Place, meaning and sociality: exploring fullness in the themed retail environment

"This paper describes an investigation of themed retail environments that provides a more complete understanding of how of retail environments or servicescapes ""build relationships with customers"" (Hollenbeck, Peters and Zinkhan 2008, p. 334). The research is the result of a three-year ethnographic study of five small Irish pubs. In my analysis I adapt Daniel Miller's (2008) concept of ""Fullness,"" which refers to an experience of place as meaningful and social. In more Full places we see how interpersonal relationships can abound and I show how different retailers are more and less successful at facilitating this sociality and at building relationships. For this I draw on Manuel DeLanda's (2006) notion of the assemblage to show that the Fullness we see in retail settings can be conceptualized and understood as emerging from an assemblage of material and nonmaterial components, each unique and dynamic over time, and all not necessarily present in one setting at the same time. Among the contributing components to Fullness, I identify three particularly potent mutually reinforcing ones: 1) material elements of the space, channelling and shaping interactions to provide elements of a mise-en-scene that facilitate sociality, 2) an assemblage of a core group of consumers in a retail space who themselves construct a narrative that holds that their ties to one another are forged and re-affirmed by the retail space in which they interact, 3) lead marketers who draw on personal resources and invoke marketplace myths. I also show how a variability of components can lead to variability in the forms of emergent Fullness. Finally, in detailing ways in which retail environments can be understood as assemblages of material and nonmaterial elements - dynamic entities that can be stabilized by some elements, destabilized by others - I identify implications for areas of retail and marketing management.