Journeying Together: Aligning Retailer and Service Provider Roles with Collective Consumer Practices

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Journeying Together: Aligning Retailer and Service Provider Roles with Collective Consumer Practices Tandy Chalmers Thomas a,∗ , Amber M. Epp b , Linda L. Price c a

b

Stephen J.R. Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, 143 Union St., Kingston, ON K7L 7N6, Canada School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Grainger Hall, 975 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706, United States c Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon, 1208 University St, Eugene, OR 97403, United States

Abstract Consumer journeys offers a powerful metaphor that has inspired diverse strategic frameworks to aid retailers in managing and designing customer experiences. Absent from existing frameworks, however, is a clear understanding of the journeys consumers perform as a collective that is bound by a shared identity and communal goals. Yet, whether taking vacations, going out to dinner, facing a health crisis, or setting up a household, much of consumers’ lives are spent journeying together. With families as our focal collective, we adopt a social practice theory lens and integrate prior consumer research related to collective practice dynamics (identity goal interplay, connectedness, and corporeality) to articulate what retailers should consider when designing collective journeys. Using this theoretical foundation, we build a conceptual framework that identifies three roles retailers play in collective journeys: central, mediated, and dispersed. We differentiate each role by the core value retailers provide to consumer practices as well as the collective dynamic challenges implicated. Our framework highlights the need for retailers to structure their offerings to match the dynamics of families’ collective journeys. To explore this matching process more fully, we introduce the idea of ‘fields of alignment’ as the social spaces where retailers and consumers actively negotiate, improvise, and experiment to align around common frames for action. We use the concept of fields of alignment to generate implications for retailers, propose guidelines for managerial action, and present avenues for future research. © 2019 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Retailing; Service providers; Consumer journeys; Collective practices; Alignment frames; Customer experience

Introduction In this article, we present a framework that describes the journeys that consumers perform as collectives that are bound by a shared identity and communal goals. The conscious design and management of consumer experiences has garnered increased attention from marketing scholars and retailers in recent years (Schmitt 1999, 2003, 2011; Schmitt, Brakus, and Zarantonello 2015; Verhoef et al. 2009). In part, we attribute this interest to the proliferation of new technologies, augmented reality, and innovative retail spaces that open up possibilities and stoke our imaginations for what comes next (Grewal, Roggeveen, and Nordfält 2017; Heller et al. 2019). Recent work conceptualizes “customer experience as a customer’s ‘journey’ with a ∗

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T.C. Thomas), [email protected] (A.M. Epp), [email protected] (L.L. Price).

firm over time during the purchase cycle across multiple touch points” (Lemon and Verhoef 2016, p. 74–76). Consumer journey frameworks offer a window into customer experience and provide retailers with some structure for managing experiences by emphasizing how to strategically improve touchpoints (Lemon and Verhoef 2016). Emerging research moves beyond the traditional purchase cycle boundaries of a consumer journey. This work examines a more diverse range of touchpoints to consider what happens before and after experiences with retailers (Mende et al. 2019; Seybold 2001; Vredeveld and Coulter 2019), how touchpoints across a retailer’s multiple channels influence decision processes (Anderl, Schumann, and Kunz 2016; Herhausen et al. 2019), and the ways consumer journeys facilitate broader life projects (Hamilton and Price 2019). There is also increasing recognition of the social nature of journeys within this emerging work that documents the role of other consumers, peers, and employees as both direct and indirect touchpoints that influence consumers’

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2019.11.008 0022-4359/© 2019 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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experiences (Baxendale, Macdonald, and Wilson 2015; Dahl and Argo 2019; Grove and Fisk 1997; Lemon and Verhoef 2016). Yet, explicitly absent from this literature is a focus on how a collective journeys together. In these journeys, members of a collective, who are united by a shared collective identity and communal goals, perform a journey together. There are a range of consumption situations where consumers do things with others, such as consuming in the presence of others (e.g., Boothby, Clark, and Bargh 2014; McFerran and Jennifer 2014; Raghunathan and Corfman 2006; Ramanathan and McGill 2007; Ratner and Hamilton 2015), interacting with strangers (Epley and Schroeder 2014), and cboth direct and indirect touchpoints that influence consumers’ experiences (Baxendale, Macdonald, and Wilson 2015; Dahl and Argo 2019; Grove and Fisk 1997; Lemon and Verhoef 2016). Yet, explicitly absent from this literature is a focus on how a collective journeys together. In these journeys, members of a collective, who are united by a shared collective identity and communal goals, perform a journey together. There are a range of consumption situations where consumers do things with others, such as consuming in the presence of others (e.g., Boothby, Clark, and Bargh 2014; McFerran and Jennifer 2014; Raghunathan and Corfman 2006; Ramanathan and McGill 2007; Ratner and Hamilton 2015), interacting with strangers (Epley and Schroeder 2014), and collaborating through the sharing economy (Eckhardt et al. 2019; Lamberton 2016). However, these situations are differentiated from collective journeys as the consumers involved are not bound together by a shared collective identity or communal goals. In this article, we develop theory and implications around the idea of collective journeys. To do so, we use families as our focal collective. Many family experiences take place as collective journeys. For example, pursuing parenthood (Fischer, Otnes, and Tuncay 2007), addressing health issues (Berry et al. 2017), going on vacation (Epp and Price 2011), taking a trip to the zoo (DeVault 2000), and setting up a household (Bradford and Sherry 2013) all involve collective experiences with service providers, often across multiple retail settings. Even when a journey appears as an individual endeavor, various relationships are often implicated in the experience. For example, a parent’s trip to the grocery store to feed the family is only an individual journey on the surface, but upon closer examination, feeding the family is a collective pursuit that involves invisible tensions and negotiations that parents manage in the supermarket aisle (Epp and Price 2018). Similarly, shopping for a wedding dress may be a heroic quest for the bride (Dobscha and Foxman 2012), but when viewed as a collective experience, it also serves as a site of negotiation for a broader set of relationships (Otnes and Pleck 2003; Velagaleti and Epp 2019). Collective journeys are thus much more prevalent than retailers may think. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine collective journeys as they unfold within and across retailing contexts. To aid in our conceptualization of collective journeys, we adopt a social practice theory lens. This perspective overcomes three deficiencies we identify in work examining consumer journeys.

First, existing frameworks do not account for the influence of shifting macro trends that impact, and disrupt, collective practices. A social practice lens is able to attenuate this shortcoming by explicitly accounting for macro shifts such as technological advances, environmental changes, and cultural movements that may challenge and transform social practices (Magaudda, 2011; Phipps and Ozanne, 2017)This would allow retailers to anticipate potential disruptions. Given that social practices offer a governance structure for how practices should happen, and serve as highly idealized templates for families’ collective journeys (Schatzki 1996; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012), when there are shifts in the macro environment, the social practice script changes. For example, technological advances spawned an array of non-physically, non-temporally shared social practices. The availability of video chat and other digital platforms, for instance, inspired families to reconfigure previously co-located family practices (e.g., holidays, gaming, or bedtime stories) as geographically and temporally dispersed (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014). Through another example, we contemplate how cultural movements to improve animal welfare confront social practices of family zoo outings or trips to the circus. In such cases, providers and families are re-imagining the ideal social practice with the help of holograms and virtual reality solutions to preserve the educational and entertainment value of the experience while also protecting the animals (Kateman 2019; Wehner 2019). Second, current consumer journey theorizing does not account for the interplay between the dynamics of a collective practice and the implications for journeying together. With an implicit assumption that individuals are the focal entity for consumer journeys, existing scholarship has neglected the influence of collective practice dynamics. We know from prior research, however, that collective dynamics, such as the interplay among collective, relational, and individual goals for the journey can disrupt practices. Understanding these dynamics can improve retailer solutions (Epp and Price 2011). A social practice lens explicitly draws attention to the ways collective dynamics complicate enactments within consumer journeys. Third, existing consumer journey frameworks are retailer focused rather than consumer focused, meaning they largely examine retailer-controlled touchpoints within the confines of the stages of a customer experience with the firm (Hamilton and Price 2019; Lemon and Verhoef 2016). Introducing a social practice lens explicitly forces retailers to consider how the consumer journey maps onto templates for enacting the collective practice. As social practices typically extend over time and across retailers, this lens opens new pathways to think about how retailers can adapt journey frameworks to include more temporal and spatial diversity as well as reconsider what kinds of roles they can play in collective journeys. In the next section, we overview social practice theory and consumer research on collective practice dynamics as a foundation for understanding collective journeys. We then introduce a conceptual framework that depicts three retailer roles in collective journeys: central, mediated, and dispersed. We elaborate on each role by offering a definition, identifying the retailer’s core value, and describing the challenges posed by collective dynam-

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ics. We conclude with a discussion that emphasizes how retailers can make conscious choices about the roles they play in collective journeys and we introduce the idea of fields of alignment as social spaces where retailers and consumers come together to negotiate, improvise, and experiment to align around common frames for action. We use this concept to generate implications for retailers, propose guidelines for managerial action, and present avenues for future research. Theoretical Perspectives To better understand collective journeys, we propose the use of two complementary theoretical perspectives: social practice theory and collective practice dynamics. Social Practice Theory Social practice theory refers to a group of related theories that explore how practices come to structure everyday life. Practices are “a routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002, p. 249). These can be either individual level practices, like riding a bicycle, or collective practices, like family dinner. Practices exist at two levels. First, social practices refer to cultural-level views of what a practice should be (Shove and Pantzar 2005; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). That is, social practices are cultural scripts that encapsulate the normative view of a practice. For example, the script for how a wedding celebration should unfold is culturally defined. The second level of a practice is the enacted practice (Reckwitz 2002; Shove and Pantzar 2005). Here, consumers adapt the social practice to their particular situation and perform the practice—for example, how a wedding actually unfolds. Bridging these two levels is consumers’ envisioned practice (Thomas and Epp 2019). The envisioned practice represents consumers’ plans for enacting a practice. It is their personalized view of how they imagine their practice enactment will play out—for example, a couple’s plan for how they want their wedding to unfold. Practices are enacted, both individually and collectively, by integrating practice elements into a performance. Practice elements include materials (e.g., objects), competences (e.g., knowledge related to the practice), and meanings (e.g., the ideas, aspirations, and emotions associated with a practice) (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). When these three elements are in alignment, a practice functions as intended and the practice is able to reproduce and habituate over time (Shove and Pantzar 2005; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). The processes that enable the replication and stability of practices have been the dominant focus of research in the domain of practice theory (Reckwitz 2002; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Warde 2005). However, research has started to examine both practice fragility and how practice replication can be differential (Nicolini 2012; Rouse 2007). In terms of fragility, research documents how practices can easily fall into a state of misalignment

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where elements do not work together as intended (Magaudda 2011; Reckwitz 2002; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Warde 2005, 2014). In these situations, consumers work to restore practice stability by reconfiguring elements to bring them back into alignment (Arsel and Bean 2013; Canniford and Shankar 2013; Epp, Schau, and Price 2014; Phipps and Ozanne 2017; Seregina and Weijo 2017; Thomas and Epp 2019; Woermann and Rokka 2015). For example, Canniford and Shankar (2013) describe how surfers reconfigure their practice after it is disrupted by various kinds of technological changes. While stability is certainly an important outcome for practices, a focus on dynamism also brings to light how practices constantly shift and evolve over time (Price and Epp 2015; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Thomas, Price, and Schau 2013). In this work, researchers describe how each instantiation of a practice performance is likely slightly different from those that came before, as well as those that will come after. Children’s birthday parties, for example, tend to follow a general script over time, but also vary year to year. Further, the social script for birthday parties changes over time and between generations. In this way, enacted practices exhibit both heterogeneity and evolution, even when informed by a common social practice (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014; Thomas and Epp 2019). To summarize, social practice theory conceptualizes social life as a series of practices that are guided by cultural-level scripts but enacted, individually and/or collectively, at a localized level. Practice enactments involve the integration of materials, competences, and meanings, all of which are dynamic and constantly shifting as enactments evolve over time. Our understandings of practices are enhanced by examinations of both practice stability as well as practice fragility and heterogeneity. Collective journeys often comprise the enactment of a practice, or the enactment of a series of related practices. In the sections that follow, we discuss how the collective dynamics of family practices are implicated in consumer journeys. Collective Practice Dynamics Understanding the dynamics of collective practices is essential to building retail solutions around journeying together. As previously noted, prior research on consumer journeys starts with an implicit assumption of a solo focal consumer (Lemon and Verhoef 2016), but many retail experiences facilitate collective practice enactments or, at least, implicate collective pursuits (Diamond et al. 2009; Epp and Price 2011). We draw on previous consumer research on collective practices to identify and theorize three relevant dynamics that shape collective journeys: identity goal interplay, connectedness, and corporeality. First, identity goals refer to “conscious or unconscious pursuits related to how people define themselves” (Coulter and Zaltman 2000; Epp and Price 2011, p. 37), and multiple identity goals may be relevant to a collective practice. Examining the interplay of these goals captures the complementarity and competition among collective, relational, and individual goal levels that occur within a practice enactment (Epp and Price 2008). For example, the collective goal of being together as a family may be at odds with a couple’s relational goal to connect during family

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vacations (Epp and Price 2011). In some cases, conflicts result in tradeoffs or prioritization among goal levels, and we know that consideration of this interplay aids in the design of retail solutions. For instance, family vacation providers can explicitly weigh the mix of goals to improve solution design (Epp and Price 2011). Over the course of a collective journey, attention to the dynamic interaction of collective, relational, and individual identity goals allows providers to trace the ebb and flow of how families prioritize goals within practice enactments. Second, connectedness refers both to the nature and strength of ties among members. Connectedness highlights the inertia of entanglements that might hold collectives together, or pull them apart, sometimes in unanticipated ways. To illustrate, many young adults remain interwoven within collective family practices, long after they establish residential independence, via family insurance plans, Netflix or Hulu subscriptions, phone plans, iTunes playlists, or Amazon Prime accounts, among other services (Jennings 2019). These retail alliances reveal inertia, unruliness, and stickiness as they gather force, but also maintain collective family practices by providing ways to remain connected. In some cases, this is enabled by technologies, but connectedness dynamics also emerge within physical spaces. In fact, families tend to actively manage connectedness by finding ways to disconnect, partially participate, or bracket their collective experiences (Epp and Price 2008). For example, research examines how families attempt to bracket spaces by locking out technology in valued family practices such as dinner around the table (Nathanson 2018), while others use technology to facilitate full or partial participation in long-distance versions of family practices (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014). Third, corporeality directs attention to the degree to which members of a collective are co-located, spatially bound, or physically present (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014). Prior research on collective practices emphasizes corporeal interactions (Epp and Price 2010; Moisio, Arnould, and Price 2004; Shove and Pantzar 2005). However, in recent years, technologies have enabled a proliferation of non-temporally and non-spatially bound collective phenomena. Thus, consumer researchers must consider the degree of corporeality when theorizing about collective practices, and retailers must rethink how they design experiences around journeying together. To illustrate, geographically dispersed families find creative ways to maintain practices in physically isolated spaces—for example, shopping together via text or video chat, coordinating streaming services to continue family movie night, or meeting in online gaming spaces. Given this, corporeality matters for practice enactment, with the potential to enhance or disrupt collective practices (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014). Effective design of virtual and physical retail spaces that accommodate collective journeys requires consideration of the degree of corporeality necessary for family members to join in, as well as ways to enable variation in how they participate. Retailer Roles in Collective Journeys We developed a conceptual framework (Fig. 1) that details retailer roles in collective journeys and attends to the opportunities that emerge from consideration of social practices and

collective dynamics. Journeying together involves the enactment of collective practices that represent localized performances of social practices. These enactments emerge from the interplay between consumers and retailers, where both work to balance the collective dynamics of the family—individual, relational, and collective identity goals, connectedness dynamics, and practice corporality—with the actions of retailers, who are playing particular roles. We identify three roles that retailers can play in collective journeys: central, mediated, and dispersed. In the sections that follow, we define and describe these roles, articulating what they are, how they provide value to collective journeys, and the key challenges and opportunities retailers face in each role. These opportunities involve matching consumers’ collective practices with retail offerings. This matching process occurs in what we refer to as fields of alignment—social fields where retailer roles intersect with collective practices. Here, retailers and consumers work to align their practices through processes of negotiation, improvisation, and experimentation. Central Role Key retailer and service provider role The first retailer role we identify – the ‘central’ role – is perhaps the most typical role described within the existing consumer journeys literature, albeit without consideration of how to design around collective dynamics. Here, the retail context is central to the practice and the consumer journey is contained within the retail setting. Colloquially speaking, the retailer is ‘the main event.’ A multitude of collective journeys fall into this category. Examples include a Disney World vacation (Epp and Price 2011), exploring the American Girl store (Diamond et al. 2009), shopping for a wedding dress (Dobscha and Foxman 2012), or utilizing Ronald McDonald House when caring for an ill child (Rubin and Franck 2017). During all of these journeys, we observe the dominance of collective goals that emerge through practice enactments. Notably, many, but not all, of these journeys are linked to crucial transitional moments in a family’s history. Core value offering When retailers play a central role in a collective journey, the core value offering is driven by how successful they are in designing an experience that matches consumers’ envisioned practices. Retailer success is dependent on a matching process that considers the collective’s ideal view of a practice and accounts for each collective’s goals. Challenges The challenge for retailers in a central role is that consumers, both within and across collectives, and over time, do not necessarily share the same view of what constitutes the ideal practice enactment. In contrast to individual consumer journeys, when working with collectives, retailers must account for the inherent heterogeneity that characterizes groups (Canniford and Shankar 2013; Epp and Price 2008; Thomas, Price, and Schau 2013). Prior research on heterogeneous collectives has articulated how group members differ in their views of a practice’s materials,

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Fig. 1. Retailer roles in collective journeys.

competences, and meanings (Thomas, Price, and Schau 2013), as well as the identity goals to which they ascribe (Epp and Price 2008). From a practice perspective, this means that, within a collective there is likely considerable variation in how members think about and understand a practice (Warde 2005). Retailers need to contend with three types of heterogeneity. First, heterogeneity exists within families as to what constitutes an idealized journey: family members may differ in what they think a practice should look like, how it should be enacted, the meanings they associate with a practice, and even who should be included in the practice (Connell, Schau, and Thomas 2019; Epp, Schau, and Price 2014; Thomas and Epp 2019). Prior research has documented this kind of heterogeneity across a range of collective journeys, including child rearing, family vacations, attending sporting events, and family food preparation. A second type of heterogeneity retailers in a central role contend with concerns the replication of collective practices over time and across generations. Many family practices, especially those that are tied to life transitions (e.g., weddings) or important family rituals (e.g., birthday celebrations), are performed repeatedly over time, both within a single generation and across multiple generations. Under these conditions, families often hold envisioned practices that are steeped in years of experiences, traditions, and enactments. In many cases, these envisioned practices outlive the retailers that supported the original practice (Otnes et al. 2009). The challenge for retailers thus lies in providing a retail setting where these collective journeys can flourish. This can be particularly difficult as, unlike with the intergenerational transfer of material objects such as heirlooms (Curasi, Price, and Arnould 2004), it is harder to transfer practices over time and across different retail settings—while physical objects endure, reproducing the essence of a practice and capturing its historically-rooted meanings relies on the replication and transference of competences and meanings across retail providers over time.

Finally, retailers in the central role are also challenged by heterogeneity that stems from shifting macro-level cultural trends. When cultural trends shift, this can disrupt social practices and result in differing views of what constitutes an ideal practice (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). For example, as noted earlier, 30 years ago going to the zoo or an aquarium was considered to be an iconic family practice (DeVault 2000), however in recent years, increasing awareness of the treatment of animals kept in these facilities has disrupted the degree to which families consider this to be an appropriate family experience (Kateman 2019). Likewise, changes in parenting practices (Afflerback et al. 2013; Shirani, Henwood, and Coltart 2012), as well as shifts in technology have influenced how consumers interact as families and how different family members view family rituals (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014). These kinds of cultural trends not only change the nature of a particular social practice, they also add heterogeneity to the collection of social practice templates available to families, which further complicates their collective journey (Thomas and Epp 2019). Opportunities Tackling the challenges described above requires that retailers adopt a family-centered perspective that allows for various kinds of heterogeneity to co-exist within a particular collective journey (Thomas, Price, and Schau 2013). Retailers should work with families to calibrate and align their retail platforms with the envisioned practice(s) of the collective. In building this alignment, retailers should first consider how to design journeys that allow for a range of family members to be included, in a variety of different ways. Retailers in a central role can benefit from platforms that enable families to flexibly constitute their idealized journey across the retail platform, but also provide materials and competences to help them improvise and negotiate tensions that arise as the journey unfolds. Doing so requires retailer sensitivity to various forms of heterogeneity child (Berry et al. 2017), caring

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for aging parents (Barnhart and Pe˜naloza 2013), or planning a wedding for same-sex couples (Velagaleti and Epp 2019). Retailers tend to focus on normative views of iconic transitions that do not always account for the ‘messiness of doing’ that results when the reality of an enactment does not match the guiding social practice (Thomas and Epp 2019). In these situations, families scramble and improvise to try to find a solution that meets their needs. These non-traditional transitions are often ignored by the retail landscape. Notably, non-traditional does not mean focusing on niche or rare moments, but rather looking at experiences that are common but ignored (Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). This gap between the goals of families and retailer offerings affords an opportunity for retailers to change the way families perceive and experience these journeys. Specifically, retailers can, and should, work with families to co-author the cultural scripts that will come to guide and define these new social practices. Finally, retailers should focus not only on the material elements of a practice, but also on the competences of a practice. That is, thinking about how a journey is enacted as well as the various ways that it could be enacted will help retailers work with families who are struggling to replicate a practice over time or across generations. Retailers can meet these challenges by incorporating new materials and skills to afford innovative articulations and elaborations of family practices, but with due attention to the family meanings that frame the enactment. For example, while families may still prize the enactment of homemade food and look to retailers such as Williams Sonoma to help them script these practices, the ways in which this practice is enacted have changed dramatically, and will likely continue to change, as cultural shifts alter family life (Moisio, Arnould, and Price 2004). Retailers thus not only need to build flexibility into their own offerings, but also need to work with families to build flexibility into their envisioned practices. The goal is to bridge the gap between what retailers are able to offer and how consumers envision a practice. Mediated Role Key retailer and service provider role The second retailer role we identify is what we refer to as a ‘mediated’ role. Here, retailers shift to a supporting role by facilitating collective practices that help orchestrate connections between family members, frequently across time zones and distances (Epp, Schau, and Price 2014). There are numerous mundane examples of how important it is for retailers to consider this mediating role. For example, families often travel together only to find that, despite their best efforts, they have been put in different parts of an airplane faced with begging strangers to trade seats so they can sit with their children. Alternatively, they are often punished for being a family and banished to the back of the plane. And of course, as many of us can attest, restaurants are often chosen based on whether they work for what the family is collectively trying to accomplish, rather than quality ratings. Many of us have watched more than our fair share of ‘romantic comedies,’ ‘action’ films or ‘independent’ films (dare we say it) in the service of relational goals.

Core value offering When retailers play a mediating role, they can create substantial customer value by helping consumers journey together. In these cases, the retailer needs to remember that ‘It’s Not All About Me,’ or even my relationship with individual customers.often punished for being a family and banished to the back of the plane. And of course, as many of us can attest, restaurants are often chosen based on whether they work for what the family is collectively trying to accomplish, rather than quality ratings. Many of us have watched more than our fair share of ¨films or ??independent?¨films ¨ ??romantic comedies,???action? (dare we say it) in the service of relational goals. Core value offering When retailers play a mediating role, they can create substantial customer value by helping consumers journey together. In these cases, the retailer needs to remember that ‘It’s Not All About Me,’ or even my relationship with individual customers. That is, unlike in the first role, where the retailer is the main event, in a mediating role, the retailer emphasizes col¨ lectives?desired relationships with each other in the design of their services. Here, the retailer must ask: ??How important are ¨ collectives?desired relationships in the choice of my products ¨ effectively serve a mediating role requires and services??To explicit retailer consideration of how to structure flexible platforms that enable collective practices to thrive. Over and above other sources of brand value, performance of this facilitating role can significantly enhance or attenuate brand patronage and loyalty (Price 2015). Challenges In thinking about the mediating role, we foreground managing collective connectedness as the central challenge. In the prior section, where the retailer is the main event, we stressed the challenge of managing heterogeneity within and between collectives in their envisioned ideal practice. Managing heterogeneity is also important for the mediating role, however rather than diversity in envisioned practices, family members may not even know what options are possible to facilitate goals of connecting with other family members in meaningful, albeit sometimes unanticipated or previously un-envisioned, ways. With the mediated role, retailers face two primary, related, challenges: shifting their focus toward connectedness and identifying current and emerging enactments of connectedness in consumer practices. First, retailers need to overcome the tendency to view the consumer journey as focused on their offerings. Unfortunately, retailers rarely explicitly define their platforms to support dynamic connectedness goals. As such, retailers often inadver¨ tently end up obstructing collectives?desire to flexibly engage in consumption together. For example, Epp and Price (2011) describe numerous instances where designing around individual goals consequently disrupts and derails collective goals, where families are forced to take all or none-should we, for example, put our children in ski school and never see them, or never get to ski that awesome black run that as a couple we have been dreaming about the whole year? Too often, retailers focus on either the core practice, only the individuals within a collective,

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or just the collective, without considering the complex set of individual, relational, and collective connectedness goals that motivate a collective journey (Epp and Price 2008). Second, retailers in the mediated role must contend with new and alternative conceptualizations of what it means to connect and how family members want to connect to each other. Here, the challenge of facilitating flexible connectedness unfolds against a backdrop of cultural changes that alter the essence of what it means to connect. For example, parents connecting with their children can take myriad forms. It might include watching a child play Fortnite to grab hold of pieces of the experience without disrupting the child?¨s own collective online video game journey, or evoking cell phone ??lock-down?¨for family meals or collective events (Chitakunye and Amandeep Takhar 2014). It might include a book club designed to help parents support their teenagers by reading what they are reading, or to help their own parents with aging challenges (Thomas, Pyle, and Handelman 2019). In each of these, and many other everyday cases, there are opportunities for retailers to facilitate or thwart connectedness. Opportunities Managing connectedness has two critical parts. First, retailers should design structures that are malleable to dynamic and unexpected collective arrangements. Specifically, retailers need to put collectives in charge of defining who is included and excluded from collective practices organized on their platform. Contemporary families are distinguished by substantial diversity in membership, characteristics, and roles, exhibiting an elective quality in how they define family (Epp and Price 2018; Thomas and Epp 2019; Velagaleti and Epp 2019). It is important for retailers to think beyond stereotypical depictions of families in how they deliver value. Second, retailers should consider how to facilitate connectedness across collective practice participants. That is, retailers should offer materials and skills (affordances) that help collectives share meanings and experiences (Bradford and Sherry 2013). Many retailers operate in both physical and virtual spaces and it is important for retailers to manage connectedness within and across both platforms, with explicit attention to whether and how corporeality shapes connections. Many evolving retailer platforms serve a critical role in helping families connect, including across distances. Yet the importance of this role may be underappreciated in retail platform design. For example, platforms such as Netflix, Acorn, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Airbnb, Grubhub, and Uber (add the app of choice) may poorly design around the extent to which they serve a mediating role. Let?¨s take just one example of a young married woman, who similar to many millennials is close to her parents who live far away. She competes on her Apple watch (gift from mother) with her mother for steps; shares an Acorn subscription with her mother because they both love British mysteries; shares her and her husband?¨s Hulu subscription with her parents so they can ??co-watch;?¨shares her parents Amazon subscription because ??they like shopping together;?¨and shares their Netflix accounts because they ??love ¨ to binge watch Stranger Things.?And, of course they love sharing playlists on iTunes. They talk daily, share pictures, and look

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for opportunities to connect. Retailers and brands can help them do that. Families select many products and services together and share brands that connect them. Yet, at every turn, many of these platforms are inflexible in how they accommodate and enable sharing across collective practices. For example, prized collective practices of connecting through sharing are constrained and thwarted: sharing an e-book with a friend; sharing Spotify lists; sharing profiles within an account on Netflix; or co-watching TV shows with geographically dispersed family members. Ironically, whereas digital options should make sharing easier, they often make it harder. Perhaps because platforms organize around restricting sharing (in protection of intellectual property and potential revenue) they miss meaningful and economically advantageous ways to enable it. As a notable exception, WhatsApp has experienced explosive growth perhaps in part because it affords dynamic and flexible collective practices, letting consumers easily choose who is included and excluded and affording different modalities for connectedness. Conventional retail institutions may also have overlooked opportunities to structure platforms around a mediating role. Let?¨s take two examples that are increasingly besieged with competitive challenges: grocery stores and department stores. How consumers feed and provision their families has changed dramatically in the past decade with an explosion of online options (Epp and Price 2018). What if grocery and department stores decided to meet at least some of those challenges by structuring environments to afford collective journeys? where families could enjoy experiences together? At the same time that grocery stores feel pressured to reinvent themselves online, ¨ farmers?markets have thrived as places that families can collectively explore and enjoy (Godfrey and Wallendorf 2017). By privileging efficiency and space optimization (two characteristics that online options offer in abundance), grocery stores do not provide affordances that make it fun and easy for families to share the experience together as part of scarce ??family time?¨(Epp and Price 2012). For example, what if moving through the grocery store was designed to help children better understand, learn about, and experience various foods? with interactive displays and rotating events? Augmented reality could be employed to make grocery store shelves come to life to help navigate and enrich the collective journey and provide families with opportunities to engage meaningfully with each other through the grocery shopping experience. Although augmented reality is increasingly used in retail environments (Grewal, Roggeveen, and Nordfält 2017), there is little discussion about how it might serve collective connectedness goals. Similar to grocery stores, department stores organize around standard demographics intended to promote efficiency for the single shopper. What if instead department stores redesigned to enable families to explore and experience the space together? This might suggest mixing age and gender assortments to keep everyone engaged, along with highly visible central areas for play with ease of movement into and out of them. Both of the above examples illustrate how many retailers have been privileging conventional metrics (e.g., space optimization) that do not allow for relational affordances that enable

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collective practices to thrive. Moreover, many retailers still focus on understanding the individual customer experience, failing to adequately attend to the complex, collective obligations and relations that comprise most consumers?¨lives. There are thus numerous retailer opportunities for creative innovation around the mediator role that could ultimately lead to competitive advantages for retailers, as we detail in the discussion section. Dispersed Role Key retailer and service provider role Finally, the ??dispersed?¨role recognizes that collective journeys often distribute activities across a diverse set of retailers. Acknowledging the dispersed role aligns with calls to take a more holistic view of consumer journeys, where consumption is not necessarily the goal (in contrast with the central role) but instead is implicated as part of a broader life project (Hamilton and Price 2019). Much of family life involves such activities, and families typically take on the work of integrating retailers and actions across service providers (Epp and Price 2011). For example, healthcare interactions that involve visits with primary care providers, specialists, at-home care, pharmacists, physical therapists, and community support groups require substantial coordination by families to ensure quality care (Berry et al. 2017). Families also work across service providers in childcare settings, in pursuit of family leisure activities such as sports or music, and while planning multi-sited vacations. In these cases, each individual retailer acts as a ??team player?¨and the journey goes smoothly when service providers understand their roles, share information, and synchronize across retailers on relevant platforms. Core value offering When retailers play a dispersed role in a collective journey, the core value offering is the retailer?¨s ability to coordinate and integrate with other service providers. For a few prominent collective journeys, the retail industry currently offers specialists to help with coordination such as wedding planners, travel agents, or care advocates. Taking on this role as a retailer, however, is less common though we do see examples. As a purveyor in a dispersed role, Airbnb recently began coordinating restaurant reservations and booking adventure experiences through its online platform (Barkho 2019). Challenges With the dispersed role, the key challenge retailers face is to start thinking of themselves as embedded in a broader network of actions within a journey, as opposed to being the focal point. Here, in addition to optimizing their own offerings, retailers and service providers need to focus on the connections between steps and/or elements of a journey. This process directs attention to two key challenges: reframing how retailers think of their role in a dispersed journey and implementing coordination efforts across retailers. Shifts in retailing trends indicate an increasing need for coordination across retailers and service providers in the future. Generalist retailers? such as department stores and malls? that

could support the enactment and synchronization of diverse collective practices are giving way to more distinct specialty retailers, many of which are online (Ertimur and CoskunerBalli 2015). A key problem is that retailers currently structure around product categories instead of around consumer journeys. As a result, collective journeys desperately need retail platforms that integrate across providers. Consider a family?¨s back-to-school journey, for example. Families must locate a diverse array of specific items necessary to prepare for the new school year, ranging from notebooks and markers to lunchboxes and backpacks to electronics and clothing. Some savvy vendors and retailers have found creative ways to take on a bulk of the work of integration for parents by coordinating directly with teachers to produce ready-made kits for parents to order online (Zumbach 2018). In contrast, when we consider collective journeys related to childcare, healthcare, or extra-curricular activities, much of this integration work still falls to parents. For instance, parents spend substantial time and effort researching and synchronizing extra-curricular activities across family members to manage the interplay of collective, relational, and individual identity goals that surface in the enactment of these practices. Thinking about the connections between retailers requires paying attention to the sequencing of elements in a collective journey. For this to happen, a retailer needs to understand the full scope of a collective journey and determine the various ways that a family can move through that journey. For example, small sequences such as family night out might require orchestrating a park walk, dinner, movie, and ice-cream on the way home. Retailers can help families both envision and move through these sequences. One option is for the retailer to acquire other firms in the sequences in order to own the entire journey and gain efficiencies; this seems to reflect Amazon?¨s primary strategy (Moynihan and Payo 2019). Alternatively, retailers could coordinate with other providers in the sequence to provide a seamless journey for families. Of course, coordination across retailers and service providers, especially when they are not owned by the same entity, can be difficult (Krafft et al. 2015; Varman and Costa 2009). Retailers may be met with resistance from other retailers in the journey, power dynamics between retailers could derail coordination efforts, and retailers may use incompatible systems and/or have incompatible infrastructure that makes coordination difficult. Opportunities As evidenced in the above discussion, retailers that fail to recognize their dispersed role are bypassing an opportunity to author their place in the collective journey through coordination of disparate activities and providers. Given that collective practices regularly extend across time and spatial arrangements, retailers in dispersed roles also would benefit from adopting a long-term view of consumer journeys that account for the ebb and flow of relevant service providers in and out of the journey. This is especially evident when we embrace a holistic perspective of journeying together that emphasizes the collective practice enactment to define the borders of the journey. In

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general, longer-term journeys amass a more expansive range of participants including evolving assortments of family members and retailers. Facilitating coordination within these settings requires dexterity and improvisation within the fields of alignment where retailers?¨innovative solutions account for evolving collective journeys. Here, we propose that retailers focus on best practices in coordination that have been developed in channel coordination (Kozlenkova et al. 2015) as well as service providers who focus on coordination (e.g., travel agents). There are significant opportunities available for retailers to take ownership over an entire journey through coordination, without having to provide each element themselves. One example that draws out the complexity of such collective journeys is the path taken to pursue parenthood using assisted reproductive technologies (Fischer, Otnes, and Tuncay 2007). This journey often spans years, sometimes decades, and involves not only the focal couple, but a shifting assortment of extended family, doctors, specialists, procedures, and support resources. As families move through this journey, they are often confronted with coordination challenges that embroil families in frustration and seemingly insurmountable bureaucratic roadblocks (Fischer, Otnes, and Tuncay 2007). Service providers have the opportunity to take on the role of coordinating this process. Overall, thinking about the dispersed role highlights how consumer goals and identities are embedded in journeys that extend beyond a single firm and require a lens that allows the totality of the consumer journey to dominate decision making. Retailers who adopt this view, and tackle coordination efforts across retailers, will have substantial control over collective journey scripts, as well as over which retailers are included or excluded. Discussion Retail and services research increasingly highlights the need for a dynamic, multi-actor-centric perspective on customer experience, including an emphasis on the dynamic nature of customer experiences across touch points and over time (Bolton 2014; Hamilton and Price 2019; McColl-Kennedy et al. 2015). In addition, there are calls to adopt a consumer practice perspective to understand customer experience, including understanding collective practices among known and unknown consumers who help co-create the customer experience (Carù and Cova 2015; McColl-Kennedy et al. 2015; Schau, Mu˜niz, and Arnould 2009). In this paper, we invite retailers and researchers to focus attention on whether and how collective consumer journeys? that are guided by a shared collective identity and communal goals and that temporally unfold within, and between, retailer platforms? inform and challenge retailer roles and practices. We adopt family as the focal collective and argue that collective consumer practices on retailer platforms are both common and under-examined as fertile ground for managerial action. ¨ Retailers?Strategic Role Choices Using a practice theory lens, we identify three specific roles retailers take on to support consumers?¨collective journeys: cen-

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tral, mediated, and dispersed. These roles differ in how they provide value to consumers as well as the retailer challenges, and opportunities, implicated in each role (see Fig. 1). Thus far we have treated these roles in a rather static manner to aid in the exposition of ideas. However, it is important to note that retailers frequently shift between roles over a collective journey, play different types of roles across collectives, and can even play multiple roles simultaneously within a single collective?¨s journey. Recognizing this role fluidity emboldens retailers to make strategic choices about what roles they play in consumer journeys. Consider, for example, a health-care scenario where a family member has a health crisis, such as a heart attack requiring coronary bypass surgery. In this scenario, the hospital shifts between roles as the journey unfolds. During the acute phase of the medical emergency, the hospital plays a central role. However, as the patient?¨s care evolves over time, the hospital?¨s role moves toward playing a mediating role, where it provides spaces and services to help connect and support the patient and their family. Later, it plays a dispersed role where the hospital?¨s function shifts again from being a primary care provider to coordinating with other supports such as home-health care teams, pharmacies, rehabilitation centers, fitness specialists, and nutritionists. Here, we see a single retailer playing all three roles for the same collective at different points in their collective journey. Notably, in addition to shifting roles within a journey, retailers can also play different roles for different collectives where they are central for some, mediated for others, and dispersed for yet another set of families. So, for example, a hospital may play a central role while a family member is having surgery, a mediated role that facilitates the interaction of family and friends when, for example, someone has a baby, and a dispersed role when coordinating the long-term care of someone with an ongoing health issue. Retailers may also find themselves playing all three roles simultaneously within a single family?¨s journey. Continuing with the health-care setting, for example, Ronald McDonald house, which provides housing for out-of-town families where children are receiving medical care at hospitals, plays all three roles simultaneously. The organization plays a central role in that its homes are focal to the family?¨s experience. It plays a mediating role in that the primary goal is to keep family members together, and it plays a dispersed role in that the organization coordinates care between multiple services providers, including health-care professionals, teachers, social workers, and recreation program providers. Given the complexity and dynamic nature of roles, it is thus important for retailers to determine what role(s) they are playing within each collective journey and whether these roles contribute the most value to the collective practice. If not, retailers need to think about how they can productively, and proactively, shift their roles to better match the needs of families?¨practices? or design their offerings so that they do not find themselves in a role that they cannot support. Retailers should strategically make choices about whether and how they play each role, and carefully structure their offerings to match the dynamics of families?¨collective journeys. To explore this matching process more

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fully, we next elaborate on fields of alignment and propose guidelines for retailer action. Fields of Alignment Retailer roles do not always seamlessly align with collective practice enactments. Our framework illustrates the central challenge of bringing together collective dynamics with retailer roles through what we term fields of alignment. We define these fields as the social spaces where retailers and consumers actively negotiate, improvise, and experiment to align around common frames for action (Snow et al. 1986; Thomas, Price, and Schau 2013). Heterogeneous goals and diverse membership make finding common frames for action difficult. There is also a delicate balance between practice replication and transformation. While much of prior research has emphasized practice replication (Reckwitz 2002; Warde 2005), we foreground the transformational dimension of collective practices that may necessitate shifting roles. As we have suggested, retailer roles and consumer practices are sticky and scripted, embedded in and reflective of existing social meanings and institutional structures? there is a tendency to just do things the way we have in the past. However, practices are also ?Sfragile, contestable, and open to challenge and transformation?? (Price and Epp 2015; Snow, Vliegenthart, and Ketelaars 2019, p. 392). For example, while grocery stores may have conventionally been framed as retail platforms where mothers provision their families (DeVault 1991; Miller 1998), we are at a moment in social life where the relevance of that meaning is open to challenge and transformation (Epp and Price 2018). Similarly, what it means to go to a zoo or circus as a family, plan a family wedding, or deal with an aging parent is also undergoing potent re-examination. Families and their practices are different and arguably more diverse than they were in the past, and retailers have many opportunities to strategically align their roles with these changes. We provide numerous examples of where conventional scripts may be open for new scrutiny and revision. We challenge retailers to identify alignment frames that are elastic, flexible, and inclusive to a diverse range of enacted collective practices and journeys. They can bring to fields of alignment new opportunities for consumers to connect not just with the firm but with each other. Research in the context of social movements supports that elastic, flexible, and inclusive frames can mobilize and transform practices, although this has not been examined in the context of retailer? consumer interactions (Snow, Vliegenthart, and Ketelaars 2019). How can retailers create alignments that mobilize rewarding consumer experiences? Retailer roles and consumer practices often fail to align because social actors have differing assumptions about ??what is going on here??¨and ??what does it mean??¨; operate with different logics or goals; or have taken-for-granted and ??sticky?¨practices that conflict with the dynamic, complex character of social life (Snow, Vliegenthart, and Ketelaars 2019). Notably, flexibility is a key element of each role. For the central role, it?¨s vital that retailers exhibit flexibility to allow for a range of ideal enactments to occur. For mediated roles, the customer experience recognize family members as essential actors.

That is, retailers privilege the dyadic relationship between firms and customers rather than attending to the dynamic, elective family members who are a fundamental part of many consumer journeys. Even most commercial ethnographic customer research (which prides itself on a cultural lens) is oriented around understanding and empathizing with an individual sovereign consumer (Arnould and Cayla 2015). To create opportunities for alignment, retailers should determine which touchpoints represent a central component of value co-creation for the collective practice that characterizes the journey. What value is being created through these touchpoints (e.g., managing heterogeneity, facilitating relationships, coordinating across providers)? Does the value the retailer is contributing align with the collective practice? Answering these questions requires an understanding of both the enacted and desired collective practice. For example, both parents and retailers may frame grocery stores as inhospitable to family shopping, but what are the taken-for-granted assumptions that impose this meaning? Could a new collective frame accent, highlight, and make salient new retailer roles to support collective journeys—such as the mediating roles foregrounded in many county fairs and farmers’ markets? We have argued in this paper that one ready source of field alignment for retailers is to systematically ask ‘who is on this journey,’ ‘for which segments,’ and ‘how important is their participation to the value created.’ A poignant example is to consider the flow of family engagement across the touchpoints of a child’s illness in a children’s hospital and how family participation grows and shrinks around the moments of that illness, variously including one or both parents; parents and siblings; parents, siblings; other family members and close friends (Silvis 2013). We posit that strategic consideration of journey participants can dramatically shape how retailers define roles and opportunities. This guideline is useful for each of the three retailer roles, and can also help inform opportunities for retailer movement across roles. Second, consider how market competitiveness might be enhanced (rather than diminished) by amplification of a collective frame. Different logics and goals are replete in failures to align retailer roles and collective practices. We have highlighted the heterogeneity of goals within consumer collectives, but also their many desires to journey together. As noted above, because retailers typically adopt an individual consumer frame they are often oblivious to where and when the most prized customer experience is the opportunity to “be a family” (Epp and Price 2008; Epp and Price 2011). In addition, retailers may emphasize logics and goals that constrain improvisational opportunities for field alignment. For example, adopting a frame of space optimization, shopping efficiency, or protection of intellectual property can tightly and inflexibly couple retail platform design to practices that are antithetical to collective practices. Thus, a ready source for field alignment is to ask how logics for performance evaluation might frame opportunities for collective value to emerge. Can we create logics for performance evaluation that foreground communal goals such as facilitating family relationships or coordinating across providers? Of course, issues of space, efficiency and so forth may still be important, but flexibility may enable retailers to think about their roles beyond their

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current boundaries. For example, retailers should think about how to share intellectual property within close, elective, and dynamic family groupings and make that easy and seamless, while at the same time constraining broad violations of intellectual property. Naturally, the stickiness of institutions is important in this context. However, before acquiescing to institutional norms, retailers need to recognize the economic and consumer well-being payoff of framing around consumers’ collective journeys on their platforms. There are many retail platforms where market competitiveness might be improved (rather than diminished) by amplification of a collective frame that invigorates values around enhancing collective journeys. We give a few examples in in this paper, but there are likely many others hidden because retailers fail to consider other logics and goals. Finally, our framework transcends taken-for-granted assumptions about families and retailer roles. We emphasize the importance of creating flexible frames that transcend conventional family and retailer scripts. Throughout our exposition we have highlighted not just rituals and traditions of collectives, but change and resilience. As marketers, we often focus on the material components of practices underscoring their enduring quality and iconic properties (Price 2013). Nevertheless, consumers are remarkably improvisational in bringing new material resources and competencies to the problem of enacting family practices (Cross and Gilly 2014; Epp, Schau, and Price 2014; Epp and Velagaleti 2014; Thomas and Epp 2019). The goal to ‘be together’ can transcend changes in material actors, competences, distances, and modalities. We invite retailers to experiment with new platforms that accommodate evolving and unforeseen collective goals. Should retailers act as mediators and design game platforms such as Fortnite to enable parents to move in and out of participation with their children in some mutually reinforcing, elective way? Or is this an unwinnable war as some framings of this platform would suggest (Morris 2018)? If retailers question taken for granted assumptions, they can create win–win scenarios that emphasize stretching and morphing around changing family relations. Rather than viewing normative violations as threats to ‘business as usual’ retailers can embrace the new practice enactments afforded by new material actors. For example, it is easy to see augmented reality, virtual reality, robots, and smart devices such as Alexa and Google home in dyadic relational terms (cf. Hoffman and Novak 2017), but there are also numerous opportunities to envision these material actors in broader relational terms in service to collective journeys. How might retailer roles shift as Alexa reconfigures a family’s grocery shopping, for example? Within fields of alignment, retailers and consumers can experiment with revised collective practices and reimagine the core values retailers bring to the collective journey. Future Research Opportunities In addition to provoking changes to retailer practices and inviting mangers to imagine a different way of aligning with a family’s collective journey, our framework also opens up new avenues for future research. In particular, thinking about collective journeys as emerging from the interplay of collective

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dynamics, consumer practices, and retailer roles highlights several important avenues for future research in the areas of practice theory, consumer experiences, and journey metrics and value perceptions (see Table 1). Practice theory Future research should explore the role of heterogeneity in envisioned practices and how this connects to practice enactment opportunities. Until recently, an underlying assumption of practice theory is that the meanings attributed to a practice are shared by those performing the practice (Reckwitz 2002; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). Our framework, and some emerging work in the area of practice theory, however, call this assumption into question (Thomas and Epp 2019; Warde 2005) and describes how, within collective practices, there exists significant heterogeneity (Thomas, Price, and Schau 2013). Future research should seek to understand this heterogeneity and how it impacts retailer roles. For those in a central role, researchers should explore how these retailers can co-author scripts that cater to heterogeneous collectives. This work will help us understand how practices, at both the enactment and social levels, shift and change. It will also provide insights into how the marketplace can take a more active role in shaping social practices, instead of merely supporting them. For mediated roles, researchers should examine how agency is distributed across connections in a journey. Here, given that the retailers are not ‘the main event,’ questions emerge as to who controls the practice and who has the agency to alter practices to fit consumer needs. The locus of agency within a practice is an area of research that has received little attention but is of vital importance—future research should explore the ways that retailers can either enhance or constrain consumers’ agency in collective journeys. This kind of exploration will foreground issues of agency in collective practices and help us better understand their dynamics. Finally, examining heterogeneity within the dispersed role focuses research on the long-term nature of practices and will help improve our understanding of the evolution and interaction of practices. Conceptualizing practices as long-term enactments without a consistent set of players, as is the case with a dispersed role, is a novel way to think about practices. Exploring this role in more detail will allow researchers to track the ebb and flow of various providers throughout a collective journey, and highlight the challenges and obstacles that may inhibit these practices over time. Here, we anticipate seeing both structural obstacles and collective dynamics disrupting practices. Consumer experiences A recurring theme in our discussion of collective journeys is that designing consumer experiences that facilitate collective, as opposed to just individual, practices may bring substantial advantages to retailers. This calls for research into consumer experience design that offers direction to retailers on how to reimagine, and redesign, experiences to accommodate and support collective journeys.

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Table 1 Future research opportunities. Core Research Focus

Central Questions

Mediated Questions

Dispersed Questions

Practice Theory

Understanding the heterogeneity in envisioned practices and how that connects to practice enactment opportunities.

Explore how retailers can coauthor scripts for emerging collective practices.

Study heterogeneity in how agency is distributed across connections for a mediated journey.

Consumer Experiences

Redesign experiences to accommodate and support collective journeys.

How do we design services, retail spaces, and customer experiences around the relationships that we want to enable?

Journey Metrics and Perceptions of Value

Redefine the metrics used to assess success.

How do existing touchpoints support or detract from collective journeys? What kinds of touch points can be added to support collective journeys? What are the value-added elements of a collective journey?

Build an understanding of practices as long-term enactments without a consistent set of players to document the challenges and obstacles in the process that inhibit the collective journey. How do we build cohesive touchpoints over time that account for, and facilitate, the ebb and flow of consumers and retailers through a journey?

From the perspective of retailers in a central role, it is important to explore how existing touchpoints either support or detract from collective journeys, and determine what kinds of touchpoints need to be added to support a collective. Retailers could begin by examining how various touchpoints are aligned with the goals of the collective, as well as the individual and relational goals of those who comprise the collective (Epp and Price 2011). For retailers in a mediated role, researchers should shift their focus away from the individual consumer, or even the product offering, and explore how retailers can build affordances into the consumer experiences that promote and support relationship building. For example, accessible playgrounds that accommodate a wide range of differences in ability allow siblings and families to play together in new ways (Barber 2018). Foregrounding connectedness also could transform how collectives engage with art galleries, museum tours, and theaters when the emphasis moves toward facilitating relationships. Thinking about creative ways to design retail places to promote inclusivity is vital. That is, processes for designing customer experiences need to start with the relationships, and build out to the service. This will require research into not only a redesign of the functional and aesthetic arrangements of these new spaces, but also into the processes through which customer experience designers reimagine what is possible—How would the process look different if retailers designed around the collective and connectedness, rather than around the key provider or service offering? Focusing on the dispersed role illuminates the need for future research that focuses on the dynamic nature of touchpoints over time. Adopting this longitudinal perspective brings to the fore open questions about how retailers can maintain connections with customers and other retailers over time, as well as how customer experience designers can account for an ever-changing set of actors that ebb and flow through a collective journey. Researchers should explore what kinds of mechanisms can help retailers achieve their goals in a dispersed role, as well as how

What are the potential value tradeoffs between increasing sharing capabilities at the expense of protecting offerings?

What is the equity in playing the dispersed role in a collective journey?

they can overcome obstacles that will invariably emerge as the practice unfolds. Journey metrics and perceptions of value The final area of research motivated by our framework is consumer journey metrics. By conceptualizing both what a consumer journey looks like, as well as what constitutes consumer journey success, it is vital for researchers to develop ways to measure the extent to which retailer interventions are achieving the desired results. As we have noted previously, this may require completely rethinking what constitutes value and how that relates to measures of performance. Across all three roles, it is imperative that firms incorporate collective dimensions into their calculations of customer value (Kumar 2018). Too often, firms rely on individual level factors to assess value, obscuring the extent to which collective behaviors (e.g., referrals, sharing of experiences) impact long-term value, as well as the value of the collective as a whole (Petersen et al. 2009; Verhoef et al. 2010). For retailers in a central role, research should explore how to identify and measure the value-added elements of a collective journey. In doing so, researchers should take on multiple perspectives and build measures that assess the alignment between envisioned and enacted practices and retail offerings. For example, researchers could adapt measures that assess how easily a consumer can find a particular brand in a retail environment (Ailawadi and Farris 2017) to assess the ease with which a collective can move through a particular journey. Likewise, researchers should explore how making retail environments more conducive to collective journeys can enhance store traffic and dwell time, both of which are tied to profitability. Designing metrics for mediated journeys is also essential. With mediated journeys, one intuitive benefit researchers might assess is the extent to which supporting the relationships of a collective enhances referrals and a firm’s ability to use those relationships to attract other valuable customers (Verhoef et al.

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2010). Assessing the value of the shareability of journeys, however, presents a particularly interesting complication. In this regard, retailers would benefit from shifting their focus away from policies that inhibit sharing to instead adopt policies that enable sharing. This focus problematizes the metrics used to measure success, as retailers make tradeoffs between enabling sharing which could lead to gaining new customers from unexpected places, and protecting intellectual property and copyright. Developing metrics that allow retailers to better understand these tradeoffs will help retailers gain traction in this kind of role. Finally, future research should also look at understanding the equity associated with playing a dispersed role in a collective journey. For example, what value is derived from being able to define which retailers are included in a journey? Or in playing the coordinator role amongst a group of retailers? We encourage researchers to think creatively, for example, about how we can adapt the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of multiand omni-challenge distribution systems to that of a dispersed network of retailers (Ailawadi and Farris 2017). Building on prior work on coopetition (Varman and Costa 2009) may also provide a jumping off point for researchers to better understand the dynamics of this (potential) competitive advantage, where firms work together to create value across a collective journey. We also encourage researchers to adopt a long-term view of journeys, in contrast to the shorter focus that tends to dominate current metrics (Katsikeas et al. 2016). Conclusion In conclusion, we want to emphasize how important it is for retailers to consider collective journeys as a consequential and distinct aspect of their offerings. Here, retailers need to account for shifting macro trends and collective practice dynamics, while also adopting a consumer perspective that allows them to envision how their platforms can support, match, and perhaps even define, collective journeys. In this paper, we have provided an account of collective practices, informed by social practice theory, which enhances our understanding of the journeys consumers perform as a collective and outlines what retailers should consider when working with collective journeys. While we have used families as our focal collective, a collective journey perspective can extend beyond families to any collective that holds a shared identity and has communal goals. For example, friend groups, teams, consumption communities, or employees may journey together. Our work invites retailers to make strategic choices about the roles they play and how they can, and should, structure their offerings to match families’ collective journeys. We highlight the need for retailers to be cognizant, and perhaps even strategic, about how they may shift between roles. Consumers are more empowered in the marketplace, and technology is increasingly putting retailers in mediated and/or dispersed roles. It is important for retailers to focus on these emergent roles to better serve the needs of their market. Finally, we encourage retailers to take advantage of fields of alignment where they can shed many of the shackles of legacy practices that hinder a collective focus and embrace collaboration with collectives.

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Executive summary The purpose of this paper is to critically examine collective journeys as they unfold within and across retailing contexts. In these journeys, members of a collective, who are united by a shared collective identity and communal goals, perform a journey together. We chose families as our focal collective because many family experiences take place as collective journeys (e.g., taking vacations, going out to dinner, facing a health crisis, setting up a household, pursuing parenthood, or taking a trip to the zoo). Even when a journey appears as an individual endeavor, various relationships are often implicated in the experience. For example, a parent’s trip to the grocery store to feed the family is only an individual consumer journey on the surface. Upon closer examination, we observe that feeding the family is a collective pursuit that involves invisible tensions and negotiations that parents manage within the supermarket aisle. Current consumer journey frameworks, however, lack a clear understanding of the journeys consumers perform as a collective. First, existing frameworks do not account for the influence of shifting macro trends that impact, and disrupt, collective practices. Second, with an implicit assumption that individuals are the focal entity for consumer journeys, existing scholarship has neglected the influence of collective dynamics. Third, existing frameworks focus on retailer-controlled touchpoints instead of the consumer experience as a whole. To redress these gaps, we adopt a social practice theory lens, informed by consumer research related to the dynamics of collectives (i.e., identity goals, connectedness, and corporeality), to describe what retailers should consider when designing collective journeys. We identify three roles retailers play in collective journeys: central, mediated, and dispersed. In the central role, retailers are essential to the consumer practice and the collective journey is contained within the retail setting (e.g., a Disney world vacation or shopping for a wedding dress). In this role, the retailer is ‘the main event’ and the retailer’s core value offering is driven by how well the retailer is able to design an experience that matches consumers’ idealized views of the practice. In the mediated role, retailers shift to a supporting role by facilitating collective practices that help orchestrate connections between family members, frequently across time zones and distances. In this role, the retailer needs to realize that ‘It’s not all about me.’ Here, the core value offering is derived from facilitating collective experiences. Finally, in the dispersed role, retailers are just one of many providers in a collective journey. The focus is on being a ‘team player’ with value being derived from the degree to which the retailer is able to coordinate across providers. In each role, retailers are faced with a unique set of challenges and opportunities. To help embrace these opportunities, we introduce the idea of ‘fields of alignment’ as the social spaces where retailers and consumers actively negotiate, improvise, and experiment to align around common frames for action. Within these spaces, retailers and collectives can work together to design journeys that meet their needs. By embracing this collaborative view, and recognizing the unique patterns of interactions that emerge from understanding collective dynamics and retailers’

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