No abstract

The phrase "fast fashion" refers to low-cost clothing collections that mimic current luxury fashion trends. Fast fashion helps sate deeply held desires among young consumers in the industrialized world for luxury fashion, even as it embodies unsustainability. Trends run their course with lightning speed, with today's latest styles swiftly trumping yesterday's, which have already been consigned to the trash bin. This article addresses the inherent dissonance among fast fashion consumers, who often share a concern for environmental issues even as they indulge in consumer patterns antithetical to ecological best practices. Seemingly adept at compartmentalism, and free of conflicted guilt, such consumers see no contradiction in their Janus-faced desires. Can luxury fashion, with ostensibly an emphasis on authenticity, and its concomitant respect for artisans and the environment, foster values of both quality and sustainability? Since individual identity continually evolves, and requires a materially referential re-imagining of self to do so, we hypothesize that actual rather than faux luxury brands can, ironically, unite the ideals of fashion with those of environmental sustainability.

The study tests a use-diffusion model in the context of home technology use. The authors combine two constructs, variety and rate of use, to yield four user segments. The results show that user segments vary on the basis of social context and technological makeup of the household as well as personal factors and external influences. Furthermore, user segments differ with regard to users' satisfaction with technology and interest in acquiring future technologies.

Mobile marketing, which involves two-or multi-way communication and promotion of an offer between a firm and its customers using the mobile, a term that refers to the mobile medium, device, channel, or technology, is growing in importance in the retailing environment. It has the potential to change the paradigm of retailing from one based on consumers entering the retailing environment to retailers entering the consumer's environment through anytime, anywhere mobile devices. We propose a conceptual framework that comprises three key entities: the consumer, the mobile, and the retailer. The framework addresses key related issues such as mobile consumer activities, mobile consumer segments, mobile adoption enablers and inhibitors, key mobile properties, key retailer mobile marketing activities and competition. We also address successful retailer mobile marketing strategies, identify the customer-related and organizational challenges on this topic, and outline future research scenarios and avenues related to these issues.

This work calls for a paradigmatic shift from marketing techniques and concepts to markets as a social construction. Our argument is composed of six facets:(1) revisioning the creation of value in markets to include meanings; (2) reconsidering the efficacy and limits of working from the perspective of the marketer; (3) incorporating more conscientiously consumer subjectivity and agency; (4) reformulating the nature of relationships between consumers and marketers from individuals to social beings inhabiting communities; (5) addressing more explicitly cultural differences in the form of subcultures within nations and international differences between nations in level of development; and finally, (6) exhorting the importance of marketer reflexivity. In charting these key transitions and tracing them to particular academic communities over time, we work towards a more radically transformative marketing practice that is socio-historically situated, culturally sensitive, and organic, in accounting for and adapting to contemporary global, technological, and sociocultural developments.