchers need to understand that a sole focus on the advertising system needs to be supplemented by an understanding of how the symbol of the body in technology advertisements is reflective and productive of meaning in socio‐cultural discourse.

Brand researchers need to add to the prevailing advertising as persuasion model to encompass representation and culture in brand communications. The paper contributes to understanding how basic visual forms, such as the human body, are employed in technology product marketing. It challenges marketers and researchers to broaden their conception of branding and marketing communications to one more consistent with an image economy.

Cross-cultural influences are important considerations in the international marketing of luxury brands. These influences have predominantly been understood through cross-national approaches and the lens of glocalisation. The purpose of this paper is to study augments these paradigms by advancing the view of luxury brand markets as confluences of multiple cultural beliefs.

A hermeneutic analysis of 24 in-depth interviews was conducted with luxury brand consumers in New Zealand.

The findings describe two cultural beliefs that convey divergent meanings and shape luxury brand consumption styles in a multicultural marketplace. More specifically, the authors illustrate that consumers can be influenced by and shift between both local and foreign cultural beliefs in a single national market.

The study offers a situated account of the New Zealand luxury market. Other cultural beliefs may be in operation in different national markets.

This paper makes three contributions to the international marketing of and cross-cultural considerations for luxury brands. First, the authors illustrate that cultural diversity must be considered not only at the cross-national level, but also at the intra-national level. In particular, the authors show that the global-local dichotomy in cross-cultural luxury branding needs to be augmented with the local-foreign dimension. Second, this is the first study in this area to empirically demonstrate the impact of multicultural marketplaces on luxury brands, where consumers emerge as contextual cultural shifters. Third, the authors advocate a shift from the prevailing glocal approach to a new multicultural approach in luxury branding.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on a novel multi-modal enabling technique for contextualising brand consumption experiences.

A multi-modal interpretive narrative approach is presented as a means of investigating brands as experiential entities for use in consumer identity projects. It reports the strategic use of different modes of data collection: autobiographical narratives generated by solo participants to create a benchmark of identity and subsequent friendship pair guided discussion interviews. This offers a faster, cheaper and more convenient means of gaining access to consumer experiences of brands than traditional ethnographic methods, which require prolonged engagements within a community.

Consumer narratives of actual brand consumption and of mediated brand consumption are enhanced using this method. The consumer narratives generated provided rich insights into the role of brands in contributing to national identity. The contextualised use and function of identity narratives provided by brands were identified in addition to the identification of national community rituals of consumption.

The multi-modal use of friendship pair interviews with solo autobiographical interviews is shown to offer benefits to qualitative consumer researchers focussing on brand/identity issues. The combination of data collection methods allowed for greater reflexive, memorial and contextualised discussion in the friendship pair interviews about brand narrative consumption and generated responses that advance beyond socio-political conventions concerning brands. Consequently, contextualised brand consumption experiences can be accessed more effectively than in conventional depth interviews.

This paper aims to understand the elements of bridging practices enacted by Asian immigrant consumers and exploring how these practices constitute reverse acculturation within immigrant-receiving Western cultures.

A practice theoretical perspective was deployed in concert with a hermeneutic analysis of two-part depth interviews with 26 Southeast Asian immigrants in New Zealand. Multi-modal methods and open narrative reflexivity were deployed to improve depth and trustworthiness.

Participant narratives revealed three intertwined elements of bridging practices: articulations (involving sayings and meanings), performances (involving embodied social activities and material artefacts) and contestations (involving tensions and anxieties). Bridging practices create shared social spaces and facilitate the intensification of intercultural translation.

Bridging practices provide a partial view of wider “circuits of practice” (Magaudda, 2011) which cumulatively constitute reverse acculturation. Future research is needed to show how bridging practices serve as resources for transforming the consumption practices of local consumers in Western cultures.

This study advances consumer acculturation theory in three ways. First, this study identifies a key practice of intercultural translation between Asian and Western consumer cultures. In particular, this study shows that intercultural translation occurs not only through ethnic economies but also in a diverse range of private and public sites. Second, in addition to local consumers’ practices (Sobh et al., 2012), this study highlights the role of immigrant consumers’ practices in reverse acculturation, thereby providing empirical evidence for Luedicke’s (2011) conceptual model of intercultural adaptation. Third, in addition to the influence of acculturating agents on immigrant consumers (Askegaard et al., 2005; Peñaloza, 1994), this study demonstrates how immigrant consumers themselves can act as acculturating agents.