سوپر مارکت ها به عنوان کتابخانه های اساطیر پست مدرن

Using qualitative research methods this article explores the relationship between the point-of-purchase brand rhetoric and the consumers' reading of the poetry of packaging. The findings emphasize the myth-making function of commercial storytelling, identify the consumer as co-creator of marketplace myths, and theorize the process of myth-making as a projectable field that remains open to interpretations by consumers. Instead of producing a single mono-myth, the research demonstrates, package narratives produce multiple micro-myths. These postmodern fragmented micro-myths more fully connect consumers with brands.

Given the proclivity this study finds for consumers to create individuated micro-myths connecting packaged goods to their own life stories, it seems necessity for marketers to more holistically recognize that consumers are not just markets and segments but whole people. In their meaning-based model of consumers' advertising experiences Mick and Buhl (1992) assert that consumers negotiate their lives while making sense of commercial messages. In her study of consumer brand relationships Fournier (1998) concludes that consumers do not choose brands, they choose lives. This also resonates with Belk's (1987) urging that future research studies consumer behavior within the context of “the rest of life.” Brands need identities and these identities should resonate with a number of consumers. The findings suggest that consumers refine, reinterpret, or reject brand personalities that marketers proffer in a way that makes the brands more relevant to (or in some negative cases antithetical to) consumers' own interests, histories, and goals. At the same time, consumers draw on other mythical elements to transform brand meanings in this way — the cowboy, the venerable white-haired wise man. But like a child with a doll, whatever personality the marketer has transferred to the doll character, the projective interactive play of the child with the doll is likely to live out endless scenarios that come not from the corporate parent but from the child's human parents, siblings, teachers, friends, and media personifications. For consumer behavior researchers, the next logical step should be to explore how consumers use multiple myths that the same products imbue to play postmodern games of playful self-image switching (Firat and Venkatesh, 1993) and story enactments, much like playing with a doll or action character using a changing set of scripts.