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jillian on Mar 30, 2005 in
Issue no.2, March 2005,
Volume 04 |
Comments Off on Beyond the Physical Realm: A proposed theory regarding a consumer’s place experience
By Mark Rosenbaum, Ph.D. Abstract Marketers view place as a marketing mix tool that denotes activities associated with the distribution of products and services. Thus, the discipline believes that places are alienated from consumers’ lives and experiences. This article looks at the place concept anew and offers an original theory of consumers’ experience in place. Introduction The concept of place is well engrained in the marketing discipline as a basic marketing mix tool that refers to distributional and to organizational activities associated with making products and services available to targeted consumers (Kotler 2000, p. 87). As a result of this conceptualization, it is not surprising that marketers perceive that places are isolated from consumers’ personal lives and experiences. Indeed, pundits often chastise contemporary retailers for creating an urban marketplace that represents a rendition of human alienation and that is replete with impersonal, cold relationships between buyers and sellers. This perception of place, as a mere subdivision of physical space (Sherry 2000), is especially prevalent among marketing researchers who adhere to the regional school of thought (Sheth and Garrett 1986; Sheth, Gardner, and Garrett 1988). Researchers, in this school, consider marketing as a form of economic activity that bridges the geographic gap, or spatial gaps, between buyers and sellers (see Grether 1983). Consequently, these researchers are guided by a philosophy of consumption which espouses that general laws exist for predicting spatial regularities between consumers’ residential location and their selected shopping areas. Although regional researchers have been developing models since the 1930’s, no encompassing marketing theory has yet emerged from their endeavors (Sheth, Gardner, and Garrett 1988). Marketing’s conceptualization of place has been unwavering since its inception in the early 1960’s (McCarthy 1960); however, as the discipline entered the new millennium, Sherry (2000) suggested that all is not sanguine with it. Sherry’s (1998, 2000) point of contention with the place concept is that marketers deem consumption settings, or servicescapes (Bitner 1992; Sherry 1998), as being comprised of physical elements (Turley and Milliman 2000). Thus, he believes that marketers fail to consider that places may also be comprised of intangible, symbolic realms, which may be integral to consumers’ personal worlds and experiences. Rather than consider that consumers view places as pointsof- exchange where they satisfy essential consumption needs, Sherry posits that places have different dimensions of meaning for consumers, based upon their personal experiences in them. In addition, he speculates that the impact of these meanings, on consumer behavior, ranges on a continuum from the subtle to the profound. However, like Trickster, Sherry (1998, 2000) stops conjecturing mid-stream; leaving future researchers with the challenge of generating a theory of consumer’s being-in-place. The goal of this article is to heed Sherry’s (2000) challenge by conceiving a theory that (1) illustrates why and how consumers experience places in their lives, (2) uncovers major antecedents that impact consumers’ place experience, (3) links place experience to patronizing behavior, and (4) is parsimonious, relevant, and modifiable. The theory serves as a milestone for marketing as it addresses a chasm in the marketing mix. Namely, that marketing mix, along with its consideration of place as distribution, is not entirely complete, is somewhat inconsiderate of consumers’ needs, and focuses on investigating unidimensional relationships between stimuli and responses, rather than on the much richer concept of exchange relationships (van Waterschoot 2000; van Waterchoot and Van den Bulte 1992). To date, the majority of place studies in marketing have attempted to discern stimulus-response regularities between specific environmental conditions (e.g., music, crowding,...