Research Digest Storytelling in retail stores: how customer and brand/vendor narratives come together

In The narrative strategies of retail spaces: a semio-ethnographic approach, published in the European Journal of Marketing, professor Olivier Badot, along with co-authors Jean-Baptiste Welté and Patrick Hetzel, analyse how brand narratives are structured in retail stores and shaped by interactions with customers.

Why study this

Brands engage in storytelling about themselves through advertising, packaging and other strategies designed to attribute desirable meaning to their products. While the in-store experience of consumers is also important for brand success, little attention has been paid to the specific narratives deployed in the retail environment. An ethnographic study conducted in 10 sports stores in the Paris region fills this gap by analysing precisely how brand narratives are integrated into the retailing structures and how effective they are at meeting customer expectations.

Findings

  • The researchers identified four narrative strategies based on the interactions between customers and vendors.
  • The serial narrative strategy is purely commercial, i.e. it is oriented towards the customer's purchase. Discourses created outside the store (news about the brand, customer's needs) are accommodated inside, and the vendor's role is to facilitate the task of buying. 
  • The tale is a narrative based on desire. It works with customers who are fans of the brand and seek surprise and entertainment before a commercial transaction. The vendor's role is to guide the customer through carefully-staged presentations. 
  • The epic narrative opposes brand and product discourses developed outside the store. The purpose of the quest is to transform customer representations in favour of the product experience, sometimes with vendors challenging the brand strategies that customers have bought into. 
  • The legend narrative’s purpose is non-commercial. it encourages the customer to become part of a community, by maintaining ambiguity about the respective roles of the customer and vendor.

The narrative concept thus becomes a marketing tool that is not set in stone by the store’s design and layout but can be understood according to the configuration of the customer/vendor/product triumvirate in a given situation.

Key insight

Retail store narratives take the form of a negotiation and accommodation between two narrative trajectories: the retailer's (which articulates the brand/product narrative), and the customer's (which converts the monetary potential into a product) and ultimately lead to a purchase – or prevent it.

Impact

This research shows that all retail stores tell stories, and the much-discussed experiential narrative (the tale) is only one of several possible variations. The four types of narratives identified are applicable to all outlets – brand stores, specialised supermarkets, small convenience stores – and relevant to other segments than sports, especially distribution sectors that have strong storytelling potential (fashion, DIY, luxury goods, etc.).  

Final takeaway

“The structural narrative in the retail store, while originating from communication, gives customers their rightful place as actors in the narrative. (...) Rather than being statements made by designers outside the store, followed by decoding of this narrative by the customer-reader, retail-store narratives require the customer’s active participation.”

Authors

Jean-Baptiste Welté Jean-Baptiste Welté Professor of management at IAE Dijon
Olivier Badot - ESCP Business School Olivier Badot Professor of marketing and former scientific director of the Retaling 4.0 chair at ESCP Business School
Patrick Hetzel Patrick Hetzel Professor of management at Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas

Campuses

Paris