Navigating the Institutional Logics of Markets: Implications for Strategic Brand Management

Adopting an institutional theoretic framework, this article examines the evolution and competitive dynamics of markets composed of multiple practices, beliefs, and rule systems. The 30-year historical analysis of the U.S. yoga market illustrates the coexistence of spirituality, medical, fitness, and commercial logics. Using data gathered through archival sources, netnography, in-depth interviews, and participant observations, the authors link shifting emphases on institutional logics and their sustenance to institutional entrepreneurs’ accumulation and transmission of cultural capital, strategies to legitimize plural logics, distinct branding practices, and contestations among the pervading logics. The study offers a managerial framework for managing conflicting demands of logics, conveying brand legitimacy, and creating a coherent brand identity in plural logic markets; in addition, it develops a theoretical account of links between institutional logics, competitive dynamics, and market evolution.

[1]  Michael T. Hannan,et al.  Niche Width and the Dynamics of Organizational Populations , 1983, American Journal of Sociology.

[2]  M. Giesler,et al.  Conflict and Compromise: Drama in Marketplace Evolution , 2008 .

[3]  Douglas B. Holt,et al.  Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands , 2010 .

[4]  M. Singleton,et al.  The Classical Reveries of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Constructive Orientalism , 2008 .

[5]  Grant Mccracken.  The long interview , 1988 .

[6]  Paula Jarzabkowski,et al.  Reconstructing institutional complexity in practice: A relational model of institutional work and complexity , 2013 .

[7]  P. Schreiner.  Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives , 2009 .

[8]  H. Rao,et al.  Institutional Change in Toque Ville: Nouvelle Cuisine as an Identity Movement in French Gastronomy1 , 2003, American Journal of Sociology.

[9]  Candace Jones,et al.  Institutional Logics and Institutional Pluralism: The Contestation of Care and Science Logics in Medical Education, 1967–2005 , 2010 .

[10]  Craig J. Thompson,et al.  Emotional Branding and the Strategic Value of the Doppelgänger Brand Image , 2006 .

[11]  D. Holt.  Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding , 2002 .

[12]  Can Uslay,et al.  An Empirical Examination Of the "Rule Of Three": Strategy Implications For Top Management, Marketers, and Investors , 2010 .

[13]  Ashlee Humphreys.  Megamarketing: The Creation of Markets as a social Process. , 2010 .

[14]  R. Belk.  Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing , 2008 .

[15]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[16]  G. Carroll,et al.  Why the Microbrewery Movement? Organizational Dynamics of Resource Partitioning in the U.S. Brewing Industry1 , 2000, American Journal of Sociology.

[17]  Giana M. Eckhardt,et al.  Glocal yoga: Re-appropriation in the Indian consumptionscape , 2012 .

[18]  Patricia H. Thornton,et al.  Institutional Logics and the Historical Contingency of Power in Organizations: Executive Succession in the Higher Education Publishing Industry, 1958– 19901 , 1999, American Journal of Sociology.

[19]  Patricia H. Thornton,et al.  Institutional Logics , 2008 .

[20]  T. Reay,et al.  Managing the Rivalry of Competing Institutional Logics , 2009 .

[21]  W. Scott.  'Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony', American Journal of Sociology, 83, pp. 340-63. , 2016 .

[22]  Kenneth Wm. Kury,et al.  Institutional Logics and Institutional Change in Organizations: Transformation in Accounting, Architecture, and Publishing , 2005 .

[23]  Ashlee Humphreys,et al.  Semiotic Structure and the Legitimation of Consumption Practices: The Case of Casino Gambling , 2010 .

[24]  The Modern Las Vegas Casino-Hotel: The Paradigmatic New Means of Consumption , 2001 .

[25]  R. Friedland.  Bringing Society Back In : Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions , 1991 .

[26]  G. Day,et al.  Evolutionary Processes in Competitive Markets: Beyond the Product Life Cycle , 1989 .

[27]  James W. Pennebaker,et al.  Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2007) , 2007 .

[28]  Glenn R. Carroll,et al.  Concentration and Specialization: Dynamics of Niche Width in Populations of Organizations , 1985, American Journal of Sociology.

[29]  S. Kates.  The dynamics of Brand legitimacy: An interpretive study in the gay men's community , 2004 .

[30]  Eileen Fischer,et al.  How Doppelgänger Brand Images Influence the Market Creation Process: Longitudinal Insights from the Rise of Botox Cosmetic , 2012 .

[31]  J. Battilana,et al.  BUILDING SUSTAINABLE HYBRID ORGANIZATIONS: THE CASE OF COMMERCIAL MICROFINANCE ORGANIZATIONS , 2010 .

[32]  Craig J Thompson.  Interpreting Consumers: A Hermeneutical Framework for Deriving Marketing Insights from the Texts of Consumers’ Consumption Stories , 1997 .

[33]  M. Lounsbury.  INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION AND STATUS MOBILITY: THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF THE FIELD OF FINANCE , 2002 .

[34]  Anne-Claire Pache,et al.  Inside the Hybrid Organization: Selective Coupling as a Response to Competing Institutional Logics , 2013 .

[35]  M. Singleton,et al.  Yoga in the modern world : contemporary perspectives , 2008 .

[36]  R. Friedland.  Institution, practice, and ontology: Toward a religious sociology , 2009 .

[37]  Ioana Boghian.  Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , 2013 .

[38]  J. Barney.  Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage , 1991 .

[39]  T. Lawrence,et al.  Institutions and Institutional Work , 2006 .

[40]  H. Gatignon,et al.  Research Issues at the Boundary of Competitive Dynamics and Market Evolution , 2005 .

[41]  Patricia H. Thornton,et al.  The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process , 2012 .

[42]  Christine Moorman,et al.  Consumer Health under the Scope , 2002 .

[43]  John F. Sherry,et al.  American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research , 2009 .

[44]  D. Snow,et al.  Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment , 2000 .

[45]  E. Arnould,et al.  How Does Organizational Identification Form? A Consumer Behavior Perspective , 2011 .

[46]  C. Oliver.  STRATEGIC RESPONSES TO INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES , 1991 .

[47]  M. Lounsbury,et al.  Institutional Complexity and Organizational Responses , 2010 .

[48]  Anand Swaminathan,et al.  Resource Partitioning and the Evolution of Specialist Organizations: The Role of Location and Identity in the U.S. Wine Industry , 2001 .

[49]  R. Schiffer,et al.  INTRODUCTION , 1988, Neurology.

[50]  K. Weick.  Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems , 1976, Gestión y Estrategia.

[51]  Gokcen Coskuner-Balli,et al.  Countervailing market responses to corporate co-optation and the ideological recruitment of consumption communities , 2007 .

[52]  Ravi S. Achrol,et al.  Evolution of the Marketing Organization: New Forms for Turbulent Environments , 1991 .

[53]  W. Powell,et al.  The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields , 1983 .

[54]  Sten Jönsson.  Institutions and Organizations , 1997 .

[55]  Stephen L. Vargo,et al.  Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing , 2004 .

[56]  P. Bourdieu.  Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* , 2018, Food and Culture.

[57]  Allison Fish.  The Commodification and Exchange of Knowledge in the Case of Transnational Commercial Yoga , 2006, International Journal of Cultural Property.

[58]  Paul DiMaggio.  On Pierre Bourdieu , 1979, American Journal of Sociology.

[59]  Jill M. Purdy,et al.  Conflicting Logics, Mechanisms of Diffusion, and Multilevel Dynamics in Emerging Institutional Fields , 2009 .

[60]  Pamela Jordan.  Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques , 1994 .

[61]  Robert V. Kozinets.  Netnography 2.0 , 2006 .

[62]  Jon Ritterbush.  Journalism.org: Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism , 2009 .

[63]  Craig J Thompson,et al.  The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers' (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization , 2004 .

[64]  Eileen Fischer,et al.  Frustrated Fatshionistas: An Institutional Theory Perspective on Consumer Quests for Greater Choice in Mainstream Markets , 2013 .

[65]  Matthew S. Kraatz,et al.  Organizational Implications of Institutional Pluralism , 2008 .

[66]  Diane M. Martin,et al.  Consumption-Driven Market Emergence , 2014 .