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Making Intergenerational Memories at American Girl Place

Making Intergenerational Memories at American Girl Place. Nina Diamond Robert Kozinets John Sherry Albert Muniz Stefania Borghini Mary Ann McGrath. What is American Girl?. The AG project. Objective: Learn from the creation of this ‘powerhouse’ brand

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Making Intergenerational Memories at American Girl Place

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  1. Making Intergenerational Memories at American Girl Place Nina Diamond Robert Kozinets John Sherry Albert Muniz Stefania Borghini Mary Ann McGrath

  2. What is American Girl?

  3. The AG project • Objective: Learn from the creation of this ‘powerhouse’ brand • Discover the source of the ‘magic’; find out how intense emotional bonds between consumer and brand were drawn • Enrich our understanding of brands as cultural ‘actors’ and relationship partners • Continue to clarify the role of retail environments in creating and sustaining brand equity • Method: Primarily ethnographic • Extensive participant observation, photography and videography at AGP and in consumers’ homes, on-site interviews with store management and floor sales personnel, immersion in company literature • Diverse multidisciplinary research team

  4. American Girl Place: Epicenter of a brand-based project that Harnesses play in the service of learning Transmits, interprets, and transmutes traditional values to contemporary girls living in a plural, postmodern society American Girl Place

  5. AG Brand facilitates family process • Young girls alternate between imaginary play and focused preparation for their lives as women • Guided by older female family members • Mothers and grandmothers share with girls experiences from their own childhoods • These interactions among family members are facilitated by American Girl

  6. The role of narrative In the AG brand and at AG Place, female kinship groups find powerful cultural material to construct themselves as individuals and as a family • Complex brand narratives used by girls, mothers, and grandmothers to author their own stories • Represent synthesis of commercial and personal • Gendered family histories connect women and girls of successive generations

  7. Narratives that blend the personal and the commercial

  8. Shopping at AG Place • About deepening and evolving relationships among female members of the quintessential small social unit – the family • And about “making memories”

  9. Shopping at AG Place

  10. Shopping at AG Place

  11. Shopping at AG Place

  12. Shopping at AG Place

  13. Shopping at AG Place

  14. Excerpt from on-site interview with grandmother I: You were saying at the beginning that you came here for her memory. What do you mean by this? G: Well, I think grandparents..... parents, too, but especially grandparents.... like to create memories for the children and for the family, you know? And I just thought that this could be one of those memories for her… I: So … this day can be part of her memories? G: Yeah, yeah. I think it would make.... those things I remember of my childhood, you know.... the grownups and events in my life that, when I think back about, I like, you know... They’re special and I want to create that kind of event for her. That she’d say, ‘I remember my grandmother, my Nanna. - she calls me Nanna - ‘My Nanna and my Mom and I went to American Girl, and I just.... you know… I think they (memories) are more important than things, the feelings and the memories. I mean, I remember it too, you know, but for her it’s much more important.

  15. Understanding the phenomenon • Consuming as integration (Holt, 1995; Acosta-Alzuru & Kreschel, 2002) • Valued consumption object or experience becomes constitutive element of identity • Self concept is re-oriented to align with an ‘institutionally defined identity’ • (Wallendorf & Arnould, 1988) Meaning of favorite objects and experiences derives from personal memories

  16. Understanding the phenomenon • Brands serve as relationship partners (Fournier,1998): Vitality within the relationship enabled by spirit of past or present other E.g., where brand • Is received as a gift (McGrath & Sherry, 1993) • Exists for generations, and helps establish the family as a “descent group” (Miller, 1998) • Descent group characterized by cyclicality; role of parent to child recapitulates earlier such relationships • Commodity “objectifies” family tradition and history

  17. Understanding the phenomenon • Retail atmospherics being used to create a more attractive and memorable consumer experience – stores telling stories (Gottdeiner, 1997; Pine & Gilmore, 1999) • Evolution of ‘themed flagship brand store’ formats (Kozinets, Sherry, et al, 2002) and ‘retroscapes’ (Brown & Sherry, 2003) • Essence is mythological appeal of the narratives conveyed by store formats’ physical and symbolic structure • Hypothesized future potential of ‘mindscapes’ that “combine entertainment, therapeutics, and spiritual growth”

  18. Understanding the phenomenon • Shopping as a means to reveal relationships • Shopping as sacrifice • An activity that constructs the divine as a desiring subject • Purpose of shopping is less to buy things that people want than to engage with those who want the things • Shopping as identity work; medium for “objectification of ethnic, gendered, and other forms of identity” (Miller, 1998)

  19. Understanding the phenomenon:Summary of related phenomena • Retail ‘brandscapes’; ‘stores telling stories’ • Shopping as entertainment • Shopping as activity in which relationships are revealed and identity work done • Consuming as integration • Brands as relationship partners • Valued objects infused with the spirits of individuals and events

  20. Understanding the phenomenon:Learning from AG • A branded retail outlet can represent a shopping environment that • Reinforces and builds multigenerational relationships • Enables individual and family identity creation • A brand can not only act as relationship partner, but actually facilitate the development of relationships among individuals • Memories - of life events in historical context and of shopping together at AGP - serve as a vehicle for enhancing multigenerational family relationships

  21. References • Acosta-Alzuru, Carolina and Peggy Kreschel (2002), “I’m an American Girl, Whatever That Means: Girls Consuming Pleasant Company’s American Girl Identity”, Journal of Communication • Brown, Stephen, and John F Sherry, Jr. (2003), Time, Space, and the Market: Retroscapes Rising. New York, NY: M.E. Sharpe • Fournier, Susan (1998), “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research, 24: 343-373 • Gottdiener, Mark (1997), The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces, Boulder, CO: Westview • Holt, Douglas B. (1995), “How Consumers Consume: A Typology of Consumption Practices, Journal of Consumer Research”, 22: 1-16 • Kozinets, Robert V., John F. Sherry, Jr., Diana Storm, Adam Duhachek, Krittinee Nuttavuthisit and Benet DeBerry-Spence, “Themed Flagship Brand Stores in the New Millenium: Theory, Practice, Prospects”, Journal of Retailing 78: 17-29 • McGrath,Mary Ann and John F. Sherry, Jr. (1993) “Giving Voice to the Gift: The Use of Projective Techniques to Recover Lost Meanings”, Journal of Consumer Psychology 2: 171-191 • Miller, Daniel (1998), A Theory of Shopping, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press • Pine, B. Joseph II and James H. Gilmore (1999), The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School • Wallendorf, Melanie and Eric J. Arnould, ““My favorite Things”: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry into Object Attachment, Possessiveness, and Social Linkage”, Journal of Consumer Research 14: 531-547

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