Lays the groundwork for a conceptual framework that might be used to study fanatical consumers and consumption. We review literature on fanatics produced by psychologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, political scientists, theologists and marketers and then place their multidisciplinary insights into a consumption context. We identify two familiar features of fanatics – intensity and intolerance – but suggest a third feature – incoherence among thinking, behaviour and goals caused by intensity and/or intolerance might be the conceptual key to understanding fanatical consumers, measuring their fanaticism and interpreting their consumption experiences.

The decline in oil prices in 2015 and 2016 has forced innovation managers within the oil and gas industry to do more with smaller budgets. To meet this challenge, oil and gas companies in the United States need to optimize their innovation investment. By interviewing experts across the industry, we have identified six common innovation behaviors. Explicitly aligning these behaviors with innovation strategy can help oil and gas companies spend limited innovation dollars wisely. To help guide decision making, we developed three innovation archetypes (reactive, opportunistic, and proactive) that describe the relative emphasis that various companies place on different innovation behaviors. Reactive innovators limit their investment in innovation activities but forgo some of the competitive advantage offered by new technology. Opportunistic innovators keep pace with new technology but have relatively little control over developing innovations. Proactive innovators help shape technology development to derive maximum value from the innovations developed. Innovation managers can use the framework in this paper to assess their portfolio of activities holistically, or they can apply these archetypes to specific technology domains (e.g., big data or oilfield chemicals). This new framework can help align tactics with strategy to maximize innovation outcomes while oil prices remain low.

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