Purpose - To examine the role of the American Girl retail brand in consumers' lived experience of the store environment in order to understand the role of ideology in retailing. Design/methodology/approach - Adopting an ethnographic approach, explores the discourses and practices used by consumers to experience American Girl Place and develops the particularized retail link between ideology and place by tracking its progression through emplaced consumer experience. Findings - Paradoxically and ironically, American Girl Place is situated within material marketplaces and involves materialist pursuits, from search through to disposition, yet sells values of heroism and perhaps even abstinence. Reveals that this ideological promotion is keenly targeted at mothers, and secondarily at grandmothers, to powerful effect. States that, in an intricate dance of commoditization and appropriation, corporation and consumer address their rift with a combination of profoundly personal and prepackaged values and memories, adding that memories, which become aspirations that encapsulate values, are purchased and customized in a materialized inter-generational drama each time the sororal unit invokes the American Girl brand or enters American Girl Place. Insists that not only does the retail brand ideology address an antecedent void, it transforms calculative and normative commitment into affective commitment via 'sacralization' and proposes that the more 'anchoring points' that the physical experience manifests, the more powerful, variegated and real is the subjective ideological experience. Research limitations/implications - Suggests that in the commercial world the role of the 'point de capiton' can be played by the powerful immediacy of well-designed physical experience, the orchestration of human behaviour and the availability of consumer immersion and contends that the provision of rich, variegated, intentionally moral and value-laden experiences that transport consumers to other times and places is a key element in successfully enacting a retail brand ideology. Practical implications - Recommends using physical cues to suggest moral values, stimulating brand enactment within the retail store, building a museum and being multifaceted. Originality/value - Offers an initial definition of retail brand ideology as an extensive representation of moral and social values throughout the physical retail environment.
Why are themed brandstores so powerful? Retail brand ideology at american girl place
BORGHINI, STEFANIA;
2011
Abstract
Purpose - To examine the role of the American Girl retail brand in consumers' lived experience of the store environment in order to understand the role of ideology in retailing. Design/methodology/approach - Adopting an ethnographic approach, explores the discourses and practices used by consumers to experience American Girl Place and develops the particularized retail link between ideology and place by tracking its progression through emplaced consumer experience. Findings - Paradoxically and ironically, American Girl Place is situated within material marketplaces and involves materialist pursuits, from search through to disposition, yet sells values of heroism and perhaps even abstinence. Reveals that this ideological promotion is keenly targeted at mothers, and secondarily at grandmothers, to powerful effect. States that, in an intricate dance of commoditization and appropriation, corporation and consumer address their rift with a combination of profoundly personal and prepackaged values and memories, adding that memories, which become aspirations that encapsulate values, are purchased and customized in a materialized inter-generational drama each time the sororal unit invokes the American Girl brand or enters American Girl Place. Insists that not only does the retail brand ideology address an antecedent void, it transforms calculative and normative commitment into affective commitment via 'sacralization' and proposes that the more 'anchoring points' that the physical experience manifests, the more powerful, variegated and real is the subjective ideological experience. Research limitations/implications - Suggests that in the commercial world the role of the 'point de capiton' can be played by the powerful immediacy of well-designed physical experience, the orchestration of human behaviour and the availability of consumer immersion and contends that the provision of rich, variegated, intentionally moral and value-laden experiences that transport consumers to other times and places is a key element in successfully enacting a retail brand ideology. Practical implications - Recommends using physical cues to suggest moral values, stimulating brand enactment within the retail store, building a museum and being multifaceted. Originality/value - Offers an initial definition of retail brand ideology as an extensive representation of moral and social values throughout the physical retail environment.
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