Journal of Global Marketing

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.

Proposed Themes for the Special Issue

Consumer culture & identity across borders

• Refugee/migrant/diaspora consumption; transborder shopping, medical tourism and international financial strategies; cross-national fandoms and communities; digital belonging, cultural hybridity, glocalization, and intersectionality.

Global brands, platforms, entrepreneurs, and creators

• Netnography for global NPD/innovation; platform affordances/algorithms; influencer/KOL and creator ecosystems in international strategy; migrant and transnational entrepreneurship.

Transnational movements & public interest

• Digital activism; decolonial, indigenous and critical perspectives; ethical protocols for sensitive/global contexts.

Methodological innovation

• Multi-sited/multi-language collaboration; immersive/VR/AR/metaverse contexts; advances in collection/analysis/interpretation; reflexivity and positionality.

International education & mobility

• Study-abroad markets; expats/digital nomads; cross-border learning communities; international travel and hypermobile lifestyles; border-crossing and customs experiences.

Submission Types

• Empirical (qualitative netnographies, multi-method designs)
• Conceptual/theoretical
• Methodological/reflective (protocols, innovations, tutorials)
• Policy/practice pieces with grounded evidence

All submissions undergo double-blind peer review per JGM policies. Articles must clearly speak to global/international marketing and contribute to theory, method, and/or practice.

Note on references: An indicative list of background readings is available on request from the guest editors.