Territorialising Retail: Towards an Alternative Spatiality?

Converging retail channels and the proliferation of customer touchpoints have had significant impacts on consumer behaviour (Barrera and Shah, 2023). Technological advances have allowed retailers to encompass otherwise interstitial space, merging physical with digital to offer ‘phygital’ environments to provide customers with immersive, interactive and distinctive experiences (Hänninen et al. 2021; Pangarkar et al., 2022). Sixty eight percent of consumers now seek out retailers that offer phygital experiences (Deloitte, 2022), and over 70% of retailers regard digital transformation as an essential part of retail’s future (Wahi and Medeiros, 2023 - see also Barrera and Shah, 2023; Neslin, 2022; Rahman et al., 2022).

Such developments increasingly challenge traditional notions of retail space and place; specifically the confinement of ‘place’ to a particular location, delineated by finitude, boundary, function and materiality (Gieryn, 2000), manifested in a retail context in terms of where physical stores are sited, while ‘space’ has been likened to a “realm without meaning” (Cresswell, 2015:16), associated with online and virtual activities (Gieryn, 2000). In a retail context, the term ‘space’ is especially used to refer to the in-store selling area, such as in ‘space allocation’ and ‘space planning’ (Goworek and McGoldrick, 2015).

In retailing, the treatment of place and space almost as synonyms has arguably contributed towards a sense of nomenclatural ambiguity, especially with increasing channel multiplicity and customer touchpoints. Klaus and Kuppelwieser (2023) note that there remains a dearth of research exploring if - or how - customers use and experience different types of retail places and spaces, with implications for future retail predictions and conceptual developments (See also Pangarkar et al., 2022). Indeed, given the rapidly evolving retailing industry, scholars more generally are recognising the increasing gap between academic research and retail practice, casting doubts on the saliency and alignment of traditional conceptualisations to ongoing developments (See Roggeveen and Sethuraman, 2018; Dekimpe and Geyskens, 2019; Hänninen et al., 2021). Consequently, more nuanced, contemporary and interdisciplinary theorisations are arguably required to help advance new retail and customer experience in meaningful ways (Picot-Coupey et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2019; Chevtchouk et al., 2021), not least in terms of the places and spaces where this activity occurs.