This research aims to understand how gamers redefine their identity by extending, aggregating, and assembling the different dimensions of the self in experiential online communities. The authors conducted a series of filmed in‐depth and in game individual interviews, group interviews, informal conversations, and observation of online game sessions. A framework of online identity construction shows how gamers assemble their identities combining different self‐dimensions, using two different strategies: self‐extension and self‐aggregation. Self‐extension strategies consist in the idealization, development, and manipulation of avatars (their digital self). Self‐aggregation strategies refer to group participation and sharing virtual possessions within groups of players. To bring their identities from the experiential community to the real life, gamers combine these strategies by assembling and materializing identities. This framework has theoretical implications for the self, identity, and sharing in online contexts. Finally, the paper considers managerial implications and future research directions in online communities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Objective: The marketization of the different social instances has pointed the market as the main intermediary of the social and cultural constructions in contemporary society, including football. Therefore, this study analyzeshow the process of marketization takes place through the intertwining between football’s cultural dimensions and the market ideology. Method: Through an interpretative approach, we perform an ethnographic study in the universe of one Brazilian football club, Sport Club Internacional.Originality/Relevance: Contributing with previous studies on consequences of the marketization process, results indicate how marketing producers and consumers naturalize passion and consumption discourses around a market ideology, shaping the marketization process.Results: We observed that both marketing producers and consumers mix the notions of ‘supporting’ and ‘consuming’ in a single discursive structure. This intertwining involves the approximation of supporters’ passion to the notion of consumer, reinforced by discourses of professionalization e the creation of new products. This process is conducted under the influence of euroamerican spectacularization of sport.Theoretical Contributions: We use the lenses of cultural and market studies to analyze a football club, demonstrating that market ideology disseminates, among other possible forms, modifying specific cultural relations, as football passion. Football marketization involves, thus, the transformation of football as a consumption cultural phenomenon mediated by economic rationality.

Apesar de a colonialidade que opera no episteme do marketing ter sido descrita por estudos prévios, é importante reconhecer que o marketing também opera como um dispositivo para (re)produção da própria colonialidade nas práticas cotidianas de gestores e consumidores. Assim, a partir do contexto empírico do futebol e orientado para práticas de gestão de marketing, buscamos compreender como o marketing se constitui como uma ferramenta da (re)produção e gestão da matriz de poder colonial. Para isso, esse artigo é elaborado a partir do diálogo entre a perspectiva dos estudos descoloniais latino-americano e uma experiência etnográfica junto ao Grêmio Foot-Ball Porto Alegrense. Por meio de dispositivos produzidos pelos gestores, o marketing faz circular uma estética e o desejo por viver uma realidade parecida e distante da nossa própria subjetividade. Nesse processo o marketing trama narrativas e imagens, práticas de relação e arquiteturas que agem, mesmo que com resultados incertos, para construção do consumidor tomador de decisões racionais, com corpos modelados para a fruição pacífica de uma estética europeia de espetáculo de futebol, criando subjetividades colonizadas. Por fim, refletimos como podemos superar a imagem distorcida de selvagens que enxergamos diante do espelho eurocêntrico para construir imagens a partir de uma subjetividade autônoma.