Consumer-driven memorialization

Anderson, Stephanie and Hamilton, Kathy (2023) Consumer-driven memorialization. Journal of Consumer Research. ISSN 1537-5277 (https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad025)

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Abstract

Consumer research has focused on market-mediated efforts to memorialize the past, but this overshadows the issues that arise when consumers, as non-professionals, make the past consumable. Consumer-driven memorialization is defined as consumer engagement with traces of the past in memoryscapes of low market-mediation that creates a complex interplay of remembering and forgetting. Based on an ethnographic study of urban exploration, we theorize that consumer-driven memorialization comprises two practices of tracing and trace-making. Tracing involves consumer attempts to recover traces of the past, while trace-making involves consumer attempts to create traces for the future. Consumers enact multiple roles during consumer-driven memorialization: explorers experience the past, archaeologists materialize the past, artists aestheticize the past, and historians narrate the past. The theorization of consumer-driven memorialization offers three contributions. First, the dimensions of consumer-driven memorialization broaden understanding of what constitutes a consumable past in contexts of low market-mediation. Second, we explain how the ideological and material challenges that emerge in consumer-driven memorialization generate a complex interplay between remembering and forgetting. Third, we shed light on how consumer-driven memorialization is inscribed in space.

ORCID iDs

Anderson, Stephanie and Hamilton, Kathy ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5342-6166;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:85176
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    18 April 2023
    Published
    18 April 2023
    Published Online
    2 April 2023
    Accepted
    Keywords:memorialization, traces, history, remembering, forgetting, consumer research, Marketing. Distribution of products, Marketing
    Subjects:Social Sciences > Commerce > Marketing. Distribution of products
    Department:Strathclyde Business School > Marketing
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:19 Apr 2023 12:51
    Last modified:03 Jun 2023 01:53
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/85176
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