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Animating the big middle
Journal of Retailing 81 (2, 2005) 89–96
Invited article
Animating the big middle Eric Arnould ∗ E.J. Faulkner College Professor of Agribusiness and Marketing, Department of Marketing, CBA 310C, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0492, USA
Abstract A Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) perspective captures the motivating social and cultural contexts of retail patronage and purchase behaviors and the myriad motivating factors behind the retail purchase decision. A CCT perspective complements behavioral decision theory and social cognition research in retailing. For consumers, retailers represent a field in which operant resources interact. In these marketspaces, firms and consumers exert a mutual gravitational pull. Firms compete for a role in the culturally constituted projects that consumers pursue by offering certain resource combinations. A CCT-based approach to retailing strives to account for co-creation, namely, how consumers deploy their own cultural resources, aided by retailer-provided resources, to accomplish the pursuit of their personal identity and communal projects. The paper discusses strategic orientations for retail firms that spring from a resource view, four types of firm supplied operant resources, suggests some mechanisms through which consumers animate cultural resources and their motivations to do so, and offers suggestions for future research. © 2005 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Big middle segment; Consumer projects; Cultural resources; Operant resources; Operand resources; Performances; Narrative frames; Retail strategy
Just as Victor Gruen and A. Alfred Taubman’s shopping malls produced the American suburban shopper (Gladwell 2004, the Galleria produced Frank Zappa’s Valley Girl (Zappa 1995/1982), and blue-light specials produced the Kmart shopper, Wal-Mart’s strategy of low prices has brought into being the “Big Middle” segment (Connolly 2004). Some, including Wal-Mart’s own strategists, erroneously predicted a premature slowdown in Wal-Mart’s growth (Moore 1993; The Economist 2004), but the “Wheel of Retailing” (Hollander 1960) has yet to turn against the company’s low-price strategy, and dramatic growth continues. Naturally, Wal-Mart and its many suppliers want to know how long this growth can be sustained and therefore pose tactical questions: How can we stimulate Big Middle consumers to spend? What are their buying triggers? These questions interest all who serve not only the Big Middle but other shopping segments as well. Researchers have proposed several kinds of answers. In this editorial, I suggest that emerging directions of interest to retail researchers should be based more generally on consumer culture theory (CCT; Arnould & Thompson 2005). By ∗
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capturing the motivating social and cultural contexts of retail patronage and purchase behaviors and the myriad factors beyond the immediate retail purchase decision and buying context that influence consumer behaviors, CCT complements the primary focus of behavioral decision theory and social cognition research on the purchase context (see Blattberg, Briesch, & Fox 1995; Tellis & Zufryden 1995; Uncles, Ehrenberg, & Hammond 1995). For example, CCT highlights the fact that people engage in shopping to realize a variety of projects1 for which they deploy their own economic, social, and ideological resources 1 Contemporary social processes like globalization of persuasive commercial media and brands, deterritorialization, and massive movements of populations break down old social boundaries and induce more awareness of selfhood and identity formation, as well as more existential uncertainty, experimentation, and risk. Shed of traditional social roles, individuals must selfconsciously recompose their sense of identity and community. In marketdriven societies, consumption becomes one means of producing one’s self, self-image, and community membership, and this function is what I mean by projects, two of which are authenticating acts and authoritative performances. Authenticating acts are self-referential behaviors that actors believe reveal or produce their “true” selves. Authoritative performances are collective displays designed to invent or refashion community and “tradition.” Consumers often use personal narratives—their accounts of the relationships
0022-4359/$ – see front matter © 2005 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jretai.2005.03.001
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(Arnould & Price 2000). As an illustration, Haytko and Baker (2004) demonstrate how American teenaged girls use mall shopping primarily to pursue conventional social projects. Most trips include companions, and the companion choice structures the trip trajectory and specific goals. The experience of bonding with employees and other shopper friends, as well as interacting with peer strangers (i.e., playful communing and socializing; Holt 1995), leads to an accrual of social resources, a key outcome. For many trips, purchase is secondary. Fischer and Arnold (1990) show that women who spend more time accounting and evaluating their purchases (Holt 1995) while Christmas-gift shopping reinforce their larger social networks and express their traditional gender orientations. That is, they accrue both identity and social resources. These studies make the point that retailers offer consumers a variety of resources they can use to accomplish such projects. The purpose of a CCT-based approach to retailing is to account for this cocreation, namely, how consumers deploy cultural resources to accomplish the pursuit of their projects, aided by retailer-provided resources. In a CCT framework, the question of what triggers Big Middle purchase behavior is translated into other research questions: What Big Middle customer projects do retailer-provided resources animate? How can retailers align their offerings to invigorate these projects more effectively? What broader purposes animate Big Middle shoppers, and to what purposes do they put the items they cart home from such retailers? Although the answers to these questions remain unclear, I propose a framework of further research into Big Middle retailing and outline some questions that may help shed some light on the link between consumers’ projects and retailing as a field of cultural resources. In this article, I review resource theory, and then suggest some of the purposes that retailprovided cultural resources present to consumers, along with some types of these resources. After raising the question of how customers animate these firm-supplied resources, I finally suggest a resource-based way of thinking about retail evolution.
A cultural resource view Strategic marketing researchers already recognize the conceptual value of resource-based theory (e.g., Day 1994; Vargo & Lusch 2004). Vargo and Lusch (2004) usefully distinguish operant resources, a kind of cultural resource that includes skills, knowledge, competences, values, and ideologies, from among self-relevant events over time—to give these acts a sense of cohesion and integration. Personal narratives simultaneously enable people to accommodate multiple selves and mitigate or render comprehensible those events and performances that deviate from any presupposed collective norms. For a detailed description and bibliography of this research, see Arnould and Price (2000) and Firat and Venkatesh (1995); for illustrations, see Kates (2002), Thompson (2004), Thompson and Arsel (2004), and Thompson and Troester (2002).
operand resources, which involve those resources, especially material ones, on which the action of the operant resources produces effects. In most strategic marketing models, however, consumers are viewed, at best, as valuable coproducers and thus as operant resources in the firm’s production function (Prahalad & Ramaswamy 2000). In turn, most uses of resource theory remain firm centric. Alternatively, I propose that retailers might be better conceptualized as operant and operand resource purveyors that compete for shares of consumer operant resources, rather than as the orchestrators of consumers’ market outcomes (Holt 2004). Firm-produced resources, packaged into retail habitats (Bloch, Ridgway, & Dawson 1994), brands, personnel, pricing strategies, advertising campaigns, and “appliances” in Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) terms, enable consumers to craft experiences and realize the projects they choose. In CCT terms, retailing innovation resides in the managerial ability to both evaluate the cultural projects that motivate Big Middle (and other) consumers and compete for shares of these consumers’ cultural resources (Holt 2004).
The purposes of cultural resources A retailer packages cultural resources into a particular habitat, appliance, assortment, personnel policy, pricing strategy, communications campaign, and/or other element of the retail mix (operand resource). Consumers then come to perceive the resource as embodied in that retail package. In turn, they patronize the retailer, sometimes making purchases, to consume that resource and forge a relationship with the provider of that resource (the retailer). A consumer-centric view of resources treats retail environments and their contents as sources of multiple types of potential cultural resources. Firms propose and, through patronage, purchase, and consumption, consumers engage in continuous meaning transfer processes that cement the connections between their projects and specific classes of retail-produced resources (McCracken 1986; Thompson & Arsel 2004). For example, when Nike’s core customers poured awestruck through Niketown at the apogee of the Michael Jordan era, they integrated a cultural resource, the American myth of individual achievement through perseverance, into their own lives (Holt 1995; Sherry 1998). When multiple generations of female family members descend on the American Girl Place in Chicago, they assimilate general cultural resources such as myths of wholesome American family values and norms about virtuous girlhoods, but they also personalize the store habitat and its appliances through the evocation of specific cultural resources of their own, including family traditions, legends, and values (Holt 1995; Kozinets, Sherry, Mcgrath, et al. 2004). Firm-produced cultural resources are neither finite containers of fixed meaning (Holt 1997) nor free-floating entities that can be constantly imbued with meaning as retailers see fit. Instead, firm-produced operand resources are culturally constrained signs that represent the potential connections
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between the firm’s operant resources and those operant resources that remain under consumers’ control. Evidently, from a consumer perspective, a given retail habitat, brand, or appliance can provide multiple types of resources (Babin, Darden, & Griffin 1994; Brown, Kozinets, & Sherry 2003; Haytko & Baker 2004; Sandikci & Holt 1998; Sherry 1998), and multiple types of retail brands and habitats can provide similar resources. However, the process of meaning transfer is itself a culturally specific one, as studies of retailing in other cultural contexts strikingly reveal (Creighton 1994, 1998). In practical terms, cultural context limits the scope and dimensions of variation in the relationships between the resources provided (e.g., myths, values, norms, symbols, traditions) and the use values that consumers are willing and able to extract from them (cf. Baudrillard 1994; Firat & Venkatesh 1995). But specific research is needed to clarify the scope of covariation in retail-provided operant resources, elements of the culturally constituted world (McCracken 1986), and consumer projects. According to the cultural resource view, successful retailers purvey not just any subset of potential operant resources but those that are both desirable and whose realization is continuously depleted, challenged, threatened, or frustrated in everyday life. Retailers compete to provide the most compelling array of cultural resources to consumers, not merely lower prices or better assortments. From a consumer perspective, these operand resource cues are merely the means by which consumers detect the operant cultural resources of an offer. Retailers, including Big Middle retailers that outperform the competition, provide cultural resource leadership that enables consumers to pursue those ongoing projects that are most important for them to realize. By providing a constellation of resources objectified as operand resources—such as habitats, appliances, assortments, personnel, pricing strategies, and communications campaigns—powerful Big Middle retailers (e.g., Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Petsmart, even Starbucks) can structure experience, shape consumer lifestyles, and function as the cultural models through which consumers act, think, and feel (Holt 2004; Kozinets, Sherry, Storm, et al. 2004; Thompson & Arsel 2004). Consumers bring to bear operant resources—interpretive and productive capacities organized into templates for action and interpretation (Holt 1994)—that are embedded in the communities to which they belong (e.g., family, class, ethnicity, subculture, gender). These templates make certain types of transfers between firm-provided resources and consumer projects more likely than others (Allen 2002; McQuarrie & Mick 1999; Scott 1994). However, consumers still can activate firm-supplied resources to serve multiple purposes in their creative everyday usage. For example, consumers use firm-supplied resources to pursue personal and social identity projects (Arnould, Price, & Malshe 2005; Holt & Thompson 2004; Thompson & Arsel 2004); act out subcultural lifestyle orientations (Holt 1997; Sirsi, Reingen, & Ward 1996); articulate and generate individual, gender, race, and community identities (Kates 2002; Ritson, Elliott, & Eccles 1996);
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cement cultural categories (Applbaum & Jordt 1996); and animate personal fantasy (Sherry 1998). Firm-supplied cultural resources and consumer projects Firm-supplied resources help consumers connect to the cultural resources by which they organize their individual and social life projects outside the store environment. Whereas Holt (2004) has begun to show how this process works for iconic brands, little is known about the scope and variation of cultural resources into which successful retailers tap (cf. Arnold, Kozinets, & Handelman 2001). To structure future research, I suggest four macrocategories of cultural resources: (1) economic, (2) utopian, (3) ludic, and (4) temporal. This list certainly is not comprehensive; for example, more research is needed on the sacred operant resources some retailers provide (Belk, Wallendorf, & Sherry 1989; O’Guinn & Belk 1989; Zepp 1997). Economic resources Retail environments offer economic cultural resources when they facilitate consumers’ pursuit of identity projects that are organized around longstanding cultural schemas associated with frugality, thriftiness, value for money, or perhaps even perceived thinking costs (e.g., Lastovicka, Bettencourt, Hughner, & Kuntze 1999; Miller 1998; Shugan 1980; Witkowski 1989) and, conversely, luxury (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard 2003; Kapferer 1998). For example, Kmart, a Big Middle retailer, produced advertising fliers in 1999–2000 that focused almost exclusively on such resources (Arnold et al. 2001); it could be argued that hard discounters’ (e.g., Dollar General) appeal relies primarily on cues that promise these resources. Examples of firm-provided operant resources that enable consumers to connect with the economic projects associated with thriftiness include auctions, discounts, everyday low pricing, longer payment terms, low interest rates, sales promotions, value pricing, and the use of expressions such as “savings” in promotional materials. Frugal lifestyles (Lastovicka et al. 1999), deal proneness (Lichtenstein, Netemeyer, & Burton 1995), and coupon proneness (Bagozzi, Baumgartner, & Youjae 1992) represent different manifestations of consumers’ identity projects that are constructed through economic cultural resources. Future research could benefit from building on older research that highlights the playful and performative uses of economic resources in consumer identity projects (Price, Feick, & Guskey-Federouch 1988; Schindler 1994). Such research also might reconceptualize and reexamine apparently utilitarian shopping behaviors as identity projects with moral overtones (Miller 1998) and ask how, when, and in what conditions various firm-supplied resources contribute to such identity projects. Utopian resources Retail environments represent utopian cultural resources when they facilitate consumers’ pursuit of a utopian world
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or selves. This tendency to think in utopian terms is strong among Western consumers. Utopian resources help consumers arrange their place in that imaginary, perfect reality and weave the ideals of the perfect world into their everyday lives and selfhood (Maclaran & Brown 2001). Marketing literature provides various examples of the retail evocation of utopian consumer projects in festival malls (Maclaran & Brown 2005); tourist destinations (Costa 1997); religious theme parks (O’Guinn & Belk 1989); and, most significantly for firms operating in the Big Middle, hypermarkets (Floch 1988). Recently, Brown et al. (2003) argued that retrobrands (relaunched historical brands with updated features) mobilize consumers’ utopian resources. Retail retroscapes may provide similar value. For example, the images of frugality, family, religion, community, populism, and patriotism featured in Wal-Mart advertising fliers may evoke a mythic American hometown, which invites Wal-Mart shoppers to pursue matching utopian projects (Arnold et al. 2001). Additional research might explore the kinds of utopian projects that appeal to the Big Middle, as well as other customers (e.g., those who patronize the eco-retailer Real Goods). Maclaran and Brown (2005) point out that utopian thinking also has a dystopian side. The same retailers that evoke utopian projects for some consumers may evoke dystopian images for others, which would threaten retail success. For example, both Wal-Mart and Starbucks have inspired critiques that reprise common dystopian themes: unfair labor practices, environmental degradation, harm to health and well-being, the driving out of local businesses, and the commodification of authentic forms of cultural expression (Thompson & Arsel 2004). Research should examine how retailers that face dystopian interpretations of their resource offerings can adapt their strategies to anticipate the risks of dystopian imagery, as well as how they should react to cultural threats that are beyond their direct control by refining the cultural resources they offer (Holt 2004; Thompson & Arsel 2004). Ludic resources Retail environments operate as ludic resources when they facilitate consumers’ pursuit of play (Holbrook & Hirschman 1982). Ludic resources energize intrinsically rewarding (autotelic), expressive, and creative consumer activities that may be either self-oriented or interpersonal. Consumers’ ludic resources, as engaged in retail habitats, may include ongoing search, imaginative role-playing, fan behaviors, beat-themarket games, treasure hunts, or transcendent experiences (Arnold & Reynolds 2003; Bloch, Sherrell, & Ridgway 1986; Schindler 1994; Sherry 1990; Sherry & McGrath 1989). For example, a Nebraska Petsmart store recently hosted an elaborate mock wedding between two neutered cats, complete with customer-provided music and costumes (Aponick 2004). But 20 years after the initial call for more research on consumers’ ludic projects (Holbrook & Hirschman 1982), they remain an under researched dimension of retail behavior.
Retail formats ranging from independent toy stores to ESPNZone to thrift stores appear to thrive on the provision of ludic resources (Bardhi & Arnould in press; Kozinets, Sherry, Storm, et al. 2004; Wallendorf, Lindsey-Mullikin, & Pimentel 1998). Target, a Big Middle retailer, has made fanciful use of its logo and improbable product associations in recent advertising to evoke ludic themes (Arnold et al. 2001). For example, a two-page advertisement that appeared in the October 18, 2004, New Yorker magazine shows a white-on-red politician joining hands with a red-on-white politician to encourage voting. The ad’s tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea of colored states invites playful engagement by consumers. Research should investigate what kinds of autotelic and interpersonal play retailers can facilitate, both in and out of the store context, and to what effect on retention, loyalty, and sales. Temporal resources Retail environments operate as temporal resources when they facilitate the enactment of consumers’ preferred timestyles. Timestyles constitute consumers’ often taken-forgranted patterns of time allocation among activities (Feldman & Hornik 1981). Consumer research has focused almost exclusively on mechanical, divisible, linear, and calculable notions of time, which are defined by cultural constructions of natural temporal rhythms, and downplayed natural and social time styles, which are defined in reference to salient events in the social environment (Grønmo 1989; Kaufman, Lane, & Lindquist 1991). Retailing research generally focuses on the time-saving utilities of firm-provided resources (e.g., Berry, Seiders, & Grewal 2002; Hui, Thakor, & Gill 1998; Messinger & Narasimhan 1997). This preoccupation with consumers’ pressure-cooker timestyles (Cotte, Ratneshawar, & Mick 2004) may have led researchers to ignore the potential of Big Middle retailing to offer or enable resources that facilitate the construction of other timestyles, such as “slow time” promoted by the slow food movement for example (Grønmo 1989; see www.slowfood.com). Intriguingly, in some East Asian contexts, McDonald’s provides resources productive of festive social timestyles. Its tables-fortwo layout facilitates novel, romantic Western time, and its personnel facilitate an innovation in festive social time, the child’s birthday party (Yan 1997). The temporality of retail experiences thus is a topic that could be invigorated by combining insights into nostalgia (Holbrook 1993) and work that demonstrates how varying dimensions of retail habitats can alter customers’ time perceptions (Kellaris & Mantel 1996). Recent studies show that servicescapes afford consumers different holistic, embodied temporal experiences; museum patrons revel in the languid experience of aesthetic appreciation (Joy & Sherry 2003), ESPNZone customers experience atemporal flow (Kozinets, Sherry, Storm, et al. 2004), and retroscapes allow consumers to experience the nostalgia that some brands convey (Brown et al. 2003). These studies point to the desirability of
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exploring retail temporality as an operant resource. For example, how should music, lighting, color, and other atmospheric elements be managed to facilitate consumers’ use of retail-provided temporal resources to coproduce particular valued experiences? Should these elements be varied over time? And if so, how?
Activating cultural resources Firm-supplied resources become valuable for consumers to the extent that they enable those consumers to pursue their personal goals and projects (Holt 2004; McCracken 1986; Thompson 2004). However, by themselves, firm-supplied resources are inanimate, without function or meaning. For firmsupplied resources to deliver consumer experiences, consumers must activate their own operant resources. How do consumers deploy their operant resources to generate valued consumption experiences? Research in the CCT tradition suggests that firm-produced resources generate goal-relevant experiences when consumers enlist them in performances (Deighton 1992; Holt 1995). Performances can be differentiated by the degree to which the consumers’ operant resource use is constrained or liberated by the deployment of retail operant and operand resources (Deighton 1992). Thus, the Mall of the Americas offers customers the opportunity to play relatively flexible coproductive roles by making use of the plethora of resources being offered (Hetzel 1998). In contrast, the Big Middle furniture retailer IKEA controls and channels its customers’ instore purchase experience, although creative post-purchase identity performances persist (Ritson et al. 1996). Research should examine how varying the constraints under which consumers deploy their operant resources affects satisfaction, repeat purchase, and other marketing outcomes. Performances also can be differentiated by the degree to which the retailer’s deployment of resources places outcomes in doubt, tests values, or introduces tension or uncertainty into the experience. The Boston department store Filene’s Basement’s sales famously challenge shoppers (Schindler 1989); consequently, customers’ operant resources of skill and knowledge are at a premium in this retail context. Gift stores, flea markets, and festival malls also lean toward the uncertainty end of this continuum (Maclaran & Brown 2005; Sherry 1990; Sherry & McGrath 1989). Other retail venues deploy resources in such a way that consumers’ operant resources are likely to be deployed in more ritualistic or predictable ways; that is, they tend to affirm rather than test values. Do successful Big Middle retailers fall on this end of the continuum? Some authors have initiated research into retail consumers’ role performances (Grove, Fisk, & Dorsch 1998; Kiecker & Hartman 1993; McCracken 1986; McGrath & Otnes 1995), but the area invites further theorization (e.g., Moisio & Arnould, in press). Further research also could systematize performance types and their connections to consumers’ use
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of operant resources and traditional marketing outcome variables. How do consumers make retail operant resources perform? One way might be through deploying narrative frames (Deighton 1992; Thompson 2004) that reimagine the marketer’s value propositions in terms of consumer projects. For example, market mavens enact coupon usage games in which coupons become more than a mere vehicle to deliver the implicit contracted performance, namely, a price rebate (Price et al. 1988). Supermarket shoppers can reframe these contracted performances as treats (Miller 1998) or self-gifts (Mick & Demoss 1990). Similarly, thrift shoppers might reframe the contractual bargain of shopping performance so that it becomes a dramatic hunt for treasure (Bardhi & Arnould in press). Narrative reframing introduces active consumer agency into the firm-supplied resource by associating the consumer’s self, life project, and goals with the firm-provided resources, such as appliances, the shopping process, and habitats. As noted, some authors have provided typologies of some framing practices (Deighton 1992; Holt 1995; Stern 1995), but researchers and retailers still need to know more about the different types of consumer frames, the ways in which these different types facilitate value-adding performances by retail-provided operant resources, and how retail designs may cue consumer framing practices.
Resource dynamics: big middle on the move A last set of research questions pertains to what Wal-Mart and its many suppliers want to know: How long can their positioning profitably be sustained? According to the CCT view, retail evolution takes place as shifts co-occur in the combinations of cultural resources that firms produce and those that consumers favor, rather than through competitive dynamics, as is envisioned in the classic Wheel of Retailing model. How do motivations to deploy cultural resources change over time? What directions do these changes take in the space of cultural resources that drive demand in the Big Middle, and elsewhere, in consumers’ retail landscape? Holt (2004) has mapped such processes longitudinally with regard to iconic brands and shown that mighty brands such as The Gap may lose equity as a result of changes in the ambient cultural environment; a similar research effort could clarify the evolution of Big Middle retailing successes and failures. Furthermore, research should try to examine in more detail the process of value creation. What makes certain cultural resources valued? Any of the four following positions, or their combinations, could guide additional research. First, cultural resources are valuable when they provide solutions to the tensions that consumers experience between their own lives and society’s prevailing ideals (Holt 2004), a function fulfilled by specialty health food retailers or independently owned coffees shops, for example (Thompson & Arsel 2004; Thompson & Troester 2002). Second, cultural resources are valuable ingredients that can fulfill consumers’ projects when they are
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perceived as authenticating (Arnould & Price 2000), as some boutique retailers provide (Wallendorf et al. 1998). Third, firm-produced resources are valuable when they link value propositions to pervasive national myths (Arnould, Price, & Tierney 1998; Thompson 2004) that in turn are connected with universal archetypes, such as America’s frontier myth, which is linked to universal quest archetypes, as possibly captured by retailers such as REI or Cabela’s. Fourth, cultural resources are valuable when they help consumers reconfigure their social roles. Thus, Lowe’s may empower women to take on formerly male-oriented do-it-yourself projects. Further research could try to determine what makes retail cultural resources valuable, and how and when their value to consumers changes.
Discussion This article sketches a consumer-centric research approach to the question, “What makes Big Middle consumers buy?,” to complement dominant firm-centric approaches in retail studies. For consumers, I suggest that the Big Middle, as well as other retailers, represents a field in which operant resources (e.g., economic, ludic, utopian, temporal) interact. In these marketspaces, firms and consumers exert a mutual gravitational pull. Firms compete for a role in the culturally constituted projects that consumers pursue by offering certain resource combinations. Consumers realize the potential value represented by these firm-produced resources and therefore exert their own resources in various performative and narrative activities. I propose this sketch in a speculative mode and end every section with specific hypotheses or suggestions to guide further retail research about both parties in the retail relationship. Of particular interest to Big Middle retailers will be determining which operant cultural resources are most effective to offer and how.
Acknowledgements The author thanks Dhruv Grewal and Michael Levy for inviting this editorial; Risto Moisio, doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska, for developing the focus on four cultural resources, generating ideas about performance and keying, and providing invaluable bibliographic and editorial assistance; Robert Kozinets for his insight; and Michael Levy and Larry Compeau for friendly, constructive reviews.
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Invited article
Animating the big middle Eric Arnould ∗ E.J. Faulkner College Professor of Agribusiness and Marketing, Department of Marketing, CBA 310C, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0492, USA
Abstract A Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) perspective captures the motivating social and cultural contexts of retail patronage and purchase behaviors and the myriad motivating factors behind the retail purchase decision. A CCT perspective complements behavioral decision theory and social cognition research in retailing. For consumers, retailers represent a field in which operant resources interact. In these marketspaces, firms and consumers exert a mutual gravitational pull. Firms compete for a role in the culturally constituted projects that consumers pursue by offering certain resource combinations. A CCT-based approach to retailing strives to account for co-creation, namely, how consumers deploy their own cultural resources, aided by retailer-provided resources, to accomplish the pursuit of their personal identity and communal projects. The paper discusses strategic orientations for retail firms that spring from a resource view, four types of firm supplied operant resources, suggests some mechanisms through which consumers animate cultural resources and their motivations to do so, and offers suggestions for future research. © 2005 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Big middle segment; Consumer projects; Cultural resources; Operant resources; Operand resources; Performances; Narrative frames; Retail strategy
Just as Victor Gruen and A. Alfred Taubman’s shopping malls produced the American suburban shopper (Gladwell 2004, the Galleria produced Frank Zappa’s Valley Girl (Zappa 1995/1982), and blue-light specials produced the Kmart shopper, Wal-Mart’s strategy of low prices has brought into being the “Big Middle” segment (Connolly 2004). Some, including Wal-Mart’s own strategists, erroneously predicted a premature slowdown in Wal-Mart’s growth (Moore 1993; The Economist 2004), but the “Wheel of Retailing” (Hollander 1960) has yet to turn against the company’s low-price strategy, and dramatic growth continues. Naturally, Wal-Mart and its many suppliers want to know how long this growth can be sustained and therefore pose tactical questions: How can we stimulate Big Middle consumers to spend? What are their buying triggers? These questions interest all who serve not only the Big Middle but other shopping segments as well. Researchers have proposed several kinds of answers. In this editorial, I suggest that emerging directions of interest to retail researchers should be based more generally on consumer culture theory (CCT; Arnould & Thompson 2005). By ∗
Tel.: +1 402 472 5758; fax: +1 402 472 9777. E-mail address: [email protected].
capturing the motivating social and cultural contexts of retail patronage and purchase behaviors and the myriad factors beyond the immediate retail purchase decision and buying context that influence consumer behaviors, CCT complements the primary focus of behavioral decision theory and social cognition research on the purchase context (see Blattberg, Briesch, & Fox 1995; Tellis & Zufryden 1995; Uncles, Ehrenberg, & Hammond 1995). For example, CCT highlights the fact that people engage in shopping to realize a variety of projects1 for which they deploy their own economic, social, and ideological resources 1 Contemporary social processes like globalization of persuasive commercial media and brands, deterritorialization, and massive movements of populations break down old social boundaries and induce more awareness of selfhood and identity formation, as well as more existential uncertainty, experimentation, and risk. Shed of traditional social roles, individuals must selfconsciously recompose their sense of identity and community. In marketdriven societies, consumption becomes one means of producing one’s self, self-image, and community membership, and this function is what I mean by projects, two of which are authenticating acts and authoritative performances. Authenticating acts are self-referential behaviors that actors believe reveal or produce their “true” selves. Authoritative performances are collective displays designed to invent or refashion community and “tradition.” Consumers often use personal narratives—their accounts of the relationships
0022-4359/$ – see front matter © 2005 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jretai.2005.03.001
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(Arnould & Price 2000). As an illustration, Haytko and Baker (2004) demonstrate how American teenaged girls use mall shopping primarily to pursue conventional social projects. Most trips include companions, and the companion choice structures the trip trajectory and specific goals. The experience of bonding with employees and other shopper friends, as well as interacting with peer strangers (i.e., playful communing and socializing; Holt 1995), leads to an accrual of social resources, a key outcome. For many trips, purchase is secondary. Fischer and Arnold (1990) show that women who spend more time accounting and evaluating their purchases (Holt 1995) while Christmas-gift shopping reinforce their larger social networks and express their traditional gender orientations. That is, they accrue both identity and social resources. These studies make the point that retailers offer consumers a variety of resources they can use to accomplish such projects. The purpose of a CCT-based approach to retailing is to account for this cocreation, namely, how consumers deploy cultural resources to accomplish the pursuit of their projects, aided by retailer-provided resources. In a CCT framework, the question of what triggers Big Middle purchase behavior is translated into other research questions: What Big Middle customer projects do retailer-provided resources animate? How can retailers align their offerings to invigorate these projects more effectively? What broader purposes animate Big Middle shoppers, and to what purposes do they put the items they cart home from such retailers? Although the answers to these questions remain unclear, I propose a framework of further research into Big Middle retailing and outline some questions that may help shed some light on the link between consumers’ projects and retailing as a field of cultural resources. In this article, I review resource theory, and then suggest some of the purposes that retailprovided cultural resources present to consumers, along with some types of these resources. After raising the question of how customers animate these firm-supplied resources, I finally suggest a resource-based way of thinking about retail evolution.
A cultural resource view Strategic marketing researchers already recognize the conceptual value of resource-based theory (e.g., Day 1994; Vargo & Lusch 2004). Vargo and Lusch (2004) usefully distinguish operant resources, a kind of cultural resource that includes skills, knowledge, competences, values, and ideologies, from among self-relevant events over time—to give these acts a sense of cohesion and integration. Personal narratives simultaneously enable people to accommodate multiple selves and mitigate or render comprehensible those events and performances that deviate from any presupposed collective norms. For a detailed description and bibliography of this research, see Arnould and Price (2000) and Firat and Venkatesh (1995); for illustrations, see Kates (2002), Thompson (2004), Thompson and Arsel (2004), and Thompson and Troester (2002).
operand resources, which involve those resources, especially material ones, on which the action of the operant resources produces effects. In most strategic marketing models, however, consumers are viewed, at best, as valuable coproducers and thus as operant resources in the firm’s production function (Prahalad & Ramaswamy 2000). In turn, most uses of resource theory remain firm centric. Alternatively, I propose that retailers might be better conceptualized as operant and operand resource purveyors that compete for shares of consumer operant resources, rather than as the orchestrators of consumers’ market outcomes (Holt 2004). Firm-produced resources, packaged into retail habitats (Bloch, Ridgway, & Dawson 1994), brands, personnel, pricing strategies, advertising campaigns, and “appliances” in Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) terms, enable consumers to craft experiences and realize the projects they choose. In CCT terms, retailing innovation resides in the managerial ability to both evaluate the cultural projects that motivate Big Middle (and other) consumers and compete for shares of these consumers’ cultural resources (Holt 2004).
The purposes of cultural resources A retailer packages cultural resources into a particular habitat, appliance, assortment, personnel policy, pricing strategy, communications campaign, and/or other element of the retail mix (operand resource). Consumers then come to perceive the resource as embodied in that retail package. In turn, they patronize the retailer, sometimes making purchases, to consume that resource and forge a relationship with the provider of that resource (the retailer). A consumer-centric view of resources treats retail environments and their contents as sources of multiple types of potential cultural resources. Firms propose and, through patronage, purchase, and consumption, consumers engage in continuous meaning transfer processes that cement the connections between their projects and specific classes of retail-produced resources (McCracken 1986; Thompson & Arsel 2004). For example, when Nike’s core customers poured awestruck through Niketown at the apogee of the Michael Jordan era, they integrated a cultural resource, the American myth of individual achievement through perseverance, into their own lives (Holt 1995; Sherry 1998). When multiple generations of female family members descend on the American Girl Place in Chicago, they assimilate general cultural resources such as myths of wholesome American family values and norms about virtuous girlhoods, but they also personalize the store habitat and its appliances through the evocation of specific cultural resources of their own, including family traditions, legends, and values (Holt 1995; Kozinets, Sherry, Mcgrath, et al. 2004). Firm-produced cultural resources are neither finite containers of fixed meaning (Holt 1997) nor free-floating entities that can be constantly imbued with meaning as retailers see fit. Instead, firm-produced operand resources are culturally constrained signs that represent the potential connections
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between the firm’s operant resources and those operant resources that remain under consumers’ control. Evidently, from a consumer perspective, a given retail habitat, brand, or appliance can provide multiple types of resources (Babin, Darden, & Griffin 1994; Brown, Kozinets, & Sherry 2003; Haytko & Baker 2004; Sandikci & Holt 1998; Sherry 1998), and multiple types of retail brands and habitats can provide similar resources. However, the process of meaning transfer is itself a culturally specific one, as studies of retailing in other cultural contexts strikingly reveal (Creighton 1994, 1998). In practical terms, cultural context limits the scope and dimensions of variation in the relationships between the resources provided (e.g., myths, values, norms, symbols, traditions) and the use values that consumers are willing and able to extract from them (cf. Baudrillard 1994; Firat & Venkatesh 1995). But specific research is needed to clarify the scope of covariation in retail-provided operant resources, elements of the culturally constituted world (McCracken 1986), and consumer projects. According to the cultural resource view, successful retailers purvey not just any subset of potential operant resources but those that are both desirable and whose realization is continuously depleted, challenged, threatened, or frustrated in everyday life. Retailers compete to provide the most compelling array of cultural resources to consumers, not merely lower prices or better assortments. From a consumer perspective, these operand resource cues are merely the means by which consumers detect the operant cultural resources of an offer. Retailers, including Big Middle retailers that outperform the competition, provide cultural resource leadership that enables consumers to pursue those ongoing projects that are most important for them to realize. By providing a constellation of resources objectified as operand resources—such as habitats, appliances, assortments, personnel, pricing strategies, and communications campaigns—powerful Big Middle retailers (e.g., Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Petsmart, even Starbucks) can structure experience, shape consumer lifestyles, and function as the cultural models through which consumers act, think, and feel (Holt 2004; Kozinets, Sherry, Storm, et al. 2004; Thompson & Arsel 2004). Consumers bring to bear operant resources—interpretive and productive capacities organized into templates for action and interpretation (Holt 1994)—that are embedded in the communities to which they belong (e.g., family, class, ethnicity, subculture, gender). These templates make certain types of transfers between firm-provided resources and consumer projects more likely than others (Allen 2002; McQuarrie & Mick 1999; Scott 1994). However, consumers still can activate firm-supplied resources to serve multiple purposes in their creative everyday usage. For example, consumers use firm-supplied resources to pursue personal and social identity projects (Arnould, Price, & Malshe 2005; Holt & Thompson 2004; Thompson & Arsel 2004); act out subcultural lifestyle orientations (Holt 1997; Sirsi, Reingen, & Ward 1996); articulate and generate individual, gender, race, and community identities (Kates 2002; Ritson, Elliott, & Eccles 1996);
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cement cultural categories (Applbaum & Jordt 1996); and animate personal fantasy (Sherry 1998). Firm-supplied cultural resources and consumer projects Firm-supplied resources help consumers connect to the cultural resources by which they organize their individual and social life projects outside the store environment. Whereas Holt (2004) has begun to show how this process works for iconic brands, little is known about the scope and variation of cultural resources into which successful retailers tap (cf. Arnold, Kozinets, & Handelman 2001). To structure future research, I suggest four macrocategories of cultural resources: (1) economic, (2) utopian, (3) ludic, and (4) temporal. This list certainly is not comprehensive; for example, more research is needed on the sacred operant resources some retailers provide (Belk, Wallendorf, & Sherry 1989; O’Guinn & Belk 1989; Zepp 1997). Economic resources Retail environments offer economic cultural resources when they facilitate consumers’ pursuit of identity projects that are organized around longstanding cultural schemas associated with frugality, thriftiness, value for money, or perhaps even perceived thinking costs (e.g., Lastovicka, Bettencourt, Hughner, & Kuntze 1999; Miller 1998; Shugan 1980; Witkowski 1989) and, conversely, luxury (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard 2003; Kapferer 1998). For example, Kmart, a Big Middle retailer, produced advertising fliers in 1999–2000 that focused almost exclusively on such resources (Arnold et al. 2001); it could be argued that hard discounters’ (e.g., Dollar General) appeal relies primarily on cues that promise these resources. Examples of firm-provided operant resources that enable consumers to connect with the economic projects associated with thriftiness include auctions, discounts, everyday low pricing, longer payment terms, low interest rates, sales promotions, value pricing, and the use of expressions such as “savings” in promotional materials. Frugal lifestyles (Lastovicka et al. 1999), deal proneness (Lichtenstein, Netemeyer, & Burton 1995), and coupon proneness (Bagozzi, Baumgartner, & Youjae 1992) represent different manifestations of consumers’ identity projects that are constructed through economic cultural resources. Future research could benefit from building on older research that highlights the playful and performative uses of economic resources in consumer identity projects (Price, Feick, & Guskey-Federouch 1988; Schindler 1994). Such research also might reconceptualize and reexamine apparently utilitarian shopping behaviors as identity projects with moral overtones (Miller 1998) and ask how, when, and in what conditions various firm-supplied resources contribute to such identity projects. Utopian resources Retail environments represent utopian cultural resources when they facilitate consumers’ pursuit of a utopian world
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or selves. This tendency to think in utopian terms is strong among Western consumers. Utopian resources help consumers arrange their place in that imaginary, perfect reality and weave the ideals of the perfect world into their everyday lives and selfhood (Maclaran & Brown 2001). Marketing literature provides various examples of the retail evocation of utopian consumer projects in festival malls (Maclaran & Brown 2005); tourist destinations (Costa 1997); religious theme parks (O’Guinn & Belk 1989); and, most significantly for firms operating in the Big Middle, hypermarkets (Floch 1988). Recently, Brown et al. (2003) argued that retrobrands (relaunched historical brands with updated features) mobilize consumers’ utopian resources. Retail retroscapes may provide similar value. For example, the images of frugality, family, religion, community, populism, and patriotism featured in Wal-Mart advertising fliers may evoke a mythic American hometown, which invites Wal-Mart shoppers to pursue matching utopian projects (Arnold et al. 2001). Additional research might explore the kinds of utopian projects that appeal to the Big Middle, as well as other customers (e.g., those who patronize the eco-retailer Real Goods). Maclaran and Brown (2005) point out that utopian thinking also has a dystopian side. The same retailers that evoke utopian projects for some consumers may evoke dystopian images for others, which would threaten retail success. For example, both Wal-Mart and Starbucks have inspired critiques that reprise common dystopian themes: unfair labor practices, environmental degradation, harm to health and well-being, the driving out of local businesses, and the commodification of authentic forms of cultural expression (Thompson & Arsel 2004). Research should examine how retailers that face dystopian interpretations of their resource offerings can adapt their strategies to anticipate the risks of dystopian imagery, as well as how they should react to cultural threats that are beyond their direct control by refining the cultural resources they offer (Holt 2004; Thompson & Arsel 2004). Ludic resources Retail environments operate as ludic resources when they facilitate consumers’ pursuit of play (Holbrook & Hirschman 1982). Ludic resources energize intrinsically rewarding (autotelic), expressive, and creative consumer activities that may be either self-oriented or interpersonal. Consumers’ ludic resources, as engaged in retail habitats, may include ongoing search, imaginative role-playing, fan behaviors, beat-themarket games, treasure hunts, or transcendent experiences (Arnold & Reynolds 2003; Bloch, Sherrell, & Ridgway 1986; Schindler 1994; Sherry 1990; Sherry & McGrath 1989). For example, a Nebraska Petsmart store recently hosted an elaborate mock wedding between two neutered cats, complete with customer-provided music and costumes (Aponick 2004). But 20 years after the initial call for more research on consumers’ ludic projects (Holbrook & Hirschman 1982), they remain an under researched dimension of retail behavior.
Retail formats ranging from independent toy stores to ESPNZone to thrift stores appear to thrive on the provision of ludic resources (Bardhi & Arnould in press; Kozinets, Sherry, Storm, et al. 2004; Wallendorf, Lindsey-Mullikin, & Pimentel 1998). Target, a Big Middle retailer, has made fanciful use of its logo and improbable product associations in recent advertising to evoke ludic themes (Arnold et al. 2001). For example, a two-page advertisement that appeared in the October 18, 2004, New Yorker magazine shows a white-on-red politician joining hands with a red-on-white politician to encourage voting. The ad’s tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea of colored states invites playful engagement by consumers. Research should investigate what kinds of autotelic and interpersonal play retailers can facilitate, both in and out of the store context, and to what effect on retention, loyalty, and sales. Temporal resources Retail environments operate as temporal resources when they facilitate the enactment of consumers’ preferred timestyles. Timestyles constitute consumers’ often taken-forgranted patterns of time allocation among activities (Feldman & Hornik 1981). Consumer research has focused almost exclusively on mechanical, divisible, linear, and calculable notions of time, which are defined by cultural constructions of natural temporal rhythms, and downplayed natural and social time styles, which are defined in reference to salient events in the social environment (Grønmo 1989; Kaufman, Lane, & Lindquist 1991). Retailing research generally focuses on the time-saving utilities of firm-provided resources (e.g., Berry, Seiders, & Grewal 2002; Hui, Thakor, & Gill 1998; Messinger & Narasimhan 1997). This preoccupation with consumers’ pressure-cooker timestyles (Cotte, Ratneshawar, & Mick 2004) may have led researchers to ignore the potential of Big Middle retailing to offer or enable resources that facilitate the construction of other timestyles, such as “slow time” promoted by the slow food movement for example (Grønmo 1989; see www.slowfood.com). Intriguingly, in some East Asian contexts, McDonald’s provides resources productive of festive social timestyles. Its tables-fortwo layout facilitates novel, romantic Western time, and its personnel facilitate an innovation in festive social time, the child’s birthday party (Yan 1997). The temporality of retail experiences thus is a topic that could be invigorated by combining insights into nostalgia (Holbrook 1993) and work that demonstrates how varying dimensions of retail habitats can alter customers’ time perceptions (Kellaris & Mantel 1996). Recent studies show that servicescapes afford consumers different holistic, embodied temporal experiences; museum patrons revel in the languid experience of aesthetic appreciation (Joy & Sherry 2003), ESPNZone customers experience atemporal flow (Kozinets, Sherry, Storm, et al. 2004), and retroscapes allow consumers to experience the nostalgia that some brands convey (Brown et al. 2003). These studies point to the desirability of
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exploring retail temporality as an operant resource. For example, how should music, lighting, color, and other atmospheric elements be managed to facilitate consumers’ use of retail-provided temporal resources to coproduce particular valued experiences? Should these elements be varied over time? And if so, how?
Activating cultural resources Firm-supplied resources become valuable for consumers to the extent that they enable those consumers to pursue their personal goals and projects (Holt 2004; McCracken 1986; Thompson 2004). However, by themselves, firm-supplied resources are inanimate, without function or meaning. For firmsupplied resources to deliver consumer experiences, consumers must activate their own operant resources. How do consumers deploy their operant resources to generate valued consumption experiences? Research in the CCT tradition suggests that firm-produced resources generate goal-relevant experiences when consumers enlist them in performances (Deighton 1992; Holt 1995). Performances can be differentiated by the degree to which the consumers’ operant resource use is constrained or liberated by the deployment of retail operant and operand resources (Deighton 1992). Thus, the Mall of the Americas offers customers the opportunity to play relatively flexible coproductive roles by making use of the plethora of resources being offered (Hetzel 1998). In contrast, the Big Middle furniture retailer IKEA controls and channels its customers’ instore purchase experience, although creative post-purchase identity performances persist (Ritson et al. 1996). Research should examine how varying the constraints under which consumers deploy their operant resources affects satisfaction, repeat purchase, and other marketing outcomes. Performances also can be differentiated by the degree to which the retailer’s deployment of resources places outcomes in doubt, tests values, or introduces tension or uncertainty into the experience. The Boston department store Filene’s Basement’s sales famously challenge shoppers (Schindler 1989); consequently, customers’ operant resources of skill and knowledge are at a premium in this retail context. Gift stores, flea markets, and festival malls also lean toward the uncertainty end of this continuum (Maclaran & Brown 2005; Sherry 1990; Sherry & McGrath 1989). Other retail venues deploy resources in such a way that consumers’ operant resources are likely to be deployed in more ritualistic or predictable ways; that is, they tend to affirm rather than test values. Do successful Big Middle retailers fall on this end of the continuum? Some authors have initiated research into retail consumers’ role performances (Grove, Fisk, & Dorsch 1998; Kiecker & Hartman 1993; McCracken 1986; McGrath & Otnes 1995), but the area invites further theorization (e.g., Moisio & Arnould, in press). Further research also could systematize performance types and their connections to consumers’ use
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of operant resources and traditional marketing outcome variables. How do consumers make retail operant resources perform? One way might be through deploying narrative frames (Deighton 1992; Thompson 2004) that reimagine the marketer’s value propositions in terms of consumer projects. For example, market mavens enact coupon usage games in which coupons become more than a mere vehicle to deliver the implicit contracted performance, namely, a price rebate (Price et al. 1988). Supermarket shoppers can reframe these contracted performances as treats (Miller 1998) or self-gifts (Mick & Demoss 1990). Similarly, thrift shoppers might reframe the contractual bargain of shopping performance so that it becomes a dramatic hunt for treasure (Bardhi & Arnould in press). Narrative reframing introduces active consumer agency into the firm-supplied resource by associating the consumer’s self, life project, and goals with the firm-provided resources, such as appliances, the shopping process, and habitats. As noted, some authors have provided typologies of some framing practices (Deighton 1992; Holt 1995; Stern 1995), but researchers and retailers still need to know more about the different types of consumer frames, the ways in which these different types facilitate value-adding performances by retail-provided operant resources, and how retail designs may cue consumer framing practices.
Resource dynamics: big middle on the move A last set of research questions pertains to what Wal-Mart and its many suppliers want to know: How long can their positioning profitably be sustained? According to the CCT view, retail evolution takes place as shifts co-occur in the combinations of cultural resources that firms produce and those that consumers favor, rather than through competitive dynamics, as is envisioned in the classic Wheel of Retailing model. How do motivations to deploy cultural resources change over time? What directions do these changes take in the space of cultural resources that drive demand in the Big Middle, and elsewhere, in consumers’ retail landscape? Holt (2004) has mapped such processes longitudinally with regard to iconic brands and shown that mighty brands such as The Gap may lose equity as a result of changes in the ambient cultural environment; a similar research effort could clarify the evolution of Big Middle retailing successes and failures. Furthermore, research should try to examine in more detail the process of value creation. What makes certain cultural resources valued? Any of the four following positions, or their combinations, could guide additional research. First, cultural resources are valuable when they provide solutions to the tensions that consumers experience between their own lives and society’s prevailing ideals (Holt 2004), a function fulfilled by specialty health food retailers or independently owned coffees shops, for example (Thompson & Arsel 2004; Thompson & Troester 2002). Second, cultural resources are valuable ingredients that can fulfill consumers’ projects when they are
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perceived as authenticating (Arnould & Price 2000), as some boutique retailers provide (Wallendorf et al. 1998). Third, firm-produced resources are valuable when they link value propositions to pervasive national myths (Arnould, Price, & Tierney 1998; Thompson 2004) that in turn are connected with universal archetypes, such as America’s frontier myth, which is linked to universal quest archetypes, as possibly captured by retailers such as REI or Cabela’s. Fourth, cultural resources are valuable when they help consumers reconfigure their social roles. Thus, Lowe’s may empower women to take on formerly male-oriented do-it-yourself projects. Further research could try to determine what makes retail cultural resources valuable, and how and when their value to consumers changes.
Discussion This article sketches a consumer-centric research approach to the question, “What makes Big Middle consumers buy?,” to complement dominant firm-centric approaches in retail studies. For consumers, I suggest that the Big Middle, as well as other retailers, represents a field in which operant resources (e.g., economic, ludic, utopian, temporal) interact. In these marketspaces, firms and consumers exert a mutual gravitational pull. Firms compete for a role in the culturally constituted projects that consumers pursue by offering certain resource combinations. Consumers realize the potential value represented by these firm-produced resources and therefore exert their own resources in various performative and narrative activities. I propose this sketch in a speculative mode and end every section with specific hypotheses or suggestions to guide further retail research about both parties in the retail relationship. Of particular interest to Big Middle retailers will be determining which operant cultural resources are most effective to offer and how.
Acknowledgements The author thanks Dhruv Grewal and Michael Levy for inviting this editorial; Risto Moisio, doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska, for developing the focus on four cultural resources, generating ideas about performance and keying, and providing invaluable bibliographic and editorial assistance; Robert Kozinets for his insight; and Michael Levy and Larry Compeau for friendly, constructive reviews.
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