논문 상세보기
WHEN SENSE MEETS SENSIBILITY-USING SEMIOTICS TO ENDOW THE RETAIL ENVIRONMENT WITH MEANING
The consumption landscape is currently moving, making it hard for marketers and managers to anticipate consumers‟ needs and behaviors. With the digitalization of their daily life, ways of selling/communicating/involving with consumers has been re-invented, shifting from a traditional brick-and-mortar environment to a click-and-mortar -if not purely digital- one. Besides, consumers themselves have evolved from postmodern values to hypermodern ones: they do not buy a product anymore for purely functional or hedonic values, but for a combination of both. The hypermodern consumer is in on ongoing quest of “meaning” (Lipovetsky, 2004): the products he buys and services he consumes need to „make sense‟ and help him give some meaning to his life. Such life meaning is then communicated to his network, via (among other media) digital tools, turning a traditionally small network (primary group) into a much larger one (take bloggers for instance (Maman Larraufie & Sommer, 2015)). Still, very few consumers switch towards a 100%-digital way of consuming. They tend to melt physical stores along with digital expectations. The store therefore needs to be a showcase of the brand values, aligned with consumers‟ values of consumption. Some studies have even showed that brand and consumer personalities needed to be aligned to create some store involvement and attachment (Wilson, Wagner, & Maman, 2015). Semiotics is a discipline that focuses on understanding how meaning is produced for consumers (analytic process) or can be produced for consumers (constructive process). Therefore, it can be used to design marketing tools to build some meaning for consumers that would be consistent with their consumption values (Harmon, 2005; Mick, 1986). This would enable turning the store/the communication/etc. into some device enabling the consumer to make sense of his life. As presented before, the store is the current point of tension, as the reconciling showcase between virtual and real brand environments. In this presentation, I will stress out how structural semiotics (Greimas, 1966) can pragmatically help brand managers or marketers reconcile the rational and emotional dimensions behind the so-called store experience, while allowing the consumer associate some inherent meaning to the product/service showcased in the store. I will present several positioning deriving from it, and based on the objective of communication associated with the store, using the Jakobson‟s functions of speech (Jakobson & Halle, 2002). I use visual examples from various sectors of activity, from fashion to hospitality including jewelry, etc.
