Adele Simone Howes (QMUL) - 2024-25 Students
a.howes@qmul.ac.uk

An exploratory study on the marketisation of domestic practices and its impact on women

Domestic practice, defined as the everyday activity concerned with the running and maintaining of a household and a family, including cooking and cleaning (Sherry 2000; Arsel & Bean 2013), is an important part of working in the home and crucial in shaping how women perform their gendered identities (Pink 2020). Globally, women, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, perform more than three-quarters of unpaid domestic practice (UN Women 2003). Moreover, domestic practice represents a consumption space involving branded consumer products and services (e.g., cleaning, furniture), and thus crucial for marketers to understand marketplace functions, value and consumers.

Domestic practice, as a mundane consumption practice, is as important as other forms of ‘extraordinary’ consumption, due to their regularity within our lives (Gronow and Warde 2001). Prior consumer research has examined domestic practice in relation with family identity, emotional rituals of a ‘labor of love’ (Belk et al. 1989; Wallendorf and Arnould 1991) and aesthetic taste regimes (Dion et al. 2014; Martens and Scott 2005). Domestic practice has also been viewed as a context where working women experience conflicts between their family identity, motherhood, and work (Thompson 1996; Carrigan and Szmigin 2006; Phillips and Sego 2011).

Many social and market changes have transformed the nature of domestic practice. Changing marketplace dynamics such as media portrayals have transformed the home from a private space linked to family and individual taste to a public space, where individuals show their knowledge of high standards of domestic practice and branded products (e.g., spa-like bathrooms and chef-like cooking appliances) (Grant and Handleman 2023). Moreover, technology has enabled people to work and enjoy being in the home more (Belk 2013). One recent and impactful development in the space of the home is the platformization of domestic practice, where primarily women – including known influencers, micro-influencers, and average consumers – share insights on how to perform domestic practices (e.g, cooking tutorials, cleaning tips) (Mahdawi 2019). Domestic practice has subsequently become highly structured and organized as a profession, with one such case being cleanfluencing (Casey and Littler 2022). Although previous studies have examined complexities of domestic practice in relation to women’s identity and work (Thompson 1996; Carrigan and Szmigin 2006), more research is needed to explore the unprecedented impact of the platformization of domestic practice on women’s identities when managing domestic practice in both an online and offline capacity. Considering these changes, we ask: What are the identity implications for women content creators performing domestic practice as an everyday chore within a private space of home and a potential source of income and recognition online via commercial platforms?

The findings will offer managerial implications regarding understanding women’s motivations for performing domestic practice online/offline. This will impact practitioners managing brands (e.g., marketing domestic practice products), product positioning and placement (e.g., positioning domestic products) and market segmentation and targeting (e.g., decisions about consumer profiling).

Primary Supervisor: Dr Zafeirenia Brokalaki