How marketers and consumers synchronize temporal modes to cocreate ritual vitality

Marketers recognize the contributions that consumer rituals make to their organizations. They endeavor to have such contributions persist as they support consumers in enacting those rituals. This ethnographic study examines the temporal aspects of ritual, termed 'ritual vitality.' We explain how marketers can influence ritual vitality through engagement in the chronos and kairos temporal dimensions of ritual; theorize the relationship between those dimensions; identify the ways in which marketers and consumers interact through a ritual's chronos and kairos temporal dimensions; and theorize how marketers and consumers co-create these experiences as each party guides, aligns with, or detours from one another. This co-creation is central to ritual vitality. Finally, we contribute an understanding of how chronos and kairos temporal dimensions shape, structure, and perpetuate ritual performance, and identify opportunities for marketers and consumers to participate in the synchronization of chronos and kairos temporality and the support of ritual performances that together may result in ritual vitality.