ABSTRACT Platformisation, dominated by Global North Silicon Valley firms, is central to technocapitalism, yet its heteronormative organising logic remains under-theorised in marketing. This omission is particularly acute for queer consumers operating within Global South platform infrastructures. Addressing this gap, this paper theorises queer survival under platform capitalism in China. Despite institutional differences from Western neoliberal models, China's state-led techno-capitalism produces distinct yet equally urgent crises of platformised heteronormativity. This paper asks: how do queer users navigate and rework such power? Drawing on five years of online observation of queer content creators, platform stakeholders, and secondary interviews, I develop the concept of queer survivalscapes: gong sheng (symbiotic), ji sheng (parasitic), and ye sheng (feral). I theorise queer consumers as precarious yet strategic actors who redistribute risk through relational, performative, and affective labour, advancing technology and queer consumer studies beyond Western-centric accounts of platform power.

ABSTRACT This editorial introduces the contributions to the special issue on Marxism, Marketing and Consumer Research. It provides a brief introduction to Marxism and its influence on marketing and consumer research to set the scene for seven provocative papers. Each tackles the seemingly perverse challenge of combining Marxism with marketing and consumer research.

ABSTRACT Under more financial pressure than ever, audiences are looking for ways to budget, save, and invest online. Enter Personal Finance influencers. We find that while viewers might look for straightforward advice on saving and budgeting, they will inevitably encounter a wide range of topics, including the car and housing markets, inflation, the Federal Reserve, and geopolitics. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, including machine learning and a qualitative analysis of YouTube videos from four top influencer channels. Drawing on the history of neoliberalism and influencer studies, we find top videos focus on personal minimalism as an approach to wealth building while making macroeconomic predictions such as the prospect of an impending recession or the collapse of the U.S. dollar. The YouTube platform, which requires constant content creation, pushes influencers to make implicit economic judgments about financial topics. As a consequence, Personal Finance influencers exemplify a neoliberal transformation of expertise through the attention economy of social platforms, which further entrenches the market as the validator of Truth.

ABSTRACT Existing research on family and companionship primarily explores human-to-human relational bonds. Our research tells a different story. This study investigates the imaginative processes through which consumers form emotionally meaningful relationships with AI companions. Drawing on user reviews, online community observation, and autoethnography, we introduce the concept of consumer imagination work – a process in which consumers envision human-like characteristics in AI, establish relationships based on assigned roles, and bring these ideas to life through creative and social activities such as personalization, storytelling, and community collaboration. Guided by cultural-historical activity theory, our findings highlight the active, creative and collaborative role of consumers in shaping these relationships. We illustrate how consumer imagination contributes to the formation of emotionally significant human-AI bonds through individual creativity and collective digital imaginaries, offering new insights into the humanization of AI and its broader implications for consumer–brand interactions and technology-mediated relationships.

ABSTRACT This essay accounts for the features of Gothic Marxism and its influence on critical streams of consumer culture research. First, the essay explores the Gothic imagination and outlines how its de-familiarising aesthetics enabled Marx to denaturalise the chimerical functioning of marketplace ideologies, their depredations, and everydayness. At the heart of Gothic Marxist critique is attentiveness to the phantasmal character of lived “reality”, of seeing the unseen and making the taken-for-granted appear as it actually is: horrific, monstrous, pernicious. Second, the essay discusses the residue of Marx’s phantasmaterialism throughout critical consumption scholarship and synthesises illustrative research under the banner of Consumer Culture Gothica. Four main research programmes are outlined: (1) Sado-masochistic market relations; (2) Consumer inscapes; (3) Carnivalesque consumption formations; and (4) Defatalising marketplace metaphors. The essay concludes with Gothic Marxism’s impact on how marketing is “written” and how an “artistic critique” of capitalism’s cultural production is formulated.

ABSTRACT In response to the growing trend of male beauty influencers, this article examines the case of Li Jiaqi, known in mainland China as the “Lipstick King”. Based on a critical multimodal discourse analysis, we combine (post)feminism and queer theories to decode the contested processes in which Li (re)negotiates and (re)constructs the dominant gender regime in postfeminist beauty culture. Our analysis shows that Li’s gender performance is shaped by and shaping diverse and multi-scalar social forces, including the rampant platform economy, consumerist social-class and cosmopolitan imaginaries, and heteronormativity. These different spheres of power conflict and converge, creating space for Li’s gender transgressions. The destabilisations challenge the dominant gender relations on the one hand and are highly contingent, conditional and unevenly distributed on the other. These particularities highlight the unique aspects of postfeminist beauty consumption in a non-Western context, and enrich postfeminist literature and marketing studies.

ABSTRACT Research has regularly addressed the disparities in power between consumers and more powerful market actors and the resultant market developments that emerge either through acts of resistance or the reproduction and consolidation of existing power structures. However, previous literature has primarily foregrounded dissatisfied consumers who are openly opposed to the aspirations of powerful actors. Through an inductive study of the sneaker subculture, we identify a previously overlooked category of consumer; a consumer with high field-dependent cultural capital who is dissatisfied with developments within their particular consumption field but who is generally unantagonistic towards powerful actors and willing to engage in an exchange of legitimacy that benefits all parties. We dub these actors “consumer Clerics.” Through an institutional theory lens, we elaborate on the legitimacy exchange between powerful actors, consumers, and disruptive entrants, explore the dynamics of these relationships, and describe the nature of consumer Clerics’ consumption field participation.