Chinese intimacies & consumer–culture–brand relations

ABSTRACT Two Western culture-inflected paradigms of intimacy dominate scholarship in the marketing and consumer behaviour disciplines: intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed and intimacy as knowledge-which-accumulates. This article decentres these concepts by exploring how intimacies in China emerge in complex co-created ways, from contextual settings, from the local construction of space and place, through kinship and its extensions, through ritual and embodied everyday practices, and through the situational instantiation of symbolic boundaries which separate the sphere of intimacy from the public and private spheres. The article shows how competing paradigms for intimacy, including the Western culture inflected paradigms, interact across diverse social domains in China, and further, how Chinese persons’ dispositions regards intimacy are shaped by broader processes of globalization. The article draws on autoethnography in China, as well as popular culture, social media, and brand communications analysis. It offers conclusions about how to theorize consumer-culture-brand relationships considering the analyses of intimacy explored throughout.