Opportunities and risks of combining shopping experience and artistic elements in the same store: a contribution to the magical functions of the point of sale

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the construct of store atmospherics to address one of the latest developments in that field, i.e. the strategy of incorporating artistic elements into the store. On the one side, incorporating artistic elements in store atmospherics constitutes an innovative way for retailers to differentiate their shopping experience. Such a hybrid retail strategy seeks to offer maximised hedonic gratification to store visitors, while adding symbolic value to the commercial offering. Store traffic and sales are thus stimulated. Incorporating artistic elements is also a magic way to conceal the store’s transactional purpose; through this association with the art world, the store is viewed as less mercantile. However, there is a risk that consumers will view the store as a ‘museum’ and visit without purchasing. Therefore we conduce a conceptual investigation of that experiential strategy in order to assess its effects on retailer’s commercial and marketing performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Shopping experience
• store artification
• art
• store museumification
• hybrid retail strategy
• retail performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Vukadin

Ana Vukadin is a Ph.D. candidate at ESCP Europe Business School in Paris. Within the experiential marketing and retailing fields, her research focuses on the artistic dimension of the shopping experience. She is interested in the impact of art on the symbolic value of the store and its offering, and in the role of art in product fetichisation.

Jean-François Lemoine

Jean-François Lemoine is a university professor at the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. He is the director of the Panthéon Sorbonne Doctoral School of Management, also in charge of the professional Masters 2 in Market Research and Marketing Decision Making, as well as the Master 2 in Marketing Research, at the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. Since 2002, he has been organizing the annual research days in digital marketing (www.colloquemarketingdigital.com). His work, published among others in Administrative Science Quarterly, Décisions Marketing, Recherche et Applications en Marketing, la Revue Française de Gestion, focuses on digital marketing (namely on the e-shopping experience and crowdsourcing).

Olivier Badot

Olivier Badot is Full Professor and Associate Dean for Research at ESCP Europe Business School. His research focuses on a broad range of issues within the field of Retailing, including marketing of retail formats, cross-channel strategies, e- and m-commerce, organizational design of retail chains, shopping mall marketing, re-enchantment strategies, shopping experiences, and franchising.