ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 You're a Wizard, Harry! Consumer Response to the Harry Potter Phenomenon stephen brown, school of marketing, university of ulster anthony patterson, university of liverpool management school “You’re A Wizard, Harry!”Consumer Response to the Harry Potter PhenomenonStephen Brown (University of Ulster, UK)Anthony Patterson (University of Liverpool, UK)Short AbstractHarry Potter is one of the most astonishing consumption occurrences of recent years. Less than a decade ago, the boy wizard’s creator was an anonymous single mom on welfare. Today, J.K. Rowling presides over a $4 billion marketing empire and is one of the most famous faces on the planet. This paper examines consumer responses to the fashion for all things Potter. It argues that far from being trivial, as some suppose, fads are typical of today’s Entertainment Economy. If transformative consumer research is our aim, Harry Potteresque phenomena need to be better understood. [to cite]: stephen brown and anthony patterson (2006) ,"You're a Wizard, Harry! Consumer Response to the Harry Potter Phenomenon", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 33, eds. Connie Pechmann and Linda Price, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 155-160. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/12449/volumes/v33/NA-33 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.