【正文】 ndulgent, pleasure seeking individuals, easily dominated by marketers and advertisers, who act like sheep in the ways they mimic referent others. However, the reality is obviously much more plex than such a scenario suggests. Contemporary consumers are as likely to be driven by thrift as to they are to be hedonistic, they use consumption to make statements about themselves, they use consumption to create their identities and they develop a sense of belonging through consumption. For many people it is through consumption that relationships are formed, for example, colleagues enjoying a drink after work or children hosting their birthday parties at McDonalds, enabling them to define their circle of friends .Consumption also plays a part in finding fulfilment, developing creativity and expressing their individual abilities. Clearly such a plex phenomena cannot be easily understood. Recent arguments have been sounded that aspects of contemporary tourism and hospitality consumption have reflected the phenomena of postmodernism. Whilst many believe postmodernism to be a meaningless intellectual fad, inaccessible to many involved in marketing within our sector, others agree that there are worthwhile insights to be gained from the debate on the postmodern condition and its consequences for tourism and hospitality consumption and marketing. I do not intend to discuss at length the use of postmodern discourse in tourism and hospitality marketing as I have exercised it in previous work (Williams, 2020, 2020). The term postmodernism refers to a break in thinking away from the modern, functional and rational, and during the last couple of decades it has spread across all domains of knowledge, including marketing. The key concepts of postmodern marketing are fragmentation, indeterminacy and distrust of universal discourse, but by eschewing modernism it introduces a radically new and different cultural movement which coalesces in a reconceptualisation of how we experience and explain our world. In terms of experiential marketing two aspects of the postmodern discourse are most relevant, hypereality and image. Hypereality is one of the most discussed conditions of postmodernism, and refers to the argument that reality has collapsed and has bee image, illusion, simulation and simulacra (copies for which no original exists). Hyperreality refers to a blurring of distinction between the real and the unreal in which the prefix “hyper” signifies more real than real. When the real is no longer a given but is reproduced by a simulated environment, it does not bee unreal, but realer than real, to the extent it bees what Baudrillard (1993, p. 23)refers to as “a hallucinatory resemblance of itself”. In postmodernism, with the advent of hyperreality, simulations e to constitute reality itself. This scenario is exemplified throughout the tourism and hospitality industry. Baudrillard himself used the example of Disneyland, arguing it is more real than the USA itself. A point reinforced by Venturi (1995, p. 67) who suggested “Disneyland is nearer to what people want than what architects have ever given them. Disneyland is the symbolic American utopia”. In postmodern society people have bee fascinated by signs and as a result, they exist in a state where signs and images have bee more important than what they stand for. The result is that today’s consumers consume imagery and do not focus on what the images represent or mean. As Miller and Real (1998, p. 30) argue “we live in a world where the image or signifier of an event has replaced direct experience and knowledge of its referent or signified”. While it is accepted that there are problems with investigating tourism and hospitality marketing through a postmodern orientation, it clearly enpasses a broad range of consumer experiences. In additi