Allomother as Image and Essence: Animating the American Girl Brand

In this ethnographic study, we explore the meaning of the American Girl brand as it emerges in the interplay of consumer appropriation and managerial response. The brand depends for its vitality upon girls’ engagement in and mothers’ and grandmothers’ supervision of the deep play that marketer’s encourage to emerge from thematic props and premises. We use the concept of allomothering – the provision of maternal nurturing to children by non-mothers – to interpret intergenerational brand invocation, and deploy this understanding of social surrogacy to unpack the brand’s image and essence. We find the brand to provide not only a vehicle of collective memory and identity formation, but also a template for the female reproduction of domestic culture.