Ordinary spaces and sense of place

Commercial spaces have always represented meaningful places for consumers. From ancient times they have stimulated the call of the exotic, the magical, discovery and entertainment (Goss 1993; McGrath 1998; Maclaran and Stevens 1998). Nowadays thematized and experiential retail environments are more than the simple background of our lives. Leveraging aesthetic and hedonistic pleasure (e.g., Arnold and Reynolds 2003), such stores are the settings for pleasurable experiences in increasingly sophisticated ways. They celebrate consumers’ gender identity (Borghini et al. 2009), materialize personal utopias (Maclaran and Brown 2005), and provide therapeutic value and opportunities for spiritual growth, thus contributing to consumers’ culture and self-affirmation (Kozinets et al. 2002). The strategies of marketers are increasingly focused on the idea of designing and improving commercial settings in such a way as to generate specific experiences and meanings in consumers. The agenda of retailers is therefore full of interventions aimed at capitalizing on this trend by elaborating and enriching commercial spaces. Theorists have eagerly responded to this escalation of retail spectacle. Our study challenges this path by looking at the meaningful bonds that consumers have with what we call ordinary places, i.e. small, informally branded or unthemed stores or restaurants. In the light of the dialectics of small and large, discreet and pervasive, hidden and manifest, placid and aggressive inspired by Bachelard (1964), these ordinary commercial settings fall into the former category, while themed and branded stores fall into the latter. The dimensions of our familiar places accord well with the reformist agenda articulated by Gronow and Warde (2001, p.4) in their exploration of ordinary consumption. In analyzing the essence of store attachment, we reveal how the deepest and strongest links with favorite commercial spaces are often the ones forged with those mundane spaces where contemporary traits of store design have not been applied. Data were collected by means of ethnographic methods including direct observation, in-depth interviews and the application of projective techniques. With the help of three research assistants trained as interviewers, about 80 interviews lasting between 10 and 120 minutes were carried out. Overall, the interviews resulted in a data set of approximately 360 pages. Our findings reveal a complex picture of the relations which consumers establish with commercial locations. Places and emotions always intertwine, creating a fabric of memories and sensations which mark individuals’ lives and become part of their identities, their cultural and personal heritage. Ordinary, small places, unadorned by any strong trait of brand essence or marketers’ intervention, very gradually become important and inescapable partners of their habitual visitors. In small locations which provide unobtrusive and discreet settings for individual exploration, consumers feel safer and more protected. The social pressure of fitting the positioning of the store brand to its visitors is almost absent. Social interactions with both salespeople and visitors are more intense, which reinforces emotional and social bonds. Thus, ordinary places come to remind consumers’ of their domestic settings, becoming like a second home, or a source of emotional shelter, to them. Additionally, original and distinctive spaces created with the creativity and touch of single entrepreneurs meet consumers’ needs for authenticity, simplicity and stability. According to our data, time does not appear to erase significant experiences in ordinary commercial locations from consumers’ memories. Nonetheless, important changes in individuals’ lives (moving to a new home, a new job, divorces, etc.) may interrupt the relationship. Consumers may also find stores which are more suitable for satisfying new needs and desires. In these cases, however, mundane places visited regularly for long time in the past provide food for personal memories and prompt comparisons of new with old. Their stock of precious recollections facilitates both social interaction with other visitors and personal assessment on life projects in these new settings. When people look back over their lives, they tend to recollect memories about the stores or places they used to attend, even though they are no more considered as favorite places. In analyzing the dynamics of sense of place and attachment beyond these stories, we reveal how separation from locations to which consumers feel very close is a necessary step for identity evolution. When consumers realize the constructive function that these locations have played in their pasts, they attribute to them a new function. In personal memories, the mundane places where consumers have spent much time, regularly and in a smooth and natural way, assume a role of identity markers, spaces which indicate a personal evolution. This detachment gives rise to a new dignity attributed to these places, whose significance is heightened precisely because they no longer contribute to the individual’s present identity. The sense of place of commercial locations resides in this seeming paradox. The dialectic between attachment to and detachment from ordinary places is a major component of the process of identity construction; it is a path or journey from one physical space to the next (Casey 1993) or, better, from one commercial location to the next.