in watching, wearing or using them. ⢠Escaping daily monotony in this 'dreamland' on screen media or shopping mall we become absorbed in speculative stories ...
Malls & Marketing Communication What’s a ‘Mall’? What’s ‘Malling’?
Malls are Marketed as for ‘You as an Individual’ • ‘ ... it’s about you’, ‘take two hours for lunch’ • ‘remember who you are’ • cultivating the self, (western?) individualism
Malls as ‘Postmodern Gathering Places’ • 1. Postmodern - they address a multiplicity (many) shopping needs and cultures
• 2. Postmodern - not a sharp distinction
between inside/outside the ‘brandscape’
Malls as ‘Gathering Places’ • 1. Gathering places for purchasing goods • 2. Gathering places for meeting people • 3. Gathering places for thoughts (it can take time to find one’s way around e.g. KLCC).
Malls are like Media • On the brandscaped mall like the television or Internet screen there are genres/types (of shops and stores rather than programs or web sites)
• As in malls, media carry global product,
distributing it in diverse ways to the locally situated audience/ consumers
Immersing Ourselves on Screens/in Malls • Recognizing familiar program or product supports our projection or anticipation of pleasure (or pain) in watching, wearing or using them
• Escaping daily monotony in this ‘dreamland’ on screen media or shopping mall we become absorbed in speculative stories of consuming
Are Malls Materialistic? (are we said to be solely shoppers?) • Do they ‘invite people to think of themselves ( ... ) as individual actors in the marketplace with a sovereign right (even a duty) to remake themselves ( ... ) by purchasing goods and services?’ (Graham Murdock, 2004)
Mall Consumer Research • In Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia on a wet Saturday 17th January around noon just before Chinese New Year, Rabaah Tudin spoke briefly to small groups of youthful passers-by in the subterranean mall section of the Riverside Shopping Complex (ten persons of varying ethnicity and gender). Our contributors knew responses were being recorded).
Mall ‘Flaneur/ Flaneuse’
• For a female Malay student, the mall is ‘our usual’
ludic gregarious place: ‘we just want to meet our friends here’, ‘we can gather here’, ‘we can act more freely’ than at home. Being at the mall (‘watching movies’, ‘bowling’), they enjoy the day more. Distanced from duty, equally at play, another female Malay student mall sojourner (a flaneuse) is ‘just walking around’, just being there.
Malls as Gathering Places • Accounts by these citizen-consumers of their mall
presence, suggest not only the pursuit of an instrumental or extrinsic purpose (e.g. a male Bidayuh government servant purchasing a present for his girlfriend) but an intrinsic pleasure in playfully milling around. While these extended spaces and times can serve functionally as gathering places for material goods they also maintain the more subtle good of gathered friendship.
Malls are Marketed as Ludic or ‘Places of Play’ • ‘Take two hours for lunch’, ‘Give reality the slip’
• ‘Live more, worry less’ • Malls are presented in marketing as places of escape
(but are they more often places of dutiful shopping?)
Questions for Group Discussion
• 1. Are malls ‘glocal’ (see the Salcedo article) ? • 2. Are shopping malls like screen media -
allowing you to immerse yourself/ drawing you in: spaces where you have to orientate yourself or make sense of your surroundings: places from which you appropriate or derive a (new) sense of who you are?
