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Genre crash: The case of online shopping
Accepted Manuscript Genre crash: The case of online shopping Thomas Hestbæk Andersen, Theo Jacob van Leeuwen PII: DOI: Reference:
S2211-6958(16)30193-3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.007 DCM 178
To appear in:
Discourse, Context & Media
Received Date: Revised Date: Accepted Date:
23 November 2016 19 June 2017 21 June 2017
Please cite this article as: T.H. Andersen, T.J.v. Leeuwen, Genre crash: The case of online shopping, Discourse, Context & Media (2017), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.007
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Title: Genre crash: The case of online shopping
Authors: Thomas Hestbæk Andersen Department for Language and Communication University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK – 5230 Odense M [email protected] Theo Jacob van Leeuwen Department for Language and Communication University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK – 5230 Odense M [email protected]
Theo van Leeuwen is corresponding author.
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Genre crash: The case of online shopping Thomas Hestbæk Andersen and Theo van Leeuwen
Introduction In this article we seek to make a contribution to the theory of genre by investigating what happens when genres of everyday face to face interaction move online. We will focus on online shopping, a rapidly growing phenomenon which is not only transforming the high streets of our villages and towns, but also the way buyers and sellers interact, the way sellers present goods and services to buyers, and the way buyers can examine goods. As it happens, shopping has long played an important role in the development of systemic-functional genre theory (Mitchell, 1975[1957]; Hasan, 1979; Halliday and Hasan, 1985; Ventola, 1987), the approach in which much of our work is situated. Hasan’s work has been of particular significance here. Although a great deal of systemic-functional work on genre has focused on writing, Hasan stressed the importance of studying everyday interactions such as shopping, as they most clearly articulate the relation between text and context, and reveal “the very close partnership between language and the living of life” (Halliday and Hasan, 1985: 54). Her key concept was the idea of a ‘generic structure potential’ that would be able to specify the functional elements of shopping episodes and stipulate which of these are obligatory, necessary for a complete and successful act of shopping to occur, and which optional, as well as indicate the order in which these elements must occur. The elements themselves (most of them conversational dyads) were defined in functional-semantic terms and given functional labels such as ‘sale request’ or ‘sale enquiry’. A sale request, for instance, was defined as (a) a demand, which (b) refers to goods, and (c) specifies a quantity of these goods (e.g. “Can I have a dozen Granny Smiths?”). The analysis of a given instance of shopping would then take the form of a linear sequence of functional elements, for instance (Halliday and Hasan, 1985: 61) Who’s next? I think I am
Sale initiation (SI)
I’ll have ten oranges and a kilo of bananas please
Sale request (SR)
Yes, anything else? Yes
Sale compliance (SC)
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I wanted some strawberries but these don’t look very ripe. They’re ripe alright, they’re just that colour, a greeny pink. Mm, I see
Sale enquiry (SE)
Will they be OK for this evening? Sale enquiry (SE) Yes, they’ll be fine. I had some yesterday and they’re good, very sweet and fresh Oh alright then, I take two. You’ll like them cos they’re good
Sale request (SR)
Will that be all? Yes
Sale compliance (SC)
That’ll be two dollars sixty-nine please
Sale (S)
I can give you nine cents
Purchase (P)
Yeah, OK thanks, eighty, a hundred, three dollars
Purchase closure (PC)
Come again See ya
Finish (F)
An episode such as the one above can be represented as the following formula: SI^SR1^SC1^SE1^SE2^SE3^SC2^S^P^PC^F SI^SR1^SC1^SE1^SE2^SR2^SC2^S^P^PC^F Underlying such actual instances of shopping, there is a generic structure potential which formulates the necessary conditions for recognizing specific episodes as instances of the genre of shopping. In the above instance, these conditions are given by the following sequence of obligatory elements: SR^SC^S^P^PC. Hasan’s account was strongly inspired by T.F. Mitchell, who, 30 years earlier, had conducted an ethnographic study of shops and markets in the eastern coastal region of Libya, and analyzed shopping in terms of five stages – ‘salutation’, ‘enquiry as to the object of sale’, ‘investigation of the object of sale’, ‘bargaining’ and ‘conclusion’. He had also recognized the possibility of optional stages, noting, for instance, that enquiries do not always happen as customers sometimes identify the product they are interested in while waiting for their turn, and then, when their turn comes, point at it, or touch it, while saying ‘How much is this?”, skipping straight to the ‘bargaining’ stage. Here is one of his examples (we have omitted the middle section as the transcript of the investigation takes up several pages): Good morning Good morning
Salutation
Whose is this roan? Mine
Enquiry
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What has been offered? Nothing as yet
Bargaining
How old is he? Four
Investigation
Who is his sire? It’s a horse from the Khalifa section
Investigation
[…] What do you want for him? Well now, I don’t want to overcharge you. Take him for what I sold his brother at last year
Bargaining
How much was that? Forty pounds, in this very market.
Bargaining
Make me a reduction No, the price is a fair one
Bargaining
All right my friend, lead him over to the office so we can fill in the form
Conclusion
But there are also differences between Mitchell’s and Hasan’s account. Mitchell recognized, for instance, that not every element in actual shopping episodes is functional with respect to the sale, and that some have to do with the personalities of the buyers and sellers and with the relations between them (Mitchell, 1975 [1957]: 169): In highly ritualized activities such as buying a train ticket in England we all behave in many respects similarly from a linguistic point of view, but even if here the differences are less marked than, say, in the case of men’s boasting and cursing, nevertheless differences there are and in order to account for them the category of personality is often usefully employed. He also recognized that stages could, in whole or in part, be non-verbally realized: “Researchers all too often find native participants either silent in the performance of their tasks or talkative mainly on topics without any apparent connection with the job they are doing” (ibid: 169). And he realized that even the sale itself is, in the end, not necessarily obligatory (“the buyer, refusing to bargain further [can] turn his back and move off”, ibid: 184) and that the shape of shopping episodes also depends on other factors for instance, in the bargaining stage, whether or not other offers have been made or who takes the initiative about the price.
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More recently Ventola (1987) analyzed a large corpus of service encounters in post offices, small shops and travel agents and questioned Hasan’s perhaps too idealized version of shopping on a number of counts: 1. Hasan’s generic structure potentials, despite allowing for recursivity, are too linear. Buyers sometimes make a purchase or a booking and then remember something they had forgotten and start all over. 2. Not all Hasan’s obligatory elements need occur. A sale may never be made. People may enter a shop just to inspect the goods, perhaps returning later, perhaps not. Itineraries may be discussed with travel agents without a booking being made. In short, buyers may opt out at any stage, yet the encounter will still be an acceptable and recognizable genre of social (inter)action. 3. The way in which especially the early stages of shopping episodes unfold may depend on the relation between the buyer and the seller, for instance on whether the buyer is a regular or a new customer. 4. Other genres may be embedded in the service encounter, for instance brief discussions about the weather, or complaints about how busy life has been lately. Ventola therefore replaced Hasan’s ‘generic structure potential’ formula with a flowchart that would allow the representation of “the various ways in which interactants continuously have to make decisions about the development of the process” and show how “each participant’s decision is dependent on the other participant’s previous decision” (ibid: 67). Van Leeuwen (2005a, 2005b) foregrounded multimodality, showing that generic stages can be realized by different semiotic modes and combinations of semiotic modes. In the following example, an excerpt from a play script by Paddy Chayevsky (1953), several of the boy’s responses are silent actions, and in performing actions such as summoning the boy, pointing to the typeface, reacting to the instruction phase, and so on, actors would, in an actual performance, include gestures and facial expressions (Van Leeuwen, 2005a: 130): Mr Healy:
Hey! Come here!
Call to attention
The boy looks up and comes scurrying down the shop, dodging the poking arm of the Kluege press and comes to Mr Healy. Mr Healy:
What kind of type is that?
Boy:
Twelve point Clearface
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Quizzing
Mr Healy:
How do you know?
Boy:
It’s lighter than Goudy and the lower case ‘e’ goes up
Mr Healy:
Clearface is a delicate type. It’s clean. It’s clear. It’s got line and
Probing
Instruction
Remember that. Now beat it!
Dismissal
The boy hurries back to the front of the shop to finish his cleaning. Van Leeuwen also followed Mitchell in including ‘personality’ and the relation between the participants. In the example above, Mr Healy is an old-fashioned craftsman, opposed to the new offset technology that is about to change his trade, and the boy is eager to learn, but will eventually disappoint Mr Healy in adopting the new technology. The two elements, functional structure and ‘personality’ (today we say ‘identity’ - and this includes corporate identity) not only characterize literature and drama, but also many other forms of communication. Everywhere functional structures become increasingly homogenized and identities (‘branding’) increasingly diversified (Van Leeuwen et al, in press). In this paper, however, we will focus primarily on functional structures. Finally, Van Leeuwen discussed what happens when genres move online. A Sony website, for instance, opened with a ‘greeting’ – a glamorous blond model smiling at the viewer - and the words ‘Welcome to the world of Sony’. But in the lower half of the same page, users had to choose between 24 buttons, leading to information about 24 different product categories (Van Leeuwen, 2005b). In other words, the site had a specific beginning, but no specific end. As Van Leeuwen said (ibid: 84): What readers actually do when they read (use) such texts will still follow a single, linear reading path that could be experimentally studied and that forms a single, staged goal-oriented process. The difference is that we now study, not the structuring of the text, but the structuring of the reading (using) process. Nevertheless, to make such structured and purposeful reading processes possible, the elements of the text that the reader selects as the specific stages of his or her reading path must still have semiotic characteristics that allow them to function as these stages. An analysis of a site as a resource for creating such paths must precede a study of what people actually do in using it. Such an analysis is therefore essentially a cartography – a mapping of the entire landscape, of which ordinary users normally only know the paths they habitually traverse. Such maps 7
resemble the designs web designers and others may make prior to designing a site, but there is a difference between ‘pre-production’ and ‘post-production’ maps, as sites such as shopping sites are under constant revision and updating. The method has earlier been used in mapping games and image banks (Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2007) In this chapter we will investigate the UK version of the fashion shopping site Zalando (http://www.zalando.co.uk). This site does what sellers have always done: welcome the customer, provide information about products and extol their qualities, entice customers with bargains and try to make them buy more than they might have intended. The buyers, too, do what buyers have always done: select products, inspect them, try to find information and make purchases. But all these actions are now entextualized, mediated through words and images and other visual means such as layout, colour and graphic form, and this in ways that are necessarily predetermined and not open to negotiation in the way they are in face to face encounters. We will show that, in the case of Zalando, the functional elements are themselves ‘micro genres’. It should be noted that some of these micro genres change from week to week. Our analysis is therefore a snapshot and represents the site as it was in the week of June 6th, 2016. We then show how the site allows users to create a range of macro genres which combine these elements in different ways, yet also tries to influence users by following them wherever they go with new versions of tried and proven sales tactics such as praising the product, offering bargains, and so on. The analysis of these macro genres is based on an analysis of all the ways in which micro genres are connected, all the ways in which users can move between them. To have some data on how users actually do move between the micro genres, we conducted an eyetracking experiment in which we asked 6 students to buy two items on Zalando, (i) “Something you decide beforehand to buy for yourself but which you have not bought it online before” and (ii) “a present for someone you know”; the students performed one purchase at the time, so the experiments gave us 12 instances of online shopping and in total more than 3 hours of eye-tracking recordings. We also interviewed the subjects about their experience. The experiment provided rich data, but also showed that we had made two false assumptions. Several of the subjects noted that they would not normally look only at one site, but ‘shop around’, just as they would on high streets or in shopping malls with many smaller fashion shops. Evidently we had biased our experiment (1) by assuming that visiting a fashion site would always lead to one or more purchases, when a site may in fact also be visited for
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other purposes, and (2) by not taking into account that shopping sites are connected to a range of other sites. This will have to be rectified in the follow up studies we are currently designing. The micro genres These are the micro genres we found in the Zalando site: (1) Orientation (2) Catalogue (3) Product Information (4) Purchase (5) Fashion Magazine (6) Lifestyle Magazine (7) Street Style In addition there are three ‘pop ups’ that are linked to several of these genres. Below we will describe each of these genres. Orientation This genre consists of three elements: Global Orientation, Orientation, and Orientation Catalogue. The Global Orientation greets customers with a headline that addresses them directly with the 2nd person pronoun ‘you’ (“Who are you shopping for today?”) and, just below that headline, a triptych of three photos, a female model on the left, in medium shot, and smiling at the viewer, a male model in the centre, looking down, and two children, in a slightly wider shot, smiling at the viewer, and shown against a background of what appear to be sand dunes. Clicking these photos leads, respectively, to the women’s, men’s and kids’ ‘departments’, each of which starts with an Orientation. But is also possible to use the menus (to be described in more detail in the next section) to move directly to a particular kind of product (‘clothing’, ‘shoes’, ‘accessories’ etc), or to fashion information (‘style notes’). The Global Orientation is therefore the only obligatory stage in this micro genre – and also, with the exception of the Purchase stage, in the macro genres users create as they navigate the site. Orientations are collages of three boxes (see figure 1) that draw attention to the highlights of the week, for instance a special feature on sports clothes, a ‘special offer’ in the form of a box showing a picture of 9
hand bags against a rich red background and, superimposed on the picture, the words “Up to 50 % off bags and hand bags”, and a ‘street style’ photo that will lead to the Street Style genre. All of these can be clicked on, and two of them lead the customer to information about the latest street fashions and healthy lifestyle activities rather than to products for sale. INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE Figure 1
Orientation collage
Scrolling down then leads to the Orientation Catalogue. This catalogue is similar in appearance to the Catalogue genre we will describe below, but also differs from it in that each of the displayed items can lead to ‘trending pages’, in other words to information that does not lead directly to the purchase of specific products. Catalogue The primary function of Catalogues is to present the customer with an overview of the products available in specific categories, and also of course to stress the abundance of products on offer. Each catalogue contains hundreds of pictures, displayed in identical fashion, and arranged in tight symmetrical rows of three or four photos with similar captions, viz. there is no apparent foregrounding of one product over the other (see figure 2)
INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE Figure 2
Catalogue
Catalogue photos either show only the product, in Full Shot, and frontally photographed against a blank background, or a model wearing the product, framed in such a way that the entire item of clothing (but only that item) is displayed, this in contrast to fashion photos, which show models in Medium Long Shot and ‘on location’, as will be discussed below. These images are therefore ‘analytical’ images (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 87ff) intended to depict specific items of clothing clearly and in as much detail as possible. The analytical function of the images is enhanced by moving the mouse over them, which produces further images, showing, for instance, the back of the product, or a detail. The function of these pictures is therefore primarily representational, but when the faces of the models are included, an ‘interactive’ element (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 117) may intrude, as the model may smile at the
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viewer, or, if not looking at them, entice them (in the women’s section) with a slight pout or a half open mouth and a wistful stare. The captions, finally, simply list the brand, the name of the garment, the type of garment (e.g. blouse), its colour, and its price. Most Catalogues contain one further functional element, the Product Orientation. This element is usually entirely verbal. It is displayed in the left column, alongside the catalogue, and mixes informational and advertising language, and adds a splash of the language of fashion magazines (see below).
Informational language is characterized by indirect address, i.e. statements (realized by
indicative clauses), a non-dialogic style (3rd person pronouns), relational processes (usually with ‘be’ or ‘have’ as the main verbs) and generic reference (e,g, ‘women’s blouses’, ‘triangle bras’): Women’s blouses and tunics are useful for all sorts of occasions from heading to the office or relaxing on the weekend. The handbag is an item of iconic status and a weakness for many a woman, but one of the most functional items we will ever buy. Triangle bras do not usually have an underwire and are typically suitable for smaller sizes. Advertising language (cf Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2007, Andersen, 2007) is characterized by direct address, i.e. reader-involving speech functions, especially command (realized by imperative clauses), dialogic style (1st and 2nd person), reference to specific brands and/or store retailers; appraisal of the product or the (positive) values associated with it (typically realized by adjectives); and poetic stylistic devices such as alliteration and rhyme (e.g. ‘fun and funky style’, ‘fashion fix’ and ‘fix – tunics’ in the examples below): Whether you prefer plain, muted colours such as navy or white, or are looking for a more fun and funky style, tunics and blouses can be found to suit every style Get your fashion fix with women's blouses and tunics from Zalando.co.uk! This catalogue genre is therefore a hybrid genre, combining several communicative functions: providing information, advertising, defining clothes as fashion and selecting products. Finally, although the Product Orientation is placed to the left of the Product Catalogue, there is no guarantee that it will be read first, or, indeed, that it is read at all, or that the Catalogue is systematically
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scanned from top left to right bottom. It provides an informational landscape which users can traverse in any way they choose. Product information The Product Information genre serves to present further information about products users have selected from Catalogues (see figure 3). INSERT FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE Figure 3: Product information It has the following elements: Product, Definition cluster, Product Details, Further Recommendations and Selection. Several of these elements can be divided into further elements, for instance the Definition Cluster contains the brand, the name of the product, the type of product and the colour, and the Product Details element includes ‘length’, ‘fit’, ‘ fabric’ and much more. The Product itself is placed in the centre, and is the most salient of all the elements. The other elements are arranged around it, in what Kress and Van Leeuwen call a Centre-Margin structure, in which, they say, “the centre presents the nucleus of the information to which all the other elements are in some sense subservient” (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 196). It should be noted that the banners and menus that surround these elements will be discussed in the section on macro genres below. Much of the product information is verbal and requires a knowledge of fashion vocabularies, for instance of the names of different fabrics or types of collar on shirts (to give an example, there are no less than 13 collar types for men’s shirts, ranging from ‘button down’ over e.g. ‘Peter Pan collar’ to ‘wing collar’). The information also concerns sizing, and this requires rather precise knowledge of one’s measurements (e.g. the measurement of one’s bust or waist or arm length). This is not required in face to face shopping, where clothes can be visually and haptically inspected, and shows that, visual though it may be, online shopping relies more on language than face to face shopping. The Selection element contains an ADD TO BAG button in bright orange, the Zalando colour which, throughout the site, makes purchase-related options extra salient. It also contains some small pictures, showing the product from different angles and highlighting some of the details. The Further Recommendations element has a link to the ‘Shop the Look’ pop up, and also displays some ‘similar items’, no doubt to persuade customers to consider further purchases.
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This genre is therefore also hybrid genre, mixing information, persuasion and selection. And although the elements are arranged anti-clockwise around the Product, in the order in which we have discussed them, this need not be how they are actually read. Purchase The elements of the Purchase genre, on the other hand, are all obligatory, and have the obligatory order familiar to anyone who has ever made an online purchase: My Bag, followed by Shipping Information, followed by Address Information, followed by Delivery Information, followed by Order Summary, followed by Payment, followed by Order Confirmation. Many of these elements ask customers, in polite language, to provide information, with plenty of ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ as can be seen in figure 4. Providing this information is nevertheless obligatory for the purchase to proceed. INSERT FIGURE 4 ABOUT HERE Figure 4:
Order Confirmation
But figure 4 also shows that even the purchase genre is, to a small degree, a hybrid genre: the sequence of transactions is followed by another, very salient advertisement, in which Zalando solicits further engagement from its customers. Fashion magazines Fashion magazines, reachable via menu items such as ‘style notes’ and ‘trending’, have the following structure : {Stylist Recommendation + [Fashion statement + Fashion picture + Mini Catalogue]n}n The raised ‘n’ indicates recursivity - items enclosed in brackets can be repeated an unspecified number of times. But by representing the genre in this way we do not suggest that the elements are in fact read in anti-clockwise order. The Stylist Recommendation has, top right, a picture of the stylist, in Close Shot, and looking at the viewer, together with the authoritative announcement of a new trend, e.g. “This is a look that is 100% feminine – lots of loose and flowing material”. The Fashion Statement is then a headline which summarizes this fashion pronouncement, e.g. ‘SOFT SKILLS – Loose and flowing”. Fashion Pictures differ from Catalogue pictures in two ways – the model is shown in Medium Long Shot, hence displaying a whole outfit rather than a single product, and in a location that attributes fashion 13
meaning to this outfit, for instance the canopied entrance to an expensive hotel, or a tennis court. Fashion Pictures may also show only a product or range of products, without a model. These will be carefully arranged, often together with additional elements, for instance flowers to signify the fashion season. The difference between Catalogue and Fashion Pictures is illustrated in figure 5. INSERT FIGURE 5 ABOUT HERE Figure 5
Catalogue pictures and Fashion pictures
The Mini Catalogue is a symmetrical arrangement of the items of clothing worn by the model in the Fashion Picture, this time against a blank background and without a model. From here the customer can go directly to the relevant Product Information, and from there to ADD TO BAG or PROCEED TO CHECKOUT. The four basic Fashion Magazine elements are arranged in a kind of quadrant – the Fashion Statement top left, with the Fashion Picture below it; the Stylist Recommendation top right, with the Mini Catalogue below it. In terms of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s account of ‘information value’ (2006: 179ff), the Fashion Statement and the Fashion Picture are Given, representing what you can expect in a fashion magazine, while the recommendation by the Zalando stylist and the Mini Catalogue are New, representing what Zalando would like you to pay special attention to, and to act on. Scrolling down reveals further Fashion Statements, Fashion Pictures and Mini Catalogues, either recommended by the same stylist, for instance ‘The Footwear Trend’ (“We are loving strappy flats this summer – pair with some mom jeans and an off-the-shoulder top”) or by one or more other Zalando stylists, (e.g. “Contemporary Boho”, “Urban Safari” and “Tennis Mania”). Language plays an important role in the Fashion Magazine genre, as brilliantly explored in Barthes’ The Fashion System (1983), and, more recently, in Moeran’s anthropological study of fashion ‘glossies’ (Moeran, 2013). Both insist on the normative role of language in fashion magazines: “It is language that defines what fashion is, or is not”. Moeran (ibid: 132) then further characterizes fashion language as follows: Written clothing consists of two inter-related classes of utterance. One includes all the vestimentary features (forms, fabrics, colours, and so on) that signify different kinds of clothes; the other all evaluative (‘discreet’, ‘amusing’ and so on) and circumstantial (‘evening’,
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‘weekend’. shopping’, ‘party’ and so forth) features that signify the kinds of lives we lead in the world.” Moeran’s evaluative category should, we believe, be further divided into aesthetic evaluation (e.g. ‘amusing’) and functional evaluation (e.g. ‘summer skirt’). This would yield three discursive elements (all the examples are from the Zalando site):
Description of vestimentary features (material/fabrics, shape, colour), typically by a noun or an adjective functioning as head or premodifier in a noun phrase, e.g.: Team these string women’s heels with a sharp pencil skirt or tapered trousers, completing the look with an on-trend pussy bow blouse.
Evaluation of the clothes through positive appraisal, typically realized by adjectives used as premodifiers in noun phrases, e.g. Slip on a stunning pair of stiletto high heels in a sumptuous hue.
Pointing out the purpose of the item (or some feature of it) either by grounding it circumstantially in a situation, e.g. With court shoes and Mary Janes, perfect for the office or a dinner date. or by indicating the item’s ability to shape some part of the body, e.g. The right heels can elongate your leg and create an instant slimming effect.
Another characteristic of fashion language is its authoritative, normative stance, “the authoritative wording of someone who knows everything that is behind the confused or incomplete appearance of the visible forms” (Barthes, 2013: 108-9), e.g.: Black lace-up or tan block heels are perfect for making a fashion statement in the office. Finally, the fashion magazine genre is characterized by lexical items referring (i) to the fundamentally visual nature of fashion, e.g. “the look”, “the style”, and (ii) to the temporal nature of some trends, e.g. “this season’s must have”. These linguistic features of fashion magazines are also evident on Zalando’s website. This kind of fashion language is found, not only in the Fashion Magazine genre, but also in the Product Orientations where it mixes with the kind of informational language we described above. Lifestyle magazines
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Lifestyle magazines can be reached via menu items such as ‘Style notes’ and ‘Trending’. They have the following structure: Intro + Lifestyle Picture + [Life style picture + Lifestyle information + (Mini) Catalogue]n + (Video) + (InstaFeed) + (Feedback). The Intro introduces a lifestyle role model and/or lifestyle activity, using the kind of normative language we have described above. Lifestyles (Chaney, 1996) are characterized by shared attitudes and values, shared leisure time activities, and shared patterns of consumer behaviour (shared taste in dress, interior decoration and so on) and it is in these Lifestyle Magazines that Zalando links the products they sell to a range of trendy lifestyles. Here are two Intros, one from a feature about a personal trainer and lifestyle blogger called Carly Rowena, the other from a feature about sport titled #MYMATCH: Summer is finally here and this season an active lifestyle is an absolute must. We invited effervescent personal trainer and lifestyle blogger Carly Rowena to Berlin for an active break. She shared her tips and an epic playlist – to help you stay happy healthy and on top of your game. Sport is here to stay. No matter what kind of sport you’re into, it’s all about having the right gear to reach your goals. Get inspired, get going – with #MYMATCH Lifestyle Pictures depict these role models and lifestyles. They differ from Catalogue and Fashion Pictures because they show the role models engaged in lifestyle activities, although they may mix this with the poses characteristic of Fashion Pictures, as in the second of the two examples in figure 6. In such a case they can still be distinguished from Fashion Pictures on contextual grounds, because of the different micro genre in which they occur. INSERT FIGURE 6 ABOUT HERE Figure 6:
Lifestyle pictures
Scrolling down then reveals further Lifestyle Pictures, accompanied by texts which will, again, mix informational language with the language of advertising and the language of fashion, and which will always be accompanied by Mini Catalogues that link the clothes the role models are wearing to Product Information pages, or even to specific Catalogues - information about Carly Rowena’s ‘workout style’, for instance, leads to a page with a photo of Carly in the banner and a headline “Carly’s workout picks 290 products”.
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The #MYMATCH feature contains three further elements. The first is a video (“Anne Ewers hits the court of #MYMATCH – the second part of our Spring/Summer campaign) in which models move, jump, and dance to energetic music after which a female voice over concludes: “Choose from 101 top brands for your match, on Zalando”. The second is a social media inspired element, INSTAFEED, headlined “Need inspiration: Found your match and want to share with #MYMATCH?” with a blue button for uploading photos. These photos are displayed in symmetrically arranged rows of two and closely follow the style of professionally produced Fashion Pictures, showing girls posing in sports clothes, against the background of tennis courts and other sports locations. A final element solicits feedback. Because they unfold by scrolling down, Lifestyle Magazines are relatively linear and their elements cannot be accessed separately. But that does not mean that they need to be read from beginning to end. Even within micro genres of this kind, different users can realize different communicative goals and combinations of communicative goals - updates on broad lifestyle categories, more detailed information about trends, buying clothes, and so on.
Street style The Street Style genre is very similar to the Catalogue genre, but it uses Fashion Pictures rather than Catalogue Pictures and is viewed by clicking from page to page, rather than by scrolling down. Again, the meaning of a picture (for instance a ‘fashion picture’) derives both from its content and composition and from the context in which it is placed, for instance a ‘lifestyle magazine’ or a ‘street style display’. Street style displays contain five pages in total, each with two elements, and each leading to a Street Style Product Page, as follows: [Headline + Street Style Display+ Street Style Product Page]5. Each Display contains six framed Fashion Pictures arranged symmetrically below Headlines such as “STREET STYLE: DUNGAREES”, “STREET STYLE: DARE TO BARE”, “STREET STYLE: LATIN FEVER”, etc. (see figure 7). INSERT FIGURE 7 ABOUT HERE Figure 7
Street Style page
The pictures in Street Style Displays have, top right, a small transparent overlay with a plus sign. Clicking on these links users to a Street Style Product Page which has the Street Style picture on the left, a single item from the model’s outfit on the right and the other items from the outfit beneath it (these can be clicked to lead to other pages). The Street Style genre is therefore again a hybrid genre, which can be 17
read in different ways and for different reasons – to gain information about the latest trends, or to purchase trendy items, for instance. Pop ups Finally there are three pop ups. These lack the menus and the ‘Zalando information’ we will discuss below. The first two, Shop the Look and Product Display, take the form of a white page in ‘landscape’ format, surrounded by a heavy black frame. Like micro genres they consist of several elements, but they do not involve scrolling or clicking from page to page. The Shop the Look pop up can be accessed by clicking on a particular item of clothing in a Catalogue. It features the selected item in the centre, flanked, on each side, by four smaller pictures of items that could go with it to make a complete outfit (‘Wear it With’). At bottom there are small framed pictures of models with other similar products from the same brands, which, if clicked on, lead to other ‘Shop the Look’ pages. Customers are therefore constantly urged to buy more than they might have intended, a sales strategy which is of course also used by shop assistants in face to face fashion shopping interactions. Product Display pop ups are also selected by clicking on Catalogue items. A picture of the selected item is shown on the left. Moving the mouse over it reveals further pictures, for instance, for a pair of trousers, pictures showing the trousers from different angles, and details such as the back (how does it fit on the bottom), the front with hands in pockets, etc. On the right is the brand name and logo, the price, a link to the Product Information page, and, in highly salient Zalando orange, ADD TO BAG. Product Display pop ups therefore isolate a selected item from the abundance of other, similar items, picking it up from the rack for closer inspection, as it were. Yet below, on the black frame, a series of small pictures of similar products is also included, all clickable. The Size Guide can be reached from the Product Information page as well as from the Product Display page. It contains, on top, instructions on how to take your measurements, with pictures as well as step by step instructions. Scrolling down reveals a table comparing different measurement systems, and, below that, a list of products, for each of which a separate Size Guide can be selected. Using these Size Guides requires linguistic and practical skills: the helpful shop assistant with his tape measure no longer exists. A few further observations can be made to conclude this section:
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Overall, micro genres have a spatial rather than a linear structure. Although some elements may be more salient than others, for example the selected item of clothing in the Product Information genre, or the bright ADD TO BAG option in various other genres, essentially there is no pre-designed step by step process leading to a final stage that realizes the communicative goal of the genre as a whole. The genres are flexible, allowing different reading paths to realize different communicative goals. The only exception is the Purchase genre, which imposes a strict, non-negotiable sequence that includes the obligatory disclosure of personal data, something which in traditional shops was not required, and which puts the relation between buyers and sellers on a more durable basis, albeit under duress.
Like other online shops, the Zalando site mixes shopping with genres which formerly were (and to some degree still are) found in separate media such as fashion magazines, lifestyle magazines and lifestyle newspaper supplements. In doing so, genres such as the ‘advertorial’, the ‘friendvertorial’, the sponsored social media conversation, etc, are taken a step further – all fashion advertising and all fashion information now leads directly to the Checkout.
Although they are essentially visual structures, language plays a very significant role on the Zalando site, first of all because it must express what, in face to face shopping episodes, would have been apprehended by touch – by feeling the fabric and fitting the clothes, for instance. The Zalando site thus requires a command of relatively specialist vocabularies that not even all native speakers may have, as well as precise knowledge about one’s own measurements. Apparently (Dusto, 2012) many customers order the same item in different sizes, rather than struggling with the size guides, and then return those that do not fit, something which of course comes at a cost for the company. Secondly, as we have seen, language plays a fundamental and authoritative role in defining what fashion is and what specific fashions mean.
Most of the micro genres are hybrid genres, allowing different reading paths that realize different communicative and pragmatic aims for the users. But the site has its own aims and some of these permeate the site as a whole: the language of advertising and the language of fashion are everywhere, intruding into everything users do, urging them at every point to buy, and to buy more, even when, perhaps, they might want to be left alone, surveying the merchandise at their own pace.
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One other element is found in many different places – the call for feedback. It appears at the bottom of Product Information pages, at the bottom of the Lifestyle Magazine, and, again, at the bottom of the Order Confirmation, as if, in the absence of the natural mutuality of the face to face encounter, the seller is perenially anxious and uncertain as to whether the customer is happy. Here is an example, bottom left on a Product Information page: I love the bag, Quick Delivery. I will definitely shop in Zalando again. Below that, we then read: Four customers found this review helpful. And to the right of that: Did you find this review helpful? YES/NO Macro genres The principal menu is found on the top of all pages except the pop ups and allows all micro genres to be reached at any time and from any point. It consists of three bands: The topmost band is slightly more salient than the others, both because of its position and because it uses white caps on a black background. The menu items are promotional (e.g. DESIGNER PIECES FOR SWEET PRICES – VISIT THE PREMIUM SALE) and vary from time to time. The middle menu leads to the ‘women’s, ‘men’s’ and ‘kids’ departments, and to ‘log in’, ‘wish list’ and ‘my bag’. The third band leads to the product categories - clothing, shoes, accessories, etc. (and from there to sub-categories such as, in the case of ‘women’: ‘dresses’, ‘tops & T-Shirts’, ‘Long Sleeve Tops’ and so on) but also to specific brands, and to micro genres such as Fashion Magazines and Lifestyle magazines which are not directly related to the selection and purchase of products, using menu labels such as ‘Inspiration’ and ‘New’. There is thus, from the start, and at any point, a choice between the dual, but interlinked purposes of the site – keeping up to date with the latest fashions and picking up ideas for the expression of lifestyle values on the one hand, and purchasing items of clothing on the other. These menus not only ensure that all micro-genres and all products can be reached at any time, and from any point (the ‘Search Zalando’ box in the third menu, further facilitates that), but also allow users to start their journey with different goals in mind – a search for products, a search for bargains, a search for trend information, and so on – even if, as we have seen, Zalando does what it can to ensure that all
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roads eventually lead to the checkout. Further menus may then appear in the left column of Catalogues, following, and sometimes instead of, Product Information, and under various headings, such as ‘your weekly update’: ‘new’, ‘editor’s picks’, ‘seasonal must-haves’, ‘daily fashion updates’, ‘looks of the week’ (with subsections such as ‘casual’, ‘business’, ‘going out’, ‘trend’, ‘premium’, ‘we love’). At the bottom of each page (except, again, the pop ups), Zalando Information can be found: (1) a promotion for the Zalando newsletter with, on the right, an orange subscribe button (2) payment methods with logos of the credit card companies, (3) in small print, a list of ‘About Zalando’ options, such as ‘About Us’, ‘Press’, ‘Careers’, etc, and (4) again in small print, lists of ‘Our Top Brands’ and ’Our Top Categories’, with on the right a colourful picture of the Zalando Facebook page with an orange button leading to that page. Other means of navigation are distributed throughout the site, many of them foregrounded by Zalando and made particularly easy or attractive to click on. We have already seen how the Orientation links to a Lifestyle Magazine on sport, with subsections such as ‘Training’, ‘Yoga’ and ‘Running’, and how these magazines themselves also contain many clickable items linking information with purchases. The feature on personal trainer and lifestyle blogger Carly Rowena contains Mini Catalogues with the items Carly is wearing in the photographs that show her cooking, exercising and so on, and all of these lead directly to Product Information, and from there to MY BAG. The pictures of models actively working out or doing Yoga exercises in the #MYMATCH magazine can also be clicked to lead to Product Information. And the same applies to Street Style pictures, and to the Fashion Magazine where the advice of expert stylists and the alluring Fashion Picture are placed in close proximity to the ADD TO BAG button. Then there are the many ways in which single products are linked to whole outfits, whether in Shop the Look pop ups, in the Fashion Pictures found in Fashion Magazines, in the Street Style features, or in the social media element of #MYMATCH. Online shops increasingly try to make things easier for users by doing their work for them, for instance by choosing for them which dress to wear with which shoes, or which tie with which suit. Online groceries, similarly, offer a choice of menus for the whole week, and then select the ingredients for the chosen menu automatically, or even, next step, predict what customers will order on the basis of previous purchases, so customers will not even need to place an order. The map in figure 8 shows, in a slightly simplified way, the connectivity between the micro genres. Although there is only one entrance to the shop, from there on many different trajectories are possible,
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not all of them leading to the checkout. Of course, if a customer does buy something, there will be a number of obligatory elements – they will have to make at least one selection, they will have to inspect that selection, even if only cursorily, they will have to choose size and colour, confirm the order and pay, but a purchase does not necessarily need to be made. The user can also leaf through the fashion magazine, or walk into the shop to inspect what is on offer without buying anything – even though this will be noticed by Zalando and followed up with advertisements that will pop up on other sites frequented by the user, e.g. on newspaper websites, Facebook or YouTube. INSERT FIGURE 8 ABOUT HERE Figure 8
Map of the Zalando site
In short, the macro genre is constructed by the users, on the basis of their own plans and goals. But it is also closely watched by Zalando, which will follow users every step along the road, and even outside the shop. In the case of our eye-tracking experiments those plans and goals were chosen by us, with the result that all subjects took more or less the same path through the Zalando labyrinth, as shown in figure 9. Because we asked them to buy, they did not linger to read about Carly Rowena or Yoga outfits. Clearly only a more extensive user study, open to different hypothesized uses, can ultimately give an idea as to the range if possible aims and the degree to which they are used. INSERT FIGURE 9 ABOUT HERE Figure 9
Trajectory of 6 experimental subjects making Zalando purchasesConclusion
Our conclusion has to be brief, as this study is only a first exploration. But a few points can be made: In remediating shopping, Zalando entextualizes the practice of shopping, and embeds textual genres such as magazine articles in the practice of shopping. As a result, the functions of ‘exchange of information’ and ‘exchange of goods and services’ are no longer as distinct as they were (cf. Andersen 2017). Although an actual Zalando purchase still requires a number of obligatory stages (including the obligatory registration of consumer data), shopping is now achieved by navigating between and through a series of micro genres. Each micro genre is in itself a hybrid genre that can be used, in whole or in part, to realize different communicative and pragmatic purposes, and macro genres may also be informed by multiple purposes. Rather than seeing shopping as a single ‘generic structure potential’, we now need to consider the shop (the site) itself as a ‘multi-generic structure potential’. 22
Actual shopping episodes are designed by users and based on their plans and goals which may not include making purchases. Yet they are also constantly influenced by what the site makes easy or attractive to do, and in navigating through the site, users are constantly interrupted by Zalando addressing them with online versions of time-honoured sales techniques such as offering bargains, offering similar, but perhaps more expensive goods, and suggesting additional items, all these backed up by reference to attractive role models and fashion experts. Finally, our study of Zalando suggests that online shopping may rely more on language than face to face shopping, assuming linguistic skills and literacies not everyone may possess. Investigating the literacies needed for successful online shopping therefore needs to be high on the agenda of future work in this area. Clearly, along with the study of semiotic technologies such as Word and PowerPoint, and of social media such as Facebook and Instagram, the study of the digital remediation of social practices in fields such as education, the workplace, and everyday life should have high priority, as it significantly transforms these practices and the social relations that come with them. And as the practices themselves change, the models we use to study them, for instance our approaches to genre, will also have to change.
References Andersen, T.H. (2007) Sæt ord på! Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag Andersen, T. H. (2017): Interpersonal Meaning and the Clause. In T. Bartlett & G. O’Grady eds. Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Routledge, pp. 115-130 Barthes, R. (1983) The Fashion System. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press Barthes, R. (2013) The Language of Fashion. London and New York: Bloomsbury Chaney, D, (1996) Lifestyles. London: Routledge Chayevsky, P. (1994) The Collected Works of Paddy Chayevsky: The Television Plays. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books Dusto,
Amy
(2012):
https://www.internetretailer.com/2012/10/26/shoppers-solve-try-it-problem-
ordering-multiple-sizes, accessed 23 May 2017
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Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1985) Language, Context and Text: Aspects of language in a socialsemiotic perspective. Geelong, Vic: Deakin University Press Hasan, R, (1979) On the Notion of Text. In J.S. Petöfi, ed. Text vs sentence: basic questions of text linguistics. Vol II. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, pp. 369-390 Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading Images – The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge Machin, D. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2007) Global Media Discourse – A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge Mitchell, T.F. (1975[1957]) The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: a situational statement. In T.F. Mitchell Principles of Firthian Linguistics. London: Longman, pp. 167-200 Moeran, B. (2013) Proposing Fashion: The Discourse of Glossy Magazines. In Communicação e Sociedade. Vol. 21. Van Leeuwen, T. (2005a) Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge Van Leeuwen, T. (2005b) Multimodality, genre and design. In S. Norris and R. Jones, eds Discourse in Action – Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 73-94 Van Leeuwen, T, Bateson, D.J., Le Hunte, B., Barratt, A., Black, K.I., Kelly, M., Inoue, K., Rutherford, A.R., Stewart, M. and Richters, J. (in press) Contraceptive Advertising – A critical multimodal analysis. To appear in Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. Ventola, E. (1987) The Structure of Social Interaction – A Systemic Approach to the Semiotics of Service Encounters. London: Frances Pinter
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S2211-6958(16)30193-3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.007 DCM 178
To appear in:
Discourse, Context & Media
Received Date: Revised Date: Accepted Date:
23 November 2016 19 June 2017 21 June 2017
Please cite this article as: T.H. Andersen, T.J.v. Leeuwen, Genre crash: The case of online shopping, Discourse, Context & Media (2017), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.06.007
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Title: Genre crash: The case of online shopping
Authors: Thomas Hestbæk Andersen Department for Language and Communication University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK – 5230 Odense M [email protected] Theo Jacob van Leeuwen Department for Language and Communication University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55 DK – 5230 Odense M [email protected]
Theo van Leeuwen is corresponding author.
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Genre crash: The case of online shopping Thomas Hestbæk Andersen and Theo van Leeuwen
Introduction In this article we seek to make a contribution to the theory of genre by investigating what happens when genres of everyday face to face interaction move online. We will focus on online shopping, a rapidly growing phenomenon which is not only transforming the high streets of our villages and towns, but also the way buyers and sellers interact, the way sellers present goods and services to buyers, and the way buyers can examine goods. As it happens, shopping has long played an important role in the development of systemic-functional genre theory (Mitchell, 1975[1957]; Hasan, 1979; Halliday and Hasan, 1985; Ventola, 1987), the approach in which much of our work is situated. Hasan’s work has been of particular significance here. Although a great deal of systemic-functional work on genre has focused on writing, Hasan stressed the importance of studying everyday interactions such as shopping, as they most clearly articulate the relation between text and context, and reveal “the very close partnership between language and the living of life” (Halliday and Hasan, 1985: 54). Her key concept was the idea of a ‘generic structure potential’ that would be able to specify the functional elements of shopping episodes and stipulate which of these are obligatory, necessary for a complete and successful act of shopping to occur, and which optional, as well as indicate the order in which these elements must occur. The elements themselves (most of them conversational dyads) were defined in functional-semantic terms and given functional labels such as ‘sale request’ or ‘sale enquiry’. A sale request, for instance, was defined as (a) a demand, which (b) refers to goods, and (c) specifies a quantity of these goods (e.g. “Can I have a dozen Granny Smiths?”). The analysis of a given instance of shopping would then take the form of a linear sequence of functional elements, for instance (Halliday and Hasan, 1985: 61) Who’s next? I think I am
Sale initiation (SI)
I’ll have ten oranges and a kilo of bananas please
Sale request (SR)
Yes, anything else? Yes
Sale compliance (SC)
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I wanted some strawberries but these don’t look very ripe. They’re ripe alright, they’re just that colour, a greeny pink. Mm, I see
Sale enquiry (SE)
Will they be OK for this evening? Sale enquiry (SE) Yes, they’ll be fine. I had some yesterday and they’re good, very sweet and fresh Oh alright then, I take two. You’ll like them cos they’re good
Sale request (SR)
Will that be all? Yes
Sale compliance (SC)
That’ll be two dollars sixty-nine please
Sale (S)
I can give you nine cents
Purchase (P)
Yeah, OK thanks, eighty, a hundred, three dollars
Purchase closure (PC)
Come again See ya
Finish (F)
An episode such as the one above can be represented as the following formula: SI^SR1^SC1^SE1^SE2^SE3^SC2^S^P^PC^F SI^SR1^SC1^SE1^SE2^SR2^SC2^S^P^PC^F Underlying such actual instances of shopping, there is a generic structure potential which formulates the necessary conditions for recognizing specific episodes as instances of the genre of shopping. In the above instance, these conditions are given by the following sequence of obligatory elements: SR^SC^S^P^PC. Hasan’s account was strongly inspired by T.F. Mitchell, who, 30 years earlier, had conducted an ethnographic study of shops and markets in the eastern coastal region of Libya, and analyzed shopping in terms of five stages – ‘salutation’, ‘enquiry as to the object of sale’, ‘investigation of the object of sale’, ‘bargaining’ and ‘conclusion’. He had also recognized the possibility of optional stages, noting, for instance, that enquiries do not always happen as customers sometimes identify the product they are interested in while waiting for their turn, and then, when their turn comes, point at it, or touch it, while saying ‘How much is this?”, skipping straight to the ‘bargaining’ stage. Here is one of his examples (we have omitted the middle section as the transcript of the investigation takes up several pages): Good morning Good morning
Salutation
Whose is this roan? Mine
Enquiry
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What has been offered? Nothing as yet
Bargaining
How old is he? Four
Investigation
Who is his sire? It’s a horse from the Khalifa section
Investigation
[…] What do you want for him? Well now, I don’t want to overcharge you. Take him for what I sold his brother at last year
Bargaining
How much was that? Forty pounds, in this very market.
Bargaining
Make me a reduction No, the price is a fair one
Bargaining
All right my friend, lead him over to the office so we can fill in the form
Conclusion
But there are also differences between Mitchell’s and Hasan’s account. Mitchell recognized, for instance, that not every element in actual shopping episodes is functional with respect to the sale, and that some have to do with the personalities of the buyers and sellers and with the relations between them (Mitchell, 1975 [1957]: 169): In highly ritualized activities such as buying a train ticket in England we all behave in many respects similarly from a linguistic point of view, but even if here the differences are less marked than, say, in the case of men’s boasting and cursing, nevertheless differences there are and in order to account for them the category of personality is often usefully employed. He also recognized that stages could, in whole or in part, be non-verbally realized: “Researchers all too often find native participants either silent in the performance of their tasks or talkative mainly on topics without any apparent connection with the job they are doing” (ibid: 169). And he realized that even the sale itself is, in the end, not necessarily obligatory (“the buyer, refusing to bargain further [can] turn his back and move off”, ibid: 184) and that the shape of shopping episodes also depends on other factors for instance, in the bargaining stage, whether or not other offers have been made or who takes the initiative about the price.
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More recently Ventola (1987) analyzed a large corpus of service encounters in post offices, small shops and travel agents and questioned Hasan’s perhaps too idealized version of shopping on a number of counts: 1. Hasan’s generic structure potentials, despite allowing for recursivity, are too linear. Buyers sometimes make a purchase or a booking and then remember something they had forgotten and start all over. 2. Not all Hasan’s obligatory elements need occur. A sale may never be made. People may enter a shop just to inspect the goods, perhaps returning later, perhaps not. Itineraries may be discussed with travel agents without a booking being made. In short, buyers may opt out at any stage, yet the encounter will still be an acceptable and recognizable genre of social (inter)action. 3. The way in which especially the early stages of shopping episodes unfold may depend on the relation between the buyer and the seller, for instance on whether the buyer is a regular or a new customer. 4. Other genres may be embedded in the service encounter, for instance brief discussions about the weather, or complaints about how busy life has been lately. Ventola therefore replaced Hasan’s ‘generic structure potential’ formula with a flowchart that would allow the representation of “the various ways in which interactants continuously have to make decisions about the development of the process” and show how “each participant’s decision is dependent on the other participant’s previous decision” (ibid: 67). Van Leeuwen (2005a, 2005b) foregrounded multimodality, showing that generic stages can be realized by different semiotic modes and combinations of semiotic modes. In the following example, an excerpt from a play script by Paddy Chayevsky (1953), several of the boy’s responses are silent actions, and in performing actions such as summoning the boy, pointing to the typeface, reacting to the instruction phase, and so on, actors would, in an actual performance, include gestures and facial expressions (Van Leeuwen, 2005a: 130): Mr Healy:
Hey! Come here!
Call to attention
The boy looks up and comes scurrying down the shop, dodging the poking arm of the Kluege press and comes to Mr Healy. Mr Healy:
What kind of type is that?
Boy:
Twelve point Clearface
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Quizzing
Mr Healy:
How do you know?
Boy:
It’s lighter than Goudy and the lower case ‘e’ goes up
Mr Healy:
Clearface is a delicate type. It’s clean. It’s clear. It’s got line and
Probing
Instruction
Remember that. Now beat it!
Dismissal
The boy hurries back to the front of the shop to finish his cleaning. Van Leeuwen also followed Mitchell in including ‘personality’ and the relation between the participants. In the example above, Mr Healy is an old-fashioned craftsman, opposed to the new offset technology that is about to change his trade, and the boy is eager to learn, but will eventually disappoint Mr Healy in adopting the new technology. The two elements, functional structure and ‘personality’ (today we say ‘identity’ - and this includes corporate identity) not only characterize literature and drama, but also many other forms of communication. Everywhere functional structures become increasingly homogenized and identities (‘branding’) increasingly diversified (Van Leeuwen et al, in press). In this paper, however, we will focus primarily on functional structures. Finally, Van Leeuwen discussed what happens when genres move online. A Sony website, for instance, opened with a ‘greeting’ – a glamorous blond model smiling at the viewer - and the words ‘Welcome to the world of Sony’. But in the lower half of the same page, users had to choose between 24 buttons, leading to information about 24 different product categories (Van Leeuwen, 2005b). In other words, the site had a specific beginning, but no specific end. As Van Leeuwen said (ibid: 84): What readers actually do when they read (use) such texts will still follow a single, linear reading path that could be experimentally studied and that forms a single, staged goal-oriented process. The difference is that we now study, not the structuring of the text, but the structuring of the reading (using) process. Nevertheless, to make such structured and purposeful reading processes possible, the elements of the text that the reader selects as the specific stages of his or her reading path must still have semiotic characteristics that allow them to function as these stages. An analysis of a site as a resource for creating such paths must precede a study of what people actually do in using it. Such an analysis is therefore essentially a cartography – a mapping of the entire landscape, of which ordinary users normally only know the paths they habitually traverse. Such maps 7
resemble the designs web designers and others may make prior to designing a site, but there is a difference between ‘pre-production’ and ‘post-production’ maps, as sites such as shopping sites are under constant revision and updating. The method has earlier been used in mapping games and image banks (Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2007) In this chapter we will investigate the UK version of the fashion shopping site Zalando (http://www.zalando.co.uk). This site does what sellers have always done: welcome the customer, provide information about products and extol their qualities, entice customers with bargains and try to make them buy more than they might have intended. The buyers, too, do what buyers have always done: select products, inspect them, try to find information and make purchases. But all these actions are now entextualized, mediated through words and images and other visual means such as layout, colour and graphic form, and this in ways that are necessarily predetermined and not open to negotiation in the way they are in face to face encounters. We will show that, in the case of Zalando, the functional elements are themselves ‘micro genres’. It should be noted that some of these micro genres change from week to week. Our analysis is therefore a snapshot and represents the site as it was in the week of June 6th, 2016. We then show how the site allows users to create a range of macro genres which combine these elements in different ways, yet also tries to influence users by following them wherever they go with new versions of tried and proven sales tactics such as praising the product, offering bargains, and so on. The analysis of these macro genres is based on an analysis of all the ways in which micro genres are connected, all the ways in which users can move between them. To have some data on how users actually do move between the micro genres, we conducted an eyetracking experiment in which we asked 6 students to buy two items on Zalando, (i) “Something you decide beforehand to buy for yourself but which you have not bought it online before” and (ii) “a present for someone you know”; the students performed one purchase at the time, so the experiments gave us 12 instances of online shopping and in total more than 3 hours of eye-tracking recordings. We also interviewed the subjects about their experience. The experiment provided rich data, but also showed that we had made two false assumptions. Several of the subjects noted that they would not normally look only at one site, but ‘shop around’, just as they would on high streets or in shopping malls with many smaller fashion shops. Evidently we had biased our experiment (1) by assuming that visiting a fashion site would always lead to one or more purchases, when a site may in fact also be visited for
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other purposes, and (2) by not taking into account that shopping sites are connected to a range of other sites. This will have to be rectified in the follow up studies we are currently designing. The micro genres These are the micro genres we found in the Zalando site: (1) Orientation (2) Catalogue (3) Product Information (4) Purchase (5) Fashion Magazine (6) Lifestyle Magazine (7) Street Style In addition there are three ‘pop ups’ that are linked to several of these genres. Below we will describe each of these genres. Orientation This genre consists of three elements: Global Orientation, Orientation, and Orientation Catalogue. The Global Orientation greets customers with a headline that addresses them directly with the 2nd person pronoun ‘you’ (“Who are you shopping for today?”) and, just below that headline, a triptych of three photos, a female model on the left, in medium shot, and smiling at the viewer, a male model in the centre, looking down, and two children, in a slightly wider shot, smiling at the viewer, and shown against a background of what appear to be sand dunes. Clicking these photos leads, respectively, to the women’s, men’s and kids’ ‘departments’, each of which starts with an Orientation. But is also possible to use the menus (to be described in more detail in the next section) to move directly to a particular kind of product (‘clothing’, ‘shoes’, ‘accessories’ etc), or to fashion information (‘style notes’). The Global Orientation is therefore the only obligatory stage in this micro genre – and also, with the exception of the Purchase stage, in the macro genres users create as they navigate the site. Orientations are collages of three boxes (see figure 1) that draw attention to the highlights of the week, for instance a special feature on sports clothes, a ‘special offer’ in the form of a box showing a picture of 9
hand bags against a rich red background and, superimposed on the picture, the words “Up to 50 % off bags and hand bags”, and a ‘street style’ photo that will lead to the Street Style genre. All of these can be clicked on, and two of them lead the customer to information about the latest street fashions and healthy lifestyle activities rather than to products for sale. INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE Figure 1
Orientation collage
Scrolling down then leads to the Orientation Catalogue. This catalogue is similar in appearance to the Catalogue genre we will describe below, but also differs from it in that each of the displayed items can lead to ‘trending pages’, in other words to information that does not lead directly to the purchase of specific products. Catalogue The primary function of Catalogues is to present the customer with an overview of the products available in specific categories, and also of course to stress the abundance of products on offer. Each catalogue contains hundreds of pictures, displayed in identical fashion, and arranged in tight symmetrical rows of three or four photos with similar captions, viz. there is no apparent foregrounding of one product over the other (see figure 2)
INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE Figure 2
Catalogue
Catalogue photos either show only the product, in Full Shot, and frontally photographed against a blank background, or a model wearing the product, framed in such a way that the entire item of clothing (but only that item) is displayed, this in contrast to fashion photos, which show models in Medium Long Shot and ‘on location’, as will be discussed below. These images are therefore ‘analytical’ images (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 87ff) intended to depict specific items of clothing clearly and in as much detail as possible. The analytical function of the images is enhanced by moving the mouse over them, which produces further images, showing, for instance, the back of the product, or a detail. The function of these pictures is therefore primarily representational, but when the faces of the models are included, an ‘interactive’ element (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 117) may intrude, as the model may smile at the
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viewer, or, if not looking at them, entice them (in the women’s section) with a slight pout or a half open mouth and a wistful stare. The captions, finally, simply list the brand, the name of the garment, the type of garment (e.g. blouse), its colour, and its price. Most Catalogues contain one further functional element, the Product Orientation. This element is usually entirely verbal. It is displayed in the left column, alongside the catalogue, and mixes informational and advertising language, and adds a splash of the language of fashion magazines (see below).
Informational language is characterized by indirect address, i.e. statements (realized by
indicative clauses), a non-dialogic style (3rd person pronouns), relational processes (usually with ‘be’ or ‘have’ as the main verbs) and generic reference (e,g, ‘women’s blouses’, ‘triangle bras’): Women’s blouses and tunics are useful for all sorts of occasions from heading to the office or relaxing on the weekend. The handbag is an item of iconic status and a weakness for many a woman, but one of the most functional items we will ever buy. Triangle bras do not usually have an underwire and are typically suitable for smaller sizes. Advertising language (cf Machin and Van Leeuwen, 2007, Andersen, 2007) is characterized by direct address, i.e. reader-involving speech functions, especially command (realized by imperative clauses), dialogic style (1st and 2nd person), reference to specific brands and/or store retailers; appraisal of the product or the (positive) values associated with it (typically realized by adjectives); and poetic stylistic devices such as alliteration and rhyme (e.g. ‘fun and funky style’, ‘fashion fix’ and ‘fix – tunics’ in the examples below): Whether you prefer plain, muted colours such as navy or white, or are looking for a more fun and funky style, tunics and blouses can be found to suit every style Get your fashion fix with women's blouses and tunics from Zalando.co.uk! This catalogue genre is therefore a hybrid genre, combining several communicative functions: providing information, advertising, defining clothes as fashion and selecting products. Finally, although the Product Orientation is placed to the left of the Product Catalogue, there is no guarantee that it will be read first, or, indeed, that it is read at all, or that the Catalogue is systematically
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scanned from top left to right bottom. It provides an informational landscape which users can traverse in any way they choose. Product information The Product Information genre serves to present further information about products users have selected from Catalogues (see figure 3). INSERT FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE Figure 3: Product information It has the following elements: Product, Definition cluster, Product Details, Further Recommendations and Selection. Several of these elements can be divided into further elements, for instance the Definition Cluster contains the brand, the name of the product, the type of product and the colour, and the Product Details element includes ‘length’, ‘fit’, ‘ fabric’ and much more. The Product itself is placed in the centre, and is the most salient of all the elements. The other elements are arranged around it, in what Kress and Van Leeuwen call a Centre-Margin structure, in which, they say, “the centre presents the nucleus of the information to which all the other elements are in some sense subservient” (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 196). It should be noted that the banners and menus that surround these elements will be discussed in the section on macro genres below. Much of the product information is verbal and requires a knowledge of fashion vocabularies, for instance of the names of different fabrics or types of collar on shirts (to give an example, there are no less than 13 collar types for men’s shirts, ranging from ‘button down’ over e.g. ‘Peter Pan collar’ to ‘wing collar’). The information also concerns sizing, and this requires rather precise knowledge of one’s measurements (e.g. the measurement of one’s bust or waist or arm length). This is not required in face to face shopping, where clothes can be visually and haptically inspected, and shows that, visual though it may be, online shopping relies more on language than face to face shopping. The Selection element contains an ADD TO BAG button in bright orange, the Zalando colour which, throughout the site, makes purchase-related options extra salient. It also contains some small pictures, showing the product from different angles and highlighting some of the details. The Further Recommendations element has a link to the ‘Shop the Look’ pop up, and also displays some ‘similar items’, no doubt to persuade customers to consider further purchases.
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This genre is therefore also hybrid genre, mixing information, persuasion and selection. And although the elements are arranged anti-clockwise around the Product, in the order in which we have discussed them, this need not be how they are actually read. Purchase The elements of the Purchase genre, on the other hand, are all obligatory, and have the obligatory order familiar to anyone who has ever made an online purchase: My Bag, followed by Shipping Information, followed by Address Information, followed by Delivery Information, followed by Order Summary, followed by Payment, followed by Order Confirmation. Many of these elements ask customers, in polite language, to provide information, with plenty of ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ as can be seen in figure 4. Providing this information is nevertheless obligatory for the purchase to proceed. INSERT FIGURE 4 ABOUT HERE Figure 4:
Order Confirmation
But figure 4 also shows that even the purchase genre is, to a small degree, a hybrid genre: the sequence of transactions is followed by another, very salient advertisement, in which Zalando solicits further engagement from its customers. Fashion magazines Fashion magazines, reachable via menu items such as ‘style notes’ and ‘trending’, have the following structure : {Stylist Recommendation + [Fashion statement + Fashion picture + Mini Catalogue]n}n The raised ‘n’ indicates recursivity - items enclosed in brackets can be repeated an unspecified number of times. But by representing the genre in this way we do not suggest that the elements are in fact read in anti-clockwise order. The Stylist Recommendation has, top right, a picture of the stylist, in Close Shot, and looking at the viewer, together with the authoritative announcement of a new trend, e.g. “This is a look that is 100% feminine – lots of loose and flowing material”. The Fashion Statement is then a headline which summarizes this fashion pronouncement, e.g. ‘SOFT SKILLS – Loose and flowing”. Fashion Pictures differ from Catalogue pictures in two ways – the model is shown in Medium Long Shot, hence displaying a whole outfit rather than a single product, and in a location that attributes fashion 13
meaning to this outfit, for instance the canopied entrance to an expensive hotel, or a tennis court. Fashion Pictures may also show only a product or range of products, without a model. These will be carefully arranged, often together with additional elements, for instance flowers to signify the fashion season. The difference between Catalogue and Fashion Pictures is illustrated in figure 5. INSERT FIGURE 5 ABOUT HERE Figure 5
Catalogue pictures and Fashion pictures
The Mini Catalogue is a symmetrical arrangement of the items of clothing worn by the model in the Fashion Picture, this time against a blank background and without a model. From here the customer can go directly to the relevant Product Information, and from there to ADD TO BAG or PROCEED TO CHECKOUT. The four basic Fashion Magazine elements are arranged in a kind of quadrant – the Fashion Statement top left, with the Fashion Picture below it; the Stylist Recommendation top right, with the Mini Catalogue below it. In terms of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s account of ‘information value’ (2006: 179ff), the Fashion Statement and the Fashion Picture are Given, representing what you can expect in a fashion magazine, while the recommendation by the Zalando stylist and the Mini Catalogue are New, representing what Zalando would like you to pay special attention to, and to act on. Scrolling down reveals further Fashion Statements, Fashion Pictures and Mini Catalogues, either recommended by the same stylist, for instance ‘The Footwear Trend’ (“We are loving strappy flats this summer – pair with some mom jeans and an off-the-shoulder top”) or by one or more other Zalando stylists, (e.g. “Contemporary Boho”, “Urban Safari” and “Tennis Mania”). Language plays an important role in the Fashion Magazine genre, as brilliantly explored in Barthes’ The Fashion System (1983), and, more recently, in Moeran’s anthropological study of fashion ‘glossies’ (Moeran, 2013). Both insist on the normative role of language in fashion magazines: “It is language that defines what fashion is, or is not”. Moeran (ibid: 132) then further characterizes fashion language as follows: Written clothing consists of two inter-related classes of utterance. One includes all the vestimentary features (forms, fabrics, colours, and so on) that signify different kinds of clothes; the other all evaluative (‘discreet’, ‘amusing’ and so on) and circumstantial (‘evening’,
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‘weekend’. shopping’, ‘party’ and so forth) features that signify the kinds of lives we lead in the world.” Moeran’s evaluative category should, we believe, be further divided into aesthetic evaluation (e.g. ‘amusing’) and functional evaluation (e.g. ‘summer skirt’). This would yield three discursive elements (all the examples are from the Zalando site):
Description of vestimentary features (material/fabrics, shape, colour), typically by a noun or an adjective functioning as head or premodifier in a noun phrase, e.g.: Team these string women’s heels with a sharp pencil skirt or tapered trousers, completing the look with an on-trend pussy bow blouse.
Evaluation of the clothes through positive appraisal, typically realized by adjectives used as premodifiers in noun phrases, e.g. Slip on a stunning pair of stiletto high heels in a sumptuous hue.
Pointing out the purpose of the item (or some feature of it) either by grounding it circumstantially in a situation, e.g. With court shoes and Mary Janes, perfect for the office or a dinner date. or by indicating the item’s ability to shape some part of the body, e.g. The right heels can elongate your leg and create an instant slimming effect.
Another characteristic of fashion language is its authoritative, normative stance, “the authoritative wording of someone who knows everything that is behind the confused or incomplete appearance of the visible forms” (Barthes, 2013: 108-9), e.g.: Black lace-up or tan block heels are perfect for making a fashion statement in the office. Finally, the fashion magazine genre is characterized by lexical items referring (i) to the fundamentally visual nature of fashion, e.g. “the look”, “the style”, and (ii) to the temporal nature of some trends, e.g. “this season’s must have”. These linguistic features of fashion magazines are also evident on Zalando’s website. This kind of fashion language is found, not only in the Fashion Magazine genre, but also in the Product Orientations where it mixes with the kind of informational language we described above. Lifestyle magazines
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Lifestyle magazines can be reached via menu items such as ‘Style notes’ and ‘Trending’. They have the following structure: Intro + Lifestyle Picture + [Life style picture + Lifestyle information + (Mini) Catalogue]n + (Video) + (InstaFeed) + (Feedback). The Intro introduces a lifestyle role model and/or lifestyle activity, using the kind of normative language we have described above. Lifestyles (Chaney, 1996) are characterized by shared attitudes and values, shared leisure time activities, and shared patterns of consumer behaviour (shared taste in dress, interior decoration and so on) and it is in these Lifestyle Magazines that Zalando links the products they sell to a range of trendy lifestyles. Here are two Intros, one from a feature about a personal trainer and lifestyle blogger called Carly Rowena, the other from a feature about sport titled #MYMATCH: Summer is finally here and this season an active lifestyle is an absolute must. We invited effervescent personal trainer and lifestyle blogger Carly Rowena to Berlin for an active break. She shared her tips and an epic playlist – to help you stay happy healthy and on top of your game. Sport is here to stay. No matter what kind of sport you’re into, it’s all about having the right gear to reach your goals. Get inspired, get going – with #MYMATCH Lifestyle Pictures depict these role models and lifestyles. They differ from Catalogue and Fashion Pictures because they show the role models engaged in lifestyle activities, although they may mix this with the poses characteristic of Fashion Pictures, as in the second of the two examples in figure 6. In such a case they can still be distinguished from Fashion Pictures on contextual grounds, because of the different micro genre in which they occur. INSERT FIGURE 6 ABOUT HERE Figure 6:
Lifestyle pictures
Scrolling down then reveals further Lifestyle Pictures, accompanied by texts which will, again, mix informational language with the language of advertising and the language of fashion, and which will always be accompanied by Mini Catalogues that link the clothes the role models are wearing to Product Information pages, or even to specific Catalogues - information about Carly Rowena’s ‘workout style’, for instance, leads to a page with a photo of Carly in the banner and a headline “Carly’s workout picks 290 products”.
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The #MYMATCH feature contains three further elements. The first is a video (“Anne Ewers hits the court of #MYMATCH – the second part of our Spring/Summer campaign) in which models move, jump, and dance to energetic music after which a female voice over concludes: “Choose from 101 top brands for your match, on Zalando”. The second is a social media inspired element, INSTAFEED, headlined “Need inspiration: Found your match and want to share with #MYMATCH?” with a blue button for uploading photos. These photos are displayed in symmetrically arranged rows of two and closely follow the style of professionally produced Fashion Pictures, showing girls posing in sports clothes, against the background of tennis courts and other sports locations. A final element solicits feedback. Because they unfold by scrolling down, Lifestyle Magazines are relatively linear and their elements cannot be accessed separately. But that does not mean that they need to be read from beginning to end. Even within micro genres of this kind, different users can realize different communicative goals and combinations of communicative goals - updates on broad lifestyle categories, more detailed information about trends, buying clothes, and so on.
Street style The Street Style genre is very similar to the Catalogue genre, but it uses Fashion Pictures rather than Catalogue Pictures and is viewed by clicking from page to page, rather than by scrolling down. Again, the meaning of a picture (for instance a ‘fashion picture’) derives both from its content and composition and from the context in which it is placed, for instance a ‘lifestyle magazine’ or a ‘street style display’. Street style displays contain five pages in total, each with two elements, and each leading to a Street Style Product Page, as follows: [Headline + Street Style Display+ Street Style Product Page]5. Each Display contains six framed Fashion Pictures arranged symmetrically below Headlines such as “STREET STYLE: DUNGAREES”, “STREET STYLE: DARE TO BARE”, “STREET STYLE: LATIN FEVER”, etc. (see figure 7). INSERT FIGURE 7 ABOUT HERE Figure 7
Street Style page
The pictures in Street Style Displays have, top right, a small transparent overlay with a plus sign. Clicking on these links users to a Street Style Product Page which has the Street Style picture on the left, a single item from the model’s outfit on the right and the other items from the outfit beneath it (these can be clicked to lead to other pages). The Street Style genre is therefore again a hybrid genre, which can be 17
read in different ways and for different reasons – to gain information about the latest trends, or to purchase trendy items, for instance. Pop ups Finally there are three pop ups. These lack the menus and the ‘Zalando information’ we will discuss below. The first two, Shop the Look and Product Display, take the form of a white page in ‘landscape’ format, surrounded by a heavy black frame. Like micro genres they consist of several elements, but they do not involve scrolling or clicking from page to page. The Shop the Look pop up can be accessed by clicking on a particular item of clothing in a Catalogue. It features the selected item in the centre, flanked, on each side, by four smaller pictures of items that could go with it to make a complete outfit (‘Wear it With’). At bottom there are small framed pictures of models with other similar products from the same brands, which, if clicked on, lead to other ‘Shop the Look’ pages. Customers are therefore constantly urged to buy more than they might have intended, a sales strategy which is of course also used by shop assistants in face to face fashion shopping interactions. Product Display pop ups are also selected by clicking on Catalogue items. A picture of the selected item is shown on the left. Moving the mouse over it reveals further pictures, for instance, for a pair of trousers, pictures showing the trousers from different angles, and details such as the back (how does it fit on the bottom), the front with hands in pockets, etc. On the right is the brand name and logo, the price, a link to the Product Information page, and, in highly salient Zalando orange, ADD TO BAG. Product Display pop ups therefore isolate a selected item from the abundance of other, similar items, picking it up from the rack for closer inspection, as it were. Yet below, on the black frame, a series of small pictures of similar products is also included, all clickable. The Size Guide can be reached from the Product Information page as well as from the Product Display page. It contains, on top, instructions on how to take your measurements, with pictures as well as step by step instructions. Scrolling down reveals a table comparing different measurement systems, and, below that, a list of products, for each of which a separate Size Guide can be selected. Using these Size Guides requires linguistic and practical skills: the helpful shop assistant with his tape measure no longer exists. A few further observations can be made to conclude this section:
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Overall, micro genres have a spatial rather than a linear structure. Although some elements may be more salient than others, for example the selected item of clothing in the Product Information genre, or the bright ADD TO BAG option in various other genres, essentially there is no pre-designed step by step process leading to a final stage that realizes the communicative goal of the genre as a whole. The genres are flexible, allowing different reading paths to realize different communicative goals. The only exception is the Purchase genre, which imposes a strict, non-negotiable sequence that includes the obligatory disclosure of personal data, something which in traditional shops was not required, and which puts the relation between buyers and sellers on a more durable basis, albeit under duress.
Like other online shops, the Zalando site mixes shopping with genres which formerly were (and to some degree still are) found in separate media such as fashion magazines, lifestyle magazines and lifestyle newspaper supplements. In doing so, genres such as the ‘advertorial’, the ‘friendvertorial’, the sponsored social media conversation, etc, are taken a step further – all fashion advertising and all fashion information now leads directly to the Checkout.
Although they are essentially visual structures, language plays a very significant role on the Zalando site, first of all because it must express what, in face to face shopping episodes, would have been apprehended by touch – by feeling the fabric and fitting the clothes, for instance. The Zalando site thus requires a command of relatively specialist vocabularies that not even all native speakers may have, as well as precise knowledge about one’s own measurements. Apparently (Dusto, 2012) many customers order the same item in different sizes, rather than struggling with the size guides, and then return those that do not fit, something which of course comes at a cost for the company. Secondly, as we have seen, language plays a fundamental and authoritative role in defining what fashion is and what specific fashions mean.
Most of the micro genres are hybrid genres, allowing different reading paths that realize different communicative and pragmatic aims for the users. But the site has its own aims and some of these permeate the site as a whole: the language of advertising and the language of fashion are everywhere, intruding into everything users do, urging them at every point to buy, and to buy more, even when, perhaps, they might want to be left alone, surveying the merchandise at their own pace.
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One other element is found in many different places – the call for feedback. It appears at the bottom of Product Information pages, at the bottom of the Lifestyle Magazine, and, again, at the bottom of the Order Confirmation, as if, in the absence of the natural mutuality of the face to face encounter, the seller is perenially anxious and uncertain as to whether the customer is happy. Here is an example, bottom left on a Product Information page: I love the bag, Quick Delivery. I will definitely shop in Zalando again. Below that, we then read: Four customers found this review helpful. And to the right of that: Did you find this review helpful? YES/NO Macro genres The principal menu is found on the top of all pages except the pop ups and allows all micro genres to be reached at any time and from any point. It consists of three bands: The topmost band is slightly more salient than the others, both because of its position and because it uses white caps on a black background. The menu items are promotional (e.g. DESIGNER PIECES FOR SWEET PRICES – VISIT THE PREMIUM SALE) and vary from time to time. The middle menu leads to the ‘women’s, ‘men’s’ and ‘kids’ departments, and to ‘log in’, ‘wish list’ and ‘my bag’. The third band leads to the product categories - clothing, shoes, accessories, etc. (and from there to sub-categories such as, in the case of ‘women’: ‘dresses’, ‘tops & T-Shirts’, ‘Long Sleeve Tops’ and so on) but also to specific brands, and to micro genres such as Fashion Magazines and Lifestyle magazines which are not directly related to the selection and purchase of products, using menu labels such as ‘Inspiration’ and ‘New’. There is thus, from the start, and at any point, a choice between the dual, but interlinked purposes of the site – keeping up to date with the latest fashions and picking up ideas for the expression of lifestyle values on the one hand, and purchasing items of clothing on the other. These menus not only ensure that all micro-genres and all products can be reached at any time, and from any point (the ‘Search Zalando’ box in the third menu, further facilitates that), but also allow users to start their journey with different goals in mind – a search for products, a search for bargains, a search for trend information, and so on – even if, as we have seen, Zalando does what it can to ensure that all
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roads eventually lead to the checkout. Further menus may then appear in the left column of Catalogues, following, and sometimes instead of, Product Information, and under various headings, such as ‘your weekly update’: ‘new’, ‘editor’s picks’, ‘seasonal must-haves’, ‘daily fashion updates’, ‘looks of the week’ (with subsections such as ‘casual’, ‘business’, ‘going out’, ‘trend’, ‘premium’, ‘we love’). At the bottom of each page (except, again, the pop ups), Zalando Information can be found: (1) a promotion for the Zalando newsletter with, on the right, an orange subscribe button (2) payment methods with logos of the credit card companies, (3) in small print, a list of ‘About Zalando’ options, such as ‘About Us’, ‘Press’, ‘Careers’, etc, and (4) again in small print, lists of ‘Our Top Brands’ and ’Our Top Categories’, with on the right a colourful picture of the Zalando Facebook page with an orange button leading to that page. Other means of navigation are distributed throughout the site, many of them foregrounded by Zalando and made particularly easy or attractive to click on. We have already seen how the Orientation links to a Lifestyle Magazine on sport, with subsections such as ‘Training’, ‘Yoga’ and ‘Running’, and how these magazines themselves also contain many clickable items linking information with purchases. The feature on personal trainer and lifestyle blogger Carly Rowena contains Mini Catalogues with the items Carly is wearing in the photographs that show her cooking, exercising and so on, and all of these lead directly to Product Information, and from there to MY BAG. The pictures of models actively working out or doing Yoga exercises in the #MYMATCH magazine can also be clicked to lead to Product Information. And the same applies to Street Style pictures, and to the Fashion Magazine where the advice of expert stylists and the alluring Fashion Picture are placed in close proximity to the ADD TO BAG button. Then there are the many ways in which single products are linked to whole outfits, whether in Shop the Look pop ups, in the Fashion Pictures found in Fashion Magazines, in the Street Style features, or in the social media element of #MYMATCH. Online shops increasingly try to make things easier for users by doing their work for them, for instance by choosing for them which dress to wear with which shoes, or which tie with which suit. Online groceries, similarly, offer a choice of menus for the whole week, and then select the ingredients for the chosen menu automatically, or even, next step, predict what customers will order on the basis of previous purchases, so customers will not even need to place an order. The map in figure 8 shows, in a slightly simplified way, the connectivity between the micro genres. Although there is only one entrance to the shop, from there on many different trajectories are possible,
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not all of them leading to the checkout. Of course, if a customer does buy something, there will be a number of obligatory elements – they will have to make at least one selection, they will have to inspect that selection, even if only cursorily, they will have to choose size and colour, confirm the order and pay, but a purchase does not necessarily need to be made. The user can also leaf through the fashion magazine, or walk into the shop to inspect what is on offer without buying anything – even though this will be noticed by Zalando and followed up with advertisements that will pop up on other sites frequented by the user, e.g. on newspaper websites, Facebook or YouTube. INSERT FIGURE 8 ABOUT HERE Figure 8
Map of the Zalando site
In short, the macro genre is constructed by the users, on the basis of their own plans and goals. But it is also closely watched by Zalando, which will follow users every step along the road, and even outside the shop. In the case of our eye-tracking experiments those plans and goals were chosen by us, with the result that all subjects took more or less the same path through the Zalando labyrinth, as shown in figure 9. Because we asked them to buy, they did not linger to read about Carly Rowena or Yoga outfits. Clearly only a more extensive user study, open to different hypothesized uses, can ultimately give an idea as to the range if possible aims and the degree to which they are used. INSERT FIGURE 9 ABOUT HERE Figure 9
Trajectory of 6 experimental subjects making Zalando purchasesConclusion
Our conclusion has to be brief, as this study is only a first exploration. But a few points can be made: In remediating shopping, Zalando entextualizes the practice of shopping, and embeds textual genres such as magazine articles in the practice of shopping. As a result, the functions of ‘exchange of information’ and ‘exchange of goods and services’ are no longer as distinct as they were (cf. Andersen 2017). Although an actual Zalando purchase still requires a number of obligatory stages (including the obligatory registration of consumer data), shopping is now achieved by navigating between and through a series of micro genres. Each micro genre is in itself a hybrid genre that can be used, in whole or in part, to realize different communicative and pragmatic purposes, and macro genres may also be informed by multiple purposes. Rather than seeing shopping as a single ‘generic structure potential’, we now need to consider the shop (the site) itself as a ‘multi-generic structure potential’. 22
Actual shopping episodes are designed by users and based on their plans and goals which may not include making purchases. Yet they are also constantly influenced by what the site makes easy or attractive to do, and in navigating through the site, users are constantly interrupted by Zalando addressing them with online versions of time-honoured sales techniques such as offering bargains, offering similar, but perhaps more expensive goods, and suggesting additional items, all these backed up by reference to attractive role models and fashion experts. Finally, our study of Zalando suggests that online shopping may rely more on language than face to face shopping, assuming linguistic skills and literacies not everyone may possess. Investigating the literacies needed for successful online shopping therefore needs to be high on the agenda of future work in this area. Clearly, along with the study of semiotic technologies such as Word and PowerPoint, and of social media such as Facebook and Instagram, the study of the digital remediation of social practices in fields such as education, the workplace, and everyday life should have high priority, as it significantly transforms these practices and the social relations that come with them. And as the practices themselves change, the models we use to study them, for instance our approaches to genre, will also have to change.
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Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1985) Language, Context and Text: Aspects of language in a socialsemiotic perspective. Geelong, Vic: Deakin University Press Hasan, R, (1979) On the Notion of Text. In J.S. Petöfi, ed. Text vs sentence: basic questions of text linguistics. Vol II. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, pp. 369-390 Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading Images – The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge Machin, D. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2007) Global Media Discourse – A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge Mitchell, T.F. (1975[1957]) The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: a situational statement. In T.F. Mitchell Principles of Firthian Linguistics. London: Longman, pp. 167-200 Moeran, B. (2013) Proposing Fashion: The Discourse of Glossy Magazines. In Communicação e Sociedade. Vol. 21. Van Leeuwen, T. (2005a) Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge Van Leeuwen, T. (2005b) Multimodality, genre and design. In S. Norris and R. Jones, eds Discourse in Action – Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, pp. 73-94 Van Leeuwen, T, Bateson, D.J., Le Hunte, B., Barratt, A., Black, K.I., Kelly, M., Inoue, K., Rutherford, A.R., Stewart, M. and Richters, J. (in press) Contraceptive Advertising – A critical multimodal analysis. To appear in Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. Ventola, E. (1987) The Structure of Social Interaction – A Systemic Approach to the Semiotics of Service Encounters. London: Frances Pinter
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