Exploring the Intersection of Digital Virtual Consumption and Family Rituals

Since Rook (1985) first described important linkages between rituals and consumer behavior, scholars have examined consumer rituals from the perspectives of the individual consumer, marketers, marketing exchanges, and cultural institutions. New modes of communication and expression (e.g., digital media), and globalization calls for a thorough understanding of the consumption-related ritual topics, and what areas they should explore in the future. In this paper, we systematically review articles in the top marketing and consumer behavior journals to provide an overview of the current composition of ritual scholarship, and of prospective areas for future research. In so doing, we hope to categorize ritual scholarship into broad conceptual domains and evaluate our current understanding of rituals in each, identify gaps in our understanding based on the changing market environment, and suggest areas of inquiry to address these gaps. We examined articles in the top twelve marketing journals identified in the SCImago Journal Rank of all marketing journals, each with an impact factor of at least 2.5. We searched for articles pertaining to consumption rituals in the twelve journals by consulting the three business databases included in the EBSCO database. Of these journals, five included pertinent articles: Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and the Journal of Retailing. We determined that the authors’ foci led to an emergent partition of the literature into five domains (albeit with a few overlaps). The research team engaged in close reads and iterative discussion of articles, identifying various themes and research extensions within each domain. The themes are: foundational, macro-level, meso-level, marketplace-level, and micro-level.