Over the past two decades, consumer moralism, or moralism about consumption in a broad sense, has received much academic attention in answer to the growing concern for fair-trade, corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and other anti-consumption initiatives and movements (McGregor, 2006; Newholm and Shaw, 2007). This theoretical trajectory not only pay attention to how everyday consumption practice is shaped by and help shape certain sorts of ethical dispositions (Clive et al., 2005), but it also extends to the understanding of the intertwined relationship between morality, consumption, and consumers’ identity narratives (Thompson, 2011). While previous research has focused on understanding moral consumption as a politically and morally motivated collective practice (Luedicke et al., 2010; Thompson, 2007), limited research has been done on revealing how personal moral identity project institutionalize and contest the socio-cultural power structure through ascribing social meanings in consumption practice to legitimatize seemingly unethical behavior in the marketplace (Brace-Govan and Binary, 2010). This research concerned the creation and negotiation of moralistic identities among a group of young consumers in Hong Kong who engaged in counterfeit consumption. We focused on how consumers strategically appropriate moralistic meanings in their everyday counterfeit consumption, in which their identity work utilized these ‘alternative’ market resources to echoed with, or even reproduce, the entrenched Chinses social relationships and marketplace ideological conditions (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014; Luedicke et al., 2010).

Emerging Asian markets such as China and India have drawn tremendous attention to marketing and consumer researchers in the past decades (e.g., Cayla & Eckhardt, 2008; Dong & Tian, 2009). The increasing purchasing power of the new middle-class Asian consumers attracted not only global brands but also local brands from the region. Previous studies on Asian consumers found that consumers are actively using Western brands to construct their modern or global identities (e.g., Dong & Tian, 2009). Other studies explored how regional or local brands redefine themselves in both regional and transnational markets (Cayla & Eckhardt, 2008; Wu, Borgerson & Schroeder, 2013). In this study, we employed a cultural approach (Cayla & Arnould, 2008) to examine how Asian brands mythicize themselves in the global marketplace through various storytelling and myth-making strategies. We compare and contrast the mythology and storytelling strategies (Boje, 1995; Lundqvist, Liljander, Gummerus & van Riel, 2013; Vincent, 2001) employed by three Asian consumer electronic brands, Samsung (South Korea), Sony (Japan), and Xiaomi Technology (China) and report our key findings in the following sections. In marketing literature, brand is defined as “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those other sellers” by the American Marketing Association (Keller, 2013, p. 2). In recently years, brands have been viewed as an integral part of contemporary popular culture (Cayla & Arnould, 2008; Hancock, 2009, 2013; Holt, 2004, 2006; Klein, 2001; Moor, 2007). Brands, like other cultural artefacts such as folklore, dance, songs, and costumes, have significant impact on shaping consumers’ everyday lives and influence on how they define their world

This paper employed the conceptions of “extended self” (Belk, 1988) and expressivism (Taylor, 1989) to demonstrate how local fashion designers in post-colonial Hong Kong express their life experience and cultural identity through their designs. Through conducting long interviews (McCracken, 1988) with five local designers in Hong Kong our findings show that design collections have become an “extended self” for these individuals. The material representation that created by the individual become an inseparable self for the owner. The commercialization of these “extended selves” extends our current conception of self identity in marketing literature.

Anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) are thought to be magnetars which are young isolated neutron stars with extremely strongmagnetic fields of >1014 Gauss. Their tremendous magnetic fields inferred from the spin parameters provide a huge energyreservoir to power the observed X-ray emission. High-energy emission above 0.3 MeV has never been detected despiteintensive search. Here, we present the possible Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) detection of γ-ray pulsations above 200MeV from the AXP, 1E 2259+586, which puts the current theoretical models of γ-ray emission mechanisms of magnetars intochallenge. We speculate that the high-energy γ-rays originate from the outer magnetosphere of the magnetar.