EXPRESS: The Marketization of Tradition: How Firms Reconfigure Tradition to Create Consumer Value

The role of marketers in sustaining traditions remains ambiguous. From weddings to funerals, commercial providers supply key resources to help consumers perform traditional practices. But marketization can also slide into crass commodification. However, past research remains unclear on how marketers can create consumer value from tradition. Our study resolves these ambiguities through an ethnographic study of zuò yuèzi, a Chinese postpartum confinement custom that continues to thrive in Chinese communities yet increasingly conflicts with contemporary ideals of autonomy, health, and scientific expertise. In the Asian cities where we conducted fieldwork (Singapore, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur), a booming industry of confinement centers has emerged in response to these tensions. Drawing on practice theory, we show that the effectiveness of these commercial interventions depends on adapting key elements of tradition while preserving its teleoaffective structure: the moral purposes and affective orientations that define what a traditional practice is for and how it should feel. Our primary contribution is to advance a more constructive theorization of marketization that highlights the possibilities for value creation in the tradition domain.