To date, customer education has been framed in terms of one-way information provision, at odds with much of the literature on meaning co-creation. Drawing on an ethnography of a specialty coffee purveyor, we show how staff and consumers co-create educational consumer journeys through the deployment of seven practices: auditing, realignment, marrying competing logics, negotiating scripts, evangelizing, expanding collective knowledge, and impression management. These practices require staff and consumers to enact three different educational roles (educator, student, and peer), which are necessary for the co-creation and extension of consumer journeys. The roles, practices and the journeys themselves emerge iteratively through sensebreaking, sensegiving, and sensemaking processes among staff, consumers and the servicescape. Our findings frame customer education as a dynamic process in which meaning is co-created between participants. Furthermore, the cues and touchpoints needed for meaning-making shift as power relations between participants change. Managerially, these findings highlight the potential of co-created educational consumer journeys to expand established market categories.@en

Consecration is the process by which producers in creative fields become canonized as “greats.” However, is this the end of the story? Research on consecration focuses on the drivers of consecration but pays little attention to the post-consecration period. Furthermore, the research ignores the dynamics of consecration. To address these gaps, we examine the changing fortunes of a consecrated artist – the musician Phil Collins. We identify the ways in which three actors (fans, critics, and peers) assemble for consecration, disassemble for deconsecration, and reassemble for reconsecration. Examining the changing public image and commercial fortunes of Collins as a solo artist between 1980 and 2020, we identify an N-shaped process of rise-fall-rise that we call the Phil Collins Effect. This effect offers a new way of thinking about how cultural producers gain, lose and regain status in their fields.@en

The piece is based on an article the authors have coming up in Research in the Sociology of Organisations.@en

The case examines the strategies of Lovehoney, the UK’s largest seller of sexual wellness products, primarily driven by its own branded product range plus brand licenses such as the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. Sexual wellness is not a new category; rather it is the name given to what was the sex toy and sex play market by new entrants keen to distance themselves from historic associations with pornography and a male tone of voice. A number of disruptive brands have entered into this market, leveraging design-driven innovations and branding with a clear feminine tone of voice, focused on appealing to holistic notions of wellness. One of the earliest of these was Lovehoney, a UK-based online retailer based in the historic spa town of Bath. The case focuses on the challenge of entering into the USA, a lucrative market for sexual wellness, but one requiring a different tone of voice to successfully penetrate.@en