Consumer-driven memorialization

Anderson, S. and Hamilton, K. (2023) Consumer-driven memorialization. Journal of Consumer Research, (doi: 10.1093/jcr/ucad025) (Early Online Publication)

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Anderson, Dr Stephanie
• Authors: Anderson, S., and Hamilton, K.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Management
• Journal Name: Journal of Consumer Research
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• ISSN: 0093-5301
• ISSN (Online): 1537-5277
• Published Online: 18 April 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Journal of Consumer Research 2023
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License