Branding places or branding spatial practices? Retail spaces in the age of mixed realities

Abstract

This article advances that technologies such as online 3D simulated space increasingly challenge marketers’ usual apprehension of retail space – with direct effects on their understanding of shoppers’ behaviors. It is suggested that, as new technologies force upon shoppers a new relationship to space, achieving image coherence at the retail level through branded ‘spatial practices’ (as defined by sociologist Henri Lefebvre) may be a better approach, for companies operating in mixed realities environments, than merely branding the physical elements (for example, color or design) of their brick-and-mortar servicescapes. The impact of the new, technology-induced experience of space on shoppers’ re-appropriative behaviors, as well as their perception of servicescapes, will also be discussed. To start exploring these increasingly pressing issues and their marketing implications, an ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the online virtual world Second Life.