Retailing Retold: Unfolding the Process of Image Construction in Everyday Practice

Abstract

Retailing Retold offers an alternative approach to the analysis of how international retail images are translated across national boundaries. The approach extends the view on image in previous research as an instrument for monitoring the effects of marketing strategies on consumers’ perceptions of the retailer. Instead, it suggests that the usefulness of image resides in its ability to capture the relationship between international retailing and the lived culture. Informed by communication and cultural studies, the book argues that the formation of retail image needs to be understood as a construction process whereby consumers give retailing meaning in everyday practice. To this end, image construction is posited as a spatial storytelling in which consumers make sense of their experiences of retailing. In the tension between the strategically planned retail place and the lived spaces of those who use it, image is produced. In the book the image construction process is empirically explored through consumers’ storytelling of a major international furnishing retailer situated in Sweden and China. The exploration demonstrates how image is built via the manner by which the retailer is retold. By being retold, the retailer is silently provided with a unique and embodied existence in an everyday culture. The findings reveal a set of spatial tensions involved in the construction of an international retail image, which give fresh insights into how images of planned environments evolve with time and place.

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