Netnography at the Cultural Crossroads: Global Consumers, Markets, and Methods
Global marketing increasingly unfolds in digital spaces where local and global forces interact in real time. Netnography—a rigorous, immersive qualitative research method—has matured into a powerful approach for understanding these cultural crossings in consumers’ lived, platformed experiences. This special issue invites contributions that explore, apply or extend netnographic research methods to investigate a range of global and international marketing questions at the intersection of cultures and marketing.
Netnography has already been applied to research that has illuminated a wide range of global marketing contexts, including international education, global brand communities, cultural consumption scapes, international influencer ecosystems, cross-national consumer experiences, health behaviors, transnational fandoms, political engagement, cultural shifts, collective activism, and consumer movements.
We invite contributions from scholars at all career stages and are particularly keen to include work from underrepresented regions, emerging markets, and diverse cultural perspectives. Our goal is to foster the continued growth of rigorous, ethical, and insightful netnographic inquiry across the global marketing community.
We especially welcome international, multilingual, and multi-sited teams and studies that illuminate how identities, meanings, and market practices are negotiated across nations, platforms, and institutions—what Appadurai calls intersecting “scapes”—with clear implications for theory, method, policy, and practice. Individual-country studies are welcome when they engage global relevance.
For proposed themes for the special issue and manuscript submission guidelines, please check this link.
Journal of Global Marketing Special Issue Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 December 2026
Special Issue Editor(s): Robert V. Kozinets, University of Southern California, USA rkozinets@usc.edu, Lena Cavusoglu, Pacific University, USA, Ulrike Gretzel, IMC Krems, Austria, Rossella Gambetti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy