People increasingly seek out opportunities to escape from a sped-up pace of life by engaging in slow forms of consumption. Drawing from the theory of social acceleration, we explore how consumers can experience and achieve a slowed-down experience of time through consumption. To do so, we ethnographically study the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain and introduce the concept of consumer deceleration. Consumer deceleration is a perception of a slowed-down temporal experience achieved via a decrease in certain quantities (traveled distance, use of technology, experienced episodes) per unit of time through altering, adopting, or eschewing forms of consumption. Consumers decelerate in three ways: embodied, technological, and episodic. Each is enabled by consumer practices and market characteristics, rules, and norms, and results in time being experienced as passing more slowly and as being an abundant resource. Achieving deceleration is challenging, as it requires resynchronization to a different temporal logic and the ability to manage intrusions from acceleration. Conceptualizing consumer deceleration allows us to enhance our understanding of temporality and consumption, embodied consumption, extraordinary experiences, and the theory of social acceleration. Overall, this study contributes to consumer research by illuminating the role of speed and rhythm in consumer culture.

This article introduces a new dimension of consumption as liquid or solid. Liquid consumption is defined as ephemeral, access based, and dematerialized, while solid consumption is defined as enduring, ownership based, and material. Liquid and solid consumption are conceptualized as existing on a spectrum, with four conditions leading to consumption being liquid, solid, or a combination of the two: relevance to the self, the nature of social relationships, accessibility to mobility networks, and type of precarity experienced. Liquid consumption is needed to explain behavior within digital contexts, in access-based consumption, and in conditions of global mobility. It highlights a consumption orientation around values of flexibility, adaptability, fluidity, lightness, detachment, and speed. Implications of liquid consumption are discussed for the domains of attachment and appropriation; the importance of use value; materialism; brand relationships and communities; identity; prosumption and the prosumer; and big data, quantification of the self, and surveillance. Lastly, managing the challenges of liquid consumption and its effect on consumer welfare are explored.

Access-based consumption, defined as transactions that can be market mediated but where no transfer of ownership takes place, is becoming increasingly popular, yet it is not well theorized. This study examines the nature of access as it contrasts to ownership and sharing, specifically the consumer-object, consumer-consumer, and consumer-marketer relationships. Six dimensions are identified to distinguish among the range of access-based consumptionscapes: temporality, anonymity, market mediation, consumer involvement, the type of accessed object, and political consumerism. Access-based consumption is examined in the context of car sharing via an interpretive study of Zipcar consumers. Four outcomes of these dimensions in the context of car sharing are identified: lack of identification, varying significance of use and sign value, negative reciprocity resulting in a big-brother model of governance, and a deterrence of brand community. The implications of our findings for understanding the nature of exchange, consumption, and brand community are discussed.

We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are attempting to forge new webs of interconnectedness through the construction of a transnational, imagined Asian world. Some branding managers are creating regional brands that emphasize the common experience of globalization, evoke a generic, hyper-urban, and multicultural experience, and are infused with diverse cultural referents. These types of regional Asian brands contribute to the creation of an imagined Asia as urban, modern, and multicultural. Understanding this process helps one to appreciate the role of branding managers in constructing markets and places.

Care is increasingly marketized. Previous marketing and consumer research has focused on specific tensions underlying marketized care provision and the ways in which consumers navigate them. In contrast, this conceptual article draws on interdisciplinary research on care to develop a cumulative understanding of marketized care, that is, based on those effects that build up over time when a critical mass of consumers routinely addresses care needs via markets. Defining marketized care as attending to the welfare needs of human and nonhuman others through the market, we identify four negative cumulative effects: individuating effects on consumer subjectivities, alienating effects on care relationships, responsibilizing effects on consumers as opposed to other institutional actors of care provision, and exploitative effects generated in global care and supply chains. We also outline four principles that can mitigate these effects: interdependent consumer autonomy, affective reconnections, proportionate responsibilization, and market reconfiguration. Our conceptualization moves the literature on marketized care forward by outlining its cumulative nature as well as offering potential solutions that are neither demonizing nor celebratory of markets. In doing so, we offer a series of generative insights for research on marketized care that contribute to addressing collective human and nonhuman flourishing.

Systemic risks––pandemics, economic recessions, professional precarity, political volatility, and climate emergencies––increasingly erode previously taken-for-granted stabilities and consumers’ confidence in the future. How do consumers manage risk and uncertainty when economic and ontological security are on the decline? Traditionally, consumers have built a sense of security through solid consumption (e.g., home ownership, accumulating possessions). A four-year ethnography of digital nomadism, however, demonstrates that looming uncertainty can render solid consumption a source of vulnerability and an unwanted anchor in turbulent times that call for agility and adaptability. We outline the emergence of liquid consumer security, defined as a form of felt security that stems from avoidance of solid consumption and its risks and responsibilities. Liquid consumer security inheres in the absence of ownership, attachments, or rootedness, and is derived from circumventing the temporal demands, financial liabilities, and commitments that solid consumption requires, which emerge as sources of risk. It is achieved through a recursive process of engaging in three strategies: (1) solid risk minimization; (2) security reconstruction through the liquid marketplace; and (3) ideological legitimation. Contributions to consumer risk and security, liquid consumption, social theories of risk, and digital nomadism are discussed.

This study investigates consumers' relationship to possessions in the condition of contemporary global nomadism. Prior research argues that consumers form enduring and strong attachments to possessions because of their centrality to identity projects. This role is heightened in life transitions including cross-border movements as possessions anchor consumer's identities either to their homeland or to the host country. This study reexamines this claim via in-depth interviews with elite global nomads, deterritorialized consumers who engage in serial relocation and frequent short-term international mobility. An alternative relationship to possessions characterized by detachment and flexibility emerges, which is termed “liquid.” Three characteristics of a liquid relationship to possessions are identified: temporary situational value, use-value, and immateriality. The study outlines a logic of nomadic consumption, that of instrumentality, where possessions and practices are strategic resources in managing mobility. A liquid perspective on possessions expands current understandings of materiality, acculturation, and globalization.

Why do consumers choose difficult analog technologies over their labor-saving digital counterparts? Through ethnographic investigations of three once defunct analog technologies that have experienced a resurgence (vinyl music, film photography, and analog synthesizers), we explore how the act of consumer work enables consumers to experience shifting dimensions of agency. We utilize the theoretical lens of serious leisure to introduce a four-stage work process (novice, apprentice, craft, and design) in which the experience of agency is dependent on the shifting relations between user, object, and context. The four stages are cumulative and conjunctive, representing the development of skills toward mastery while also being connected via three transition mechanisms (contextualization, schematization, and hypothesization) that address agency–alienation tensions. The transition through these mechanisms is necessary to sustain emotional engagement in consumer work. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the myriad of ways in which consumer work as serious leisure generates different experiences of agency and alienation and the ways in which consumers can sustain engagement in their work.

“The Journal of Consumer Research is an anomaly in the ‘house of intellect’. Its primary objective is to serve as an interdisciplinary communication vehicle for theory, empirical research and methodology of the study of consumer behavior. … It is our objective to be the first journal in which professionals sharing an interest in consumer behavior across disciplines send their material. … JCR is intended to be a medium for interdisciplinary exchange over an exceedingly broad range of topics, the common denominator of which is their relationship to the study of consumer behavior.” —Ronald Frank, 1974 (inaugural JCR editorial) The Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) was founded on a unique premise: to serve as the place where scholars from across academic disciplines and research perspectives share scientific knowledge about consumers and about the study of consumer behavior. Now, 50 years later, we see JCR as more than ever playing that crucial role, as the source of a broad range of high-quality research on key questions from a diverse set of researchers and perspectives with the shared goal to improve our scientific understanding of consumer behavior.

Drawing on cultural branding research, we examine how brands can craft national identity. We do so with reference to how brands enabled New Zealand’s displaced Pākehā (white) majority to carve out a sense of we-ness against the backdrop of globalization and resurgent indigenous identity claims. Using multiple sources of ethnographic data, we develop a process model of how brands create national identity through we-ness. We find that marketplace actors deployed brands to create and renew perceptions of we-ness through four-stages: reification, lumping, splitting, and horizon expansion. From this, we make three primary contributions to the consumer research literature: we develop a four-part process model of how brands become national identity resources, explore the characteristics of the brands that enable the emergence of and evolution of we-ness, and explore how our processes can address a sense of dispossession among displaced-majorities in similarly defined contexts.