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Servicescapes
Servicescapes: From Modern Non-Places to Postmodern Common Places Ve´ronique Aubert-Gamet IAE MONTPELLIER II
Bernard Cova EAP PARIS
Of the many questions confronting services management and marketing in the 1990s, one seems characteristic of the European thought and linked with the emergent postmodern condition: is it possible to push the boundaries of services marketing beyond the individual level of analysis in order to increase our understanding of consumer behavior? In this article, it is advocated that modern consumption has emphasized essentially the use-value of services. Postmodern consumption can be said, on the contrary, to crown a forgotten element: the social link. Thus, it emphasizes the linking value of services. The ability of the physical environment, or servicescape, to influence consumer behavior is stressed: it can assume a facilitator role by encouraging and nurturing particular forms of social interaction among customers; it has a linking value. Consequently, it is proposed that companies have to manage servicescapes not only as nonplaces of economic servuction but also as common places of societal ritualization. J BUSN RES 1999. 44.37–45. 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.
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ervice providers spend millions of dollars each year designing, building, and refurbishing service settings. Yet service providers do not generally engage in a systematic approach that enables them to determine the appropriate mix of environmental factors that may influence the customer’s decision. The issue is to understand why services marketers resist marketing models and techniques that have been developed to manage the physical environment while there is a common agreement that services settings are the ‘‘physical evidences’’ that marketers should manage (Berry and Parasuraman, 1991). Indeed, physical evidence is often referred to as the environment in which the service is delivered that facilitates the performance and communication of the service (Eiglier and Langeard, 1987). Physical evidence is assumed to be important because in the absence of a material product, customers use tangible cues to assess the quality of service Address correspondence to Bernard Cova, EAP Paris, 6, Av. de la Porte de Champerret, 75838 Paris Cedex 17, France. Journal of Business Research 44, 37–45 (1999) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010
provided. Thus, it is claimed that the more intangible a service is, the greater the need to provide tangible, physical evidence is (Shostack, 1977). The physical environment itself is considered as instrumental in customers’ assessment of the quality and level of service they can expect, and consequently in customer satisfaction in service business such as restaurants, retail stores, and banks (Gummesson, 1993). One possible explanation to the resistance of the practitioners may be found in the lack of a robust theoretically based framework that could support managerial decisions regarding the servicescape. In fact, the effect of physical settings, or atmospherics (Kotler, 1973), or servicescapes (Bitner, 1992), is recognized and mentioned in virtually all marketing and retailing texts. However, the impact of a specific design or design change on consumers of the facility is not fully understood because of an overemphasis of research on behavioral approaches (Bitner, 1992). The impact is still very uncertain. One other explanation is to be sought in the emergence of the so-called postmodernity, which is considered as an epochal shift or break from modernity involving the emergence of a new social condition with paramount consequences on consumer behavior (Featherstone, 1991). These trends are not already reflected in marketing models and theories (Brown, 1995) and that adds to the uncertainty surrounding the use of servicescapes in managerial models. Thus postmodern conditions call for major transformations in the way marketing is practised, theorized, researched and evaluated (Firat et al., 1995; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). Particularly, it is recommended to direct the attention toward the phenomenon of community, often considered to be of immense social importance in a postmodern era (‘‘the time of the tribes,’’ Maffesoli, 1996), yet curiously neglected within marketing theory (Gainer, 1995). Some researchers, especially in the area of services marketing, have tried to introduce notions such as ‘‘communitas’’ (Arnould and Price, 1993) or ‘‘communality’’ (Goodwin, 1994) in their research design to get a better grasp of emotional and communal phenomena of consumption of ISSN 0148-2963/99/$–see front matter PII S0148-2963(97)00176-8
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services. It is even claimed that the postmodern individual seeks out service settings less for their use-value (functional or symbolic) than for their ‘‘linking value’’ (Cova, 1997) in order to satisfy his/her need for community. Globally, the new tribalism that characterizes postmodernity seems to necessitate a redefinition of the role and the value of servicescapes, the latter having to serve as much the service’s process as the community link. This article first briefly presents an overview of research on the physical environment in services marketing to bring to light the limits of behavioral approaches in a postmodern context and, consequently, the emergence of alternatives approaches. Then, on a basis of an ethnosociological approach, it opposes non-places inherited from modernity to common places, relics of tradition, or postmodern endeavors. Finally, some ideas for managers are developed on the basis of an inductive approach of two case studies on shopping mall and hotel facilities.
From Modern Atmospherics to Postmodern Mist Although often described as a topic of major relevance since the beginning of the 1970s (‘‘atmospheric as a marketing tool,’’ Kotler, 1973), the role of physical settings has only recently received specific attention in services marketing management (Aubert-Gamet, 1992; Baker, 1986; Bitner, 1992), whereas it has been the focus of considerable attention within the marketing strategies of shopping centers and retailers (Grossbart et al., 1975; Donovan and Rossiter, 1982; Sommer and Atkeins, 1982) as dynamic parts of their selling strategies (Markin et al., 1976). Because shopping behavior represents a response to the perceived nature of retail environments as well as to the mixed goods and services found within those environments, understanding the nature and role played by physical settings has been pointed out as a major retailing tool by environmental psychologists and their marketing followers. In their 1982 Journal of Retailing article, Donovan and Rossiter (1982) suggested that consumer behavior in a retail store was primarily an emotional response to the factors making up the retail environment. Using a stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) paradigm, they adapted measures developed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) to model the relationship between environmental factors and consumer behavior. Specifically, environmental stimuli are said to affect the emotional states of pleasure and arousal, which, in turn, affect approach or avoidance behaviors. The stimulus factors are physical features (e.g., color, store layout, lighting, music, etc.) in the environment. The emotional states that are induced by the physical environment are pleasure and arousal. Approach behavior includes a willingness or desire to move toward and explore the environment (e.g., propensity to buy). A limitation of Donovan and Rossiter’s (1982) study is that store atmosphere is examined at a global level and that it does not offer guide-
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lines to retailers regarding which environmental elements create the different types of affective response. Consequently, other researchers have focused upon the effects of specific stimuli, for example colors (Bellizzi et al., 1983), lighting (Areni and Kim, 1994), and music (Bruner, 1990), on customer behavior. Another stream of environmental psychology applied to store atmosphere is related to the cognitive approach. Some central questions in environmental cognition concern the nature of cognitive maps, the process of acquiring and forming such maps and the use of cognitive maps in processes such as way findings and other spatial behavior. As a consequence, the goal of retail studies (Grossbart et al., 1975; Sommer and Atkeins, 1982) is to learn the accuracy with which consumers are able to locate products in the store interior and how that accuracy is affected by physical features. Globally, environmental psychology made a valuable contribution to the investigation of store atmosphere and the role of physical settings on customer behavior, but it failed to integrate the customer and other customers as components of the environment. Furthermore, it did not take into consideration the interactive process likely to take place between people and tangible elements and focused predominantly on the effects of surroundings (Baker et al., 1992). In addition, research results appear to be peculiar and to make difficult attempts to generalize. As a result, every servicescape may be managed one after the other as a unique and specific entity. Given the complexity of customer-servicescape relationships, alternative approaches that borrow concepts and methods from anthropology (Belk et al., 1988), ecology (Bloch et al., 1994), sociology (Goodwin, 1994), or semiotics (Floch, 1988) have been considered as appropriate to enhance customer-environment interaction research (Bitner, 1992; Everett et al., 1994). Taken as a whole, they present a reversal in the way of looking at the customer-servicescape interaction: • the environment is no longer considered only as a defined stimuli but also partly as a personal construct; • the environment is not only spatial but also social (a sociospatial construct) • the consumer is an active part of the environment. These alternative approaches integrate the growing interest in the postmodern consumer to become part of processes and to experience immersion into thematic settings with others rather than merely to encounter finished products (AubertGamet, 1996; Firat et al., 1995). They considered physical surroundings not only as physical support or physical evidence of the service but as social artifacts, that is as evocative backgrounds for human activities. These approaches on servicescapes inscribed themselves in the stream of research on the extended service encounter as an ‘‘extraordinary experience’’ (Arnould and Price, 1993) that is characterized by high levels of emotional intensity and experience through personal
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interaction, rites, and creation of communal relationships (Gainer, 1995). More precisely, it is said (Featherstone, 1991; Maffesoli, 1996; Sennett, 1990) that in a predominantly postmodern society, the individual, after having tasted the ambiguous fruits of liberty and solitary consumption in huge depersonalizing modern megapolises, is searching for the meaning he/she can give to his/her life through shared emotion with others. The indifferent world, following in the wake of modernity, and particularly the servicescapes of urban civilization do not facilitate the task of this identity-seeking individual: they were, for the most part, conceived for a modern individual who wanted to be liberated from others and not for a postmodern individual who wishes to form links with others. By advocating that the physical environment can assume a facilitator role by encouraging and nurturing particular forms of social interaction among and between customers and employee (it has a linking value!), this postmodern argument adds uncertainty to the impact of physical settings on customer satisfaction. Thus, the manager has now to face a more elaborate repertoire of questions concerning servicescape, but still has little response. Modern atmospherics has moved into a postmodern mist. In a tangible and operational way, in order to understand if servicescapes can support the social link in a postmodern society, and thus make constructive proposals for the management of servicescapes, it is necessary to consider the way in which service places produced the social link in the traditional world and what became of this link in modernity and then in postmodernity. To do so, we shall refer to works of anthropology and urban ethnology, of ethnology of the present day and of sociology of daily life, grouped together, in France, under the term ethnosociology of the present day (Barreyre, 1993).
Modern Non-Places or the Vanishing of the Linking Value The broader, latent, linking function of commercial and service places returns us to the historic importance of the marketplace as a meeting place, a site of communications and social exchange. Market days have long been social occasions. The same has been true of stores. This latent linking function or community role of service places has been investigated by many sociological researchers, starting with the school of thought from Chicago. Lefebvre (1974) calls this the sense of ‘‘social centrality,’’ which characterizes those good urban spaces Whyte (1980) calls ‘‘schmoozing’’ spaces. Service places can be said to support specific ‘‘behavior settings’’ (Barker, 1968) of a community nature. Barker (1968) implies that recurring social behavior patterns are associated with particular settings and that when people encounter typical settings, their social behaviors can be predicted. Thus, community encounters are associated with particular service settings. Noschis (1984) in his remarkable study of the emotional
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significance of the traditional district (in Venice) shows how some places, which he qualifies as service places (i.e., the shop, the pub, the wash-house), possess a linking function for the community of the district that is at least as important as their use-value. It is as if these places had a key for contact that allows a co-presence in a ritualized framework where the interactions between individuals give rise to emotionally charged experiences that constitute and fuel the identity of the inhabitants: • in the local shop, ‘‘strings are pulled by the shopkeeper or the salesperson who spends his/her day in contact with people whose habits and expectations he/she quickly learns to know . . . . Shopping in the local shop is therefore a privileged opportunity for meeting where the initial exchange is ritualized. It is true that this possibility only exists if the shops of the district are used daily by a large number of inhabitants and not, as often tends to become the case, when it is only a question of local shops being used for additional items. In the first case, customers have the opportunity, while waiting to be served, to chat with each other and to comment on the salesperson’s remarks about the degree of freshness of the fruit and vegetables . . . . These instants are moments of presence during which the inhabitant is confronted with his/her identity in relation to the district’’ (Noschis, 1984, pp. 76–77); • in the local pub, a place of consumption but above all the privileged scene of meetings between men, ‘‘one leans on the bar, eats a hardboiled egg on it, makes the talk drag on with the owner when wanting to keep one’s distance from the pub community, from these groups of men who, very quickly, take over the individual, become his memory, leaving him little opportunity to the other than the card player or the conversation partner of the neighbor who recognized him’’ (Noschis, 1984, p. 109); • at the wash-house, ‘‘one is in a group, passing on information, during the washing and during the coffee breaks. The peddler and fortune tellers pass by. Women dance with each other. It is a women’s place, where people protect and help one another for example when an abortion is needed. The wash-house appears to offer a real opportunity for social life’’ (Noschis, 1984, p. 111). In these three examples, as in others (the town square, the landing stage, etc.), Noschis (1984) demonstrates that what he calls extensions of the home are privileged places for the exercise of the social link. They are common places, neither public nor private. The extension of the home is private space extended into public space by material or immaterial extensions that protect the intimacy of individuals while partially exposing it. The washing lines can almost serve as a metaphor here: washing lines between the houses in the old districts of the town are the extensions of the home on which private
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undergarments are exposed, whereas the rest of one’s private life is protected behind the walls of the house. Thus, in the modern world, the ideal norm has become that of a home where everything that concerns the upkeep of the family takes place between four walls: the washing machine replaces the wash-house, the tumble drier replaces the washing lines between houses, the television replaces the cinema, the fax replaces the mail, the telephone replaces the local square. Perhaps the Walkman is the ultimate example of this modern phenomenon: everyone hears his/her own music behind the headphones and disconnected from others. In modern towns (and even villages), the extensions of the home are no longer places where domestic activities are carried out together with the neighbors, but they are increasingly places where specialized services can be bought. In a community perspective of social links, the concept of extension of the home is therefore losing its meaning. Other forms of encounter are replacing this—their main characteristic is that they are leisure activities, opportunities for sharing but around activities that are no longer necessarily for the upkeep of the home and that consequently do not expose people, neither do they force people to share aspects of daily family life. This progressive disappearance of common places, in the modern world, is compensated by the proliferation of what Auge´ (1992) calls non-places, places of anonymity where the individual is alone in the crowd. ‘‘Non-places are both the infrastructures necessary for the rapid circulation of people and goods (motorways, stations, airports) and the means of transport themselves (cars, trains or airplanes). Not to mention the big hotel chains with identical rooms, the supermarkets or, of a different order, the overflowing transit camps where the refugees of the planet are parked. The non-place is therefore quite the opposite of a dwelling, of a home, of a place in the common sense of the term. Alone, but like the others, the user of the non-place keeps up a contractual relationship with the latter, symbolized by the train or air ticket, by the card presented at the motorway toll, or even by a trolley pushed along the aisles of a superstore’’ (Auge´, 1992, p. 121). It is in this way that conditions of circulation are set up in areas where individuals are only meant to interact with texts stated by legal entities or institutions (airlines, traffic police, banks, hotel chains); this is the case for all the information technology–based service encounters. All these disembodied service experiences do not contribute to the construction of the specific identity of an individual, they lead to the emergence of the modern average man. Non-places welcome every day more and more individuals who leave behind their identity at the entrance barrier. In traditional places, all inhabitants recognized each other, knew what they could or should do, and what relationships they could develop with each other. On the contrary, in modern non-places, the individual finds neither the landmarks for a lost identity nor the conditions of an interaction or a dialogue with others. People are not necessarily unhappy in these circumstances but they are alone.
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Postmodern Common Places or the Return of the Community Link Modern non-places do not therefore cover the whole of the city today, and the postmodern individual is desperately searching for common places, inherited from the tradition or postmodern endeavors. Maffesoli (1990), in his study of the hidden centrality of megapolises, analyzes what is at play in postmodern places If we only observe the physical characteristics of the megapolis, we may only notice a sort of gregarian solitude which constitutes it while there is a multiplicity of networks which give a symbolic order to the tenuous but solid channels. I call that the subterranean centrality . . . . So, it can be said that the megapolis is made up of a succession of holy places in the religious sense of the term where different forms of cult take place: of the body, of sex, of the image, of friendship, of food, of sport . . . the list is infinite. The common denominator is the place where the cult is practised. The town is dotted with small holy places which have the same function: the mysteries of communication-communion are played out their. It might be the local bar, the bar where the ‘‘tierce´’’ is played, the local square, the public benches of the pedestrian precincts, enclosed areas or open spaces, the grocery store or the busy streets where the neighbors congregate. There are also the specific places such as gymnasiums where collective body-building goes on, or political committee rooms where the collective future of society and individuals careers are decided. There are the meeting places of charitable associations and all the clubs which bring people together on the basis of ideology, religion, or friendship, and where people come to touch, more or less euphemistically, this other with whom the work he/she lives in is made (Maffesoli, 1990, pp. 215–216). Our contemporary postmodern towns can therefore be understood as a juxtaposition of these tribal places, of these places that form links. They are places where it is possible to recognize oneself while identifying oneself with a community, places where without being in control of the future, the present is looked after. So, in postmodernity, we can stipulate that service places do not necessarily isolate but can, on the contrary, become vectors of communion; like totems for primitive tribes, they can be poles of attraction for postmodern tribes. They can be divided into two categories: closed places reserved for certain tribes or even traditional communities (private clubs), and open places (launderette, cafe´, restaurant) that form the common space between private and public. Closed places are anchoring places where people put down roots, where a community forms and keeps itself alive. The postmodern example given most often is that of fashionable and therefore ephemeral places that serve as identity markers for gangs of teenagers (night clubs). Open places represent exposure places where
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the link is formed, that is to say places where individuals can be exposed with a limited risk (Sennett, 1990). There, they are neither exactly at home, nor exactly in the homes of others, and, in any case, certainly not nowhere, in the anthropological sense, that is to say in a non-place. In our opinion, the extensions of the home are the pre-modern model of exposure places. The postmodern model of exposure places, or neoextension of the home, remains to be invented in order to be developed in the design of servicescapes to gain a linking value.
Adding Linking Value to Servicescapes: Two Case Studies The Call of the Mall Of all servicescapes, shopping malls and superstores are the first to have been the object of ethnosociological investigations. These investigations aim to understand the role that shopping malls can play in the destruction (Pe´ron, 1993), the construction (Shields, 1992b), or the virtualization (Belk and Bryce, 1993) of social links of a community type. For Pe´ron (1993), the societal role of retail today is catastrophic. Previously retail was the heart of the city and the support of social exchanges, it gave an identity to districts, towns and cities, but today it is one of the most active agents of the destruction of landscapes, of the impoverishment of social links in the neighborhood, and of the aggravation of the logic of segregation. Zones of retailing activity with the anarchical juxtaposition of cut price factory sales outlets proliferate on the outskirts of towns and disfigure them. As if to counteract such degenerations, town centers are filling up with luxury stores . . . . The disappearance of local service stations, of professionalism and the social role of shopkeepers, of salespersons, the impoverishment of the forms of social life associated with the neighborhood and everyday life, and with the interpersonal and community exchanges which are indispensable to the maintenance of close links of solidarity (Pe´ron, 1993, p. 300). In fact, the success of discount (and particularly of the socalled ‘‘hard discounters’’ is at least partly due to the decline of social links and to a kind of loss of city life. In this logic, it is not only exploitation costs in the organization of the distribution channels that are saved, but the price of all values linked to service, the words exchanged during the service encounter, the urbanity, and the sense of community. In a less negative fashion, but without illusion, Belk and Bryce (1993, p. 293) note that In a fruitless effort to escape from our increasingly privatized and fragmented lives, we go to the mall to experience at least the illusion of community . . . . We desire to escape the electronic sterility of our homes and join a human community, even if it is a community in which we are
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anonymous actors. Thus, even though the mall is a world of strangers, it provides the illusion of being a community, albeit a community based on shared beliefs in the value of consumption and the shared communion of purchasing the same brands. In an even more positive approach, Shields (1992a) considers that shopping malls, more than superstores, are today diverted from their initial commercial function by postmodern tribes to become privileged places of communication and communion. Indeed, malls have become important meeting places, especially for young people and seniors in North America (Feinberg et al., 1989). Observation of daily life in a shopping mall in France (Cova, 1994) does offer a semblance of social life, even if the overall picture is one of the mediocrity of people exposure and of the unexploited societal capacity, except by tribes of teenagers. The latter occupy certain places in the malls at particular times of day. They have meeting places that they abandon after a few days for other spots in the mall or elsewhere in the surrounding area. They therefore give these places in the mall an often brief existence but one that symbolically and emotionally is that of community. Apart from this adolescent phenomenon, the major expositional tension in the mall is related to a specific spatiotemporal condition: the end of the working day, or lunch break, at the restaurant areas. There are nevertheless privileged places, around the central points of the mall: they are almost obligatory passages where you have more chance of finally meeting up with the person you are looking for. But, on the whole, in spite of and perhaps because of their high level of frequentation, shopping malls offer the specific features of non-places, notably that of people invisibility: a retired couple spends whole days in a shopping mall, going from one seat to another without being spotted by other customers, nor being concerned about being seen by employees of the mall. A middle-aged man, badly dressed (old coat, worn-out tennis shoes) spends a whole afternoon lying on a bench. Once couple goes shopping in bedroom slippers. Nobody sees them. Like non-places, the malls seem to exempt people who frequent them from noticing each other, contrary to Shield’s claim (1992a, b). The climax of this phenomenon is reached at the cashdesks of superstores: whereas in a traditional shop someone who comes in is looked at, recognized, and integrated in the group of people who are buying and chatting around the cashdesk, in superstores, people stand in line, one behind the other, preserving their invisibleness (eyes never meet) and that of others, in front and behind. In this way, all discussion or suggestion of the social link is avoided. In some cases, the customer holds a ticket that indicates clearly that his/her identity is limited to that of a number in the line of one of these non-places. After such observations, the task of mall managers appears immense. But, first of all, they have to wonder if an effort must be made to restore the linking value of these non-places? If so, how can this be done? How can they be transformed,
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even partially, into places of ritualization, into extensions of the home? Some suggest to give priority to the street market or village fair atmosphere or of the North African souk or bazaar (examples: the ‘‘feˆte de la re´ussite’’ of Leroy-Merlin in France or the Iper shops of the Marco Brunelli Group in Italy), which would break with the ordered and sophisticated atmosphere of the mall, with the exchanges that take place between people (the unwrapping of goods, ferreting about in the stalls, chance meetings). It is in this way, rather than by putting theme parks next to them or creating street substitutes inside, that these malls should be enriched. One could also imagine playing with temporality and coupling with these places a series of mini-events that aspire to rebuild the community (Moles and Rohmer, 1982). Some mall managers have already built on this trend by instituting many special events such as home improvement expos, walking clubs, art exhibits, health screening, auto shows, and live music (Bloch et al., 1994). This is what the French chain of shops ‘‘Nature et De´couvertes’’ is trying to do: these stores organize classes, lectures on astronomy, group outings, and even petitions in defense of the environment; in short, any initiative that makes for close contact between clients and their exposure in a place designed to permit quasi-ritualized activities to take place around an ethical theme. In any case, it would appear that solutions to revive the linking value of shopping malls would mix space and time.
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which shuts clients into their cosy and over-equipped bedrooms. From the cocoon-prison to the open-contact type of hotel, the development of societal behaviors is forcing the hotel industry to question its role and to adapt to a new sociocultural framework. When one studies the majority of hotel chains, it appears that, as much because of where they are situated (generally at the edge of the town), as by reason of their design, they resemble non-places more than exposure places. In them, one is nowhere: in Manchester, or in Ve´rona, in Groningen, or in Roissy. But, they also resemble places of protection. Indeed, hotels do not play on the tension between avoidance and alienation of the social link; they are the two extremes at once, without ever being in between the two: the room is a place of protection and the foyer is a non-place resembling an airport lounge. There are very few keys for contact, few extensions of the home that make contact possible; restaurants resemble non-places too closely to assume this role. Some hotel chains, like Campanile in France, are trying to react by transforming the restaurant into an extension of the home where the individual can expose his/her intimacy in a tribal atmosphere: the managers, a young couple, eat with the clients around a big traditional table that facilitates contact and sharing. A whole ritual of integration (Siehl et al., 1990) is observed around the regular customers to make them feel at home, unlike the impersonal atmosphere of a self-service restaurant.
The Bowels of the Hotels Recently, the hotel industry, because of the crisis it has gone through, has been led to question its role in daily sociability. From the results of yearly observations of the International Research Institute on Social Change (RISC), in the framework of its program Anticipating Change in Western Europe (ACE West), which is based on a minimum of 30,000 interviews a year throughout Western Europe, a specific study of the hotel industry has been carried out to identify, out of the 34 Eurotrends defined by ACE West, that which seems best to explain the recession in the hotel industry. It emerges that the hotel industry has not managed to adapt to new sociocultural demands (Semprini, 1992, p. 26): The recession has forced the profession to observe its clients more closely and to discover that, behind the room occupancy rates, there are individuals with needs which differ and develop over time. One sociocultural trend has been neglected by this sector. It could be defined as seeking out socialization, a desire to participate and to remain in contact with others. Often, a client does not choose to remain cloistered in a hotel bedroom but has no choice, for nothing has been done to help him/her find his/her way around a town he/she does not know or to quickly identify activities compatible with his/her timetable and budget. Instead of making the hotel a point of contact with the local environment, those seeking outside contacts are discouraged. On the contrary, a strategy of cocooning is often practiced
Toward a Re-enchantment of Servicescapes An inductive approach based on the two precedent cases makes it possible to give some insights to the manager who wishes to give his/her servicescape a linking value. First, it is necessary to break with the rational and transparent layout of service sites, which tries to optimize the degree of accessibility, of availability, and of functionality of the service provided (use-value for the customer). On the contrary, it is a matter of reintroducing recesses, corners, and curves, fuzziness, enabling people to meet, to get together in a partopen and part-closed space that favors community encounters. The bazaar can be quoted here as a pre-modern reference. Second, it is necessary to break with standardized, ‘‘no surprise’’ service for the consumer (‘‘the best surprise is no surprise’’), which aims to reduce the gap between the service expected by the consumer and the service delivered by the provider (zero defect for the consumer). On the contrary, it is important to reintroduce, in the servicescapes, microevents, incidents, and happenings, making people get together. Street hawkers and strolling players can be used here as pre-modern references. All in all, it is a matter of re-enchanting the disenchanted world of services born of modernity by removing from them a little transparence, rationality, and rigor, which prevent
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Table 1. Managing Servicescapes and Types of Exchanges Type of Marketing
Central Values Economic exchange Socioeconomic exchange Societal exchange
Use-value Use-value 1 linking value with employees Communal linking value
individuals from coming together (use-value versus linking value). The company turns then toward an alternative conception of business, turning away from the principles of direct maximization of profit as such, taking into account a community dimension in the service experience that is not directly oriented toward immediate profit. This dimension transcends the narrow notion of the consumer-employee interaction to encompass all types of interactions in the servicescape and above all moments of shared emotion between consumers, beyond the simple functional phenomenon of helping each other. The result can be even more beneficial for the company as the taking into account of the community (and not only relational) dimension corresponds to postmodern trends in consumption. Therefore, the manager, before taking any steps, must develop a strategic plan on the opportunity of integrating or recognizing the linking value in his/her servicescape. In fact, the physical environment can harbor several types of exchange (Table 1), depending on the nature of the interaction during the service encounter: • totally economic exchanges of a transactional type, for which the consumer seeks essentially use-value. The marketing model corresponding to this type of exchange is transactional marketing born of mass consumption (Kotler, 1994). Self-service is the type of servicescape which translates this model; • socio-economic exchanges, with relational tendency, for which the consumer seeks both use-value and linking value in the interaction with the provider and above all with the employees. The marketing model corresponding to this type of exchange is relational marketing born of the specific trend of services marketing (Gummesson, 1987). Advisory point is the type of servicescape that translates this model; • predominantly societal exchanges (although with economic effects) corresponding to the need of the consumer to form links with other consumers to satisfy his/ her sense of community, for which the consumer seeks essentially a linking value in interacting with other clients, the personnel in contact being a mere mediator and not a substitute (an often unfeasible and counterproductive task). The marketing model corresponding to this type of exchange is the so-called tribal marketing
Ideal Type of Servicescape
Transactional
Self-service
Relational Tribal
Advisory point Bazaar
(Cova, 1997). The bazaar is the type of servicescape that translates this model. The manager can decide, depending on the competence of his/her company and the specific needs of his/her consumers, to favor one type of exchange and to manage the targeted servicescape. He/she can also decide to host the three types of exchange; in this case he/she must work to a polyvalent design of his/her servicescape, which can mix together selfservice, advisory point, and bazaar.
Conclusion On one hand—the ethnosociological point of view—this article advocates that service places might no longer be designed as the modernist non-places of goal-directed individuals and utopian projects; rather, they might be designed as postmodern places of creation and development of social links and communities. On the other hand—the managerial point of view—this article argues that strategies for success in postmodernity are more and more based on the communal quality of the service or its ‘‘linking value.’’ Consequently, it is proposed that companies should regard servicescapes design, and especially the design of common places, as a managerial issue. Thus, the managerial point of view would cope with the social one: companies would owe their livehood to their ability to design common places and consequently to influence the communal quality. This conclusion needs to be tempered by a reflection about the meaning ascribed to servicescapes: it is not the service provider who decrees that his/her servicescape has a linking value, it is the people who are going to experience it who will give it this meaning. Moreover as, in postmodernity, the meanings of servicescapes are no longer fixed and connected with their functions, but free-floating; each individual may ascribe different meanings to the places (Aubert-Gamet, 1996). There is therefore an extreme relativity in the linking value of a service, contrary to its ‘‘universal’’ use-value as it was perceived in modernity. And, consequently, the servicescape is no more evidence that marketers should manage easily. This kind of statement could also be made for the two other categories of services evidence: prices become hyperflexible and the messages of communications evolve into fleeting and fragmented images. Thus, examining the servicescape in postmo-
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dernity could lead us to question the future of the concept of evidence itself in human services management and marketing.
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the Linking Value of Products or Services. European Journal of Marketing 31 (1997): 297–316. Donovan, R. J., and Rossiter, J. R.: Store Atmosphere: An Environmental Approach. Journal of Retailing 58(1) (Spring 1982): 34–57.
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Eiglier, P., and Langeard, E.: Servuction, McGraw Hill, Paris. 1987. Everett, P. B., Pieters, R. G., and Titus, P. A.: The Consumer-Environment Interaction: An Introduction to the Special Issue. International Journal of Research in Marketing 11 (1994): 97–105. Featherstone, M.: Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Sage, London. 1991. Feinberg, R. A., Meoli, J. B., and Sheffler, B.: There’s Something Social Happening at the Mall. Journal of Business and Psychology 4 (Fall 1989): 49–63. Firat, A. F., Dholakia, N., and Venkatesh, A.: Marketing in a Postmodern World. European Journal of Marketing 29(1) (1995): 40–56.
Aubert-Gamet, V.: Twist Again in Services: Diversion of Physical Supports in a Re-Appropriation Process. Proceedings of the 4th International Research Seminar in Service Management, La Londe Les Maures, June 1996, pp. 46–60. Auge´, M.: Non-Lieux: Introduction a` Une Anthropologie de la Surmodernite´, Seuil, Paris. 1992.
Firat, A. F., and Venkatesh, A.: Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption. Journal of Consumer Research 11 (December 1995): pp. 239–267.
Baker, J.: The Role of the Environment in Marketing Services: The Consumer Perspective, in The Service Challenge: Integrating for Competitive Advantage, J. A. Czepeil, C. A. Congram, and J. Shanahan, eds., Chicago, IL. American Marketing Association, 1986, pp. 79–84.
Gainer, B.: Ritual and Relationships: Interpersonal Influences on Shared Consumption. Journal of Business Research 32 (1995): 253– 260.
Baker, J., Grewal, D., and Levy, M.: An Experimental Approach to Making Retail Store Environmental Decisions. Journal of Retailing 68(4) (Winter 1992): 445–460. Barker, R. G.: Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1968.
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Goodwin, C.: Private Roles in Public Encounters: Communal Relationships in Service Exchanges. Proceedings of the 3rd International Research Seminar in Service Management, La Londe les Maures, June 1994, pp. 311–333. Grossbart, S. L., Mittelstaedt, R. A., Curtis, W. W., and Rogers, R. D.: Environmental Sensitivity and Shopping Behavior. Journal of Business Research 3(4) (1975): 281–294.
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Semprini, A.: De l’Hotel Cocon-Prison a` l’Hotel Relais-Contact. Marketing Mix (November 1997): 26. Shostack, L.: Breaking Free from Product Marketing. Journal of Marketing 41 (April 1977): 73–80. Shields, R.: Spaces for the Subject of Consumption, in Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, R. Shields, ed., Routledge, London. 1992A, pp. 1–20. Shields, R.: The Individual Consumption Culture and the Fate of Community, in Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, R. Shields, ed. Routledge, London, 1992b, pp. 99–113.
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Siehl, C., Bowen, D. E., and Pearson, C. M.: The Role of Rites of Integration in Service Delivery, Proceedings of the 1st International Research Seminar in Service Management, La Londe les Maures, June 1990, pp. 617–655. Sommer, R., and Atkeins, S.: Mental Mapping of Two Supermarkets. Journal of Consumer Research 9 (September 1982): 11–215. Whyte, W.: Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Conservation Foundation, Washington, DC. 1980.
Bernard Cova EAP PARIS
Of the many questions confronting services management and marketing in the 1990s, one seems characteristic of the European thought and linked with the emergent postmodern condition: is it possible to push the boundaries of services marketing beyond the individual level of analysis in order to increase our understanding of consumer behavior? In this article, it is advocated that modern consumption has emphasized essentially the use-value of services. Postmodern consumption can be said, on the contrary, to crown a forgotten element: the social link. Thus, it emphasizes the linking value of services. The ability of the physical environment, or servicescape, to influence consumer behavior is stressed: it can assume a facilitator role by encouraging and nurturing particular forms of social interaction among customers; it has a linking value. Consequently, it is proposed that companies have to manage servicescapes not only as nonplaces of economic servuction but also as common places of societal ritualization. J BUSN RES 1999. 44.37–45. 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.
S
ervice providers spend millions of dollars each year designing, building, and refurbishing service settings. Yet service providers do not generally engage in a systematic approach that enables them to determine the appropriate mix of environmental factors that may influence the customer’s decision. The issue is to understand why services marketers resist marketing models and techniques that have been developed to manage the physical environment while there is a common agreement that services settings are the ‘‘physical evidences’’ that marketers should manage (Berry and Parasuraman, 1991). Indeed, physical evidence is often referred to as the environment in which the service is delivered that facilitates the performance and communication of the service (Eiglier and Langeard, 1987). Physical evidence is assumed to be important because in the absence of a material product, customers use tangible cues to assess the quality of service Address correspondence to Bernard Cova, EAP Paris, 6, Av. de la Porte de Champerret, 75838 Paris Cedex 17, France. Journal of Business Research 44, 37–45 (1999) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010
provided. Thus, it is claimed that the more intangible a service is, the greater the need to provide tangible, physical evidence is (Shostack, 1977). The physical environment itself is considered as instrumental in customers’ assessment of the quality and level of service they can expect, and consequently in customer satisfaction in service business such as restaurants, retail stores, and banks (Gummesson, 1993). One possible explanation to the resistance of the practitioners may be found in the lack of a robust theoretically based framework that could support managerial decisions regarding the servicescape. In fact, the effect of physical settings, or atmospherics (Kotler, 1973), or servicescapes (Bitner, 1992), is recognized and mentioned in virtually all marketing and retailing texts. However, the impact of a specific design or design change on consumers of the facility is not fully understood because of an overemphasis of research on behavioral approaches (Bitner, 1992). The impact is still very uncertain. One other explanation is to be sought in the emergence of the so-called postmodernity, which is considered as an epochal shift or break from modernity involving the emergence of a new social condition with paramount consequences on consumer behavior (Featherstone, 1991). These trends are not already reflected in marketing models and theories (Brown, 1995) and that adds to the uncertainty surrounding the use of servicescapes in managerial models. Thus postmodern conditions call for major transformations in the way marketing is practised, theorized, researched and evaluated (Firat et al., 1995; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). Particularly, it is recommended to direct the attention toward the phenomenon of community, often considered to be of immense social importance in a postmodern era (‘‘the time of the tribes,’’ Maffesoli, 1996), yet curiously neglected within marketing theory (Gainer, 1995). Some researchers, especially in the area of services marketing, have tried to introduce notions such as ‘‘communitas’’ (Arnould and Price, 1993) or ‘‘communality’’ (Goodwin, 1994) in their research design to get a better grasp of emotional and communal phenomena of consumption of ISSN 0148-2963/99/$–see front matter PII S0148-2963(97)00176-8
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services. It is even claimed that the postmodern individual seeks out service settings less for their use-value (functional or symbolic) than for their ‘‘linking value’’ (Cova, 1997) in order to satisfy his/her need for community. Globally, the new tribalism that characterizes postmodernity seems to necessitate a redefinition of the role and the value of servicescapes, the latter having to serve as much the service’s process as the community link. This article first briefly presents an overview of research on the physical environment in services marketing to bring to light the limits of behavioral approaches in a postmodern context and, consequently, the emergence of alternatives approaches. Then, on a basis of an ethnosociological approach, it opposes non-places inherited from modernity to common places, relics of tradition, or postmodern endeavors. Finally, some ideas for managers are developed on the basis of an inductive approach of two case studies on shopping mall and hotel facilities.
From Modern Atmospherics to Postmodern Mist Although often described as a topic of major relevance since the beginning of the 1970s (‘‘atmospheric as a marketing tool,’’ Kotler, 1973), the role of physical settings has only recently received specific attention in services marketing management (Aubert-Gamet, 1992; Baker, 1986; Bitner, 1992), whereas it has been the focus of considerable attention within the marketing strategies of shopping centers and retailers (Grossbart et al., 1975; Donovan and Rossiter, 1982; Sommer and Atkeins, 1982) as dynamic parts of their selling strategies (Markin et al., 1976). Because shopping behavior represents a response to the perceived nature of retail environments as well as to the mixed goods and services found within those environments, understanding the nature and role played by physical settings has been pointed out as a major retailing tool by environmental psychologists and their marketing followers. In their 1982 Journal of Retailing article, Donovan and Rossiter (1982) suggested that consumer behavior in a retail store was primarily an emotional response to the factors making up the retail environment. Using a stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) paradigm, they adapted measures developed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) to model the relationship between environmental factors and consumer behavior. Specifically, environmental stimuli are said to affect the emotional states of pleasure and arousal, which, in turn, affect approach or avoidance behaviors. The stimulus factors are physical features (e.g., color, store layout, lighting, music, etc.) in the environment. The emotional states that are induced by the physical environment are pleasure and arousal. Approach behavior includes a willingness or desire to move toward and explore the environment (e.g., propensity to buy). A limitation of Donovan and Rossiter’s (1982) study is that store atmosphere is examined at a global level and that it does not offer guide-
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lines to retailers regarding which environmental elements create the different types of affective response. Consequently, other researchers have focused upon the effects of specific stimuli, for example colors (Bellizzi et al., 1983), lighting (Areni and Kim, 1994), and music (Bruner, 1990), on customer behavior. Another stream of environmental psychology applied to store atmosphere is related to the cognitive approach. Some central questions in environmental cognition concern the nature of cognitive maps, the process of acquiring and forming such maps and the use of cognitive maps in processes such as way findings and other spatial behavior. As a consequence, the goal of retail studies (Grossbart et al., 1975; Sommer and Atkeins, 1982) is to learn the accuracy with which consumers are able to locate products in the store interior and how that accuracy is affected by physical features. Globally, environmental psychology made a valuable contribution to the investigation of store atmosphere and the role of physical settings on customer behavior, but it failed to integrate the customer and other customers as components of the environment. Furthermore, it did not take into consideration the interactive process likely to take place between people and tangible elements and focused predominantly on the effects of surroundings (Baker et al., 1992). In addition, research results appear to be peculiar and to make difficult attempts to generalize. As a result, every servicescape may be managed one after the other as a unique and specific entity. Given the complexity of customer-servicescape relationships, alternative approaches that borrow concepts and methods from anthropology (Belk et al., 1988), ecology (Bloch et al., 1994), sociology (Goodwin, 1994), or semiotics (Floch, 1988) have been considered as appropriate to enhance customer-environment interaction research (Bitner, 1992; Everett et al., 1994). Taken as a whole, they present a reversal in the way of looking at the customer-servicescape interaction: • the environment is no longer considered only as a defined stimuli but also partly as a personal construct; • the environment is not only spatial but also social (a sociospatial construct) • the consumer is an active part of the environment. These alternative approaches integrate the growing interest in the postmodern consumer to become part of processes and to experience immersion into thematic settings with others rather than merely to encounter finished products (AubertGamet, 1996; Firat et al., 1995). They considered physical surroundings not only as physical support or physical evidence of the service but as social artifacts, that is as evocative backgrounds for human activities. These approaches on servicescapes inscribed themselves in the stream of research on the extended service encounter as an ‘‘extraordinary experience’’ (Arnould and Price, 1993) that is characterized by high levels of emotional intensity and experience through personal
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interaction, rites, and creation of communal relationships (Gainer, 1995). More precisely, it is said (Featherstone, 1991; Maffesoli, 1996; Sennett, 1990) that in a predominantly postmodern society, the individual, after having tasted the ambiguous fruits of liberty and solitary consumption in huge depersonalizing modern megapolises, is searching for the meaning he/she can give to his/her life through shared emotion with others. The indifferent world, following in the wake of modernity, and particularly the servicescapes of urban civilization do not facilitate the task of this identity-seeking individual: they were, for the most part, conceived for a modern individual who wanted to be liberated from others and not for a postmodern individual who wishes to form links with others. By advocating that the physical environment can assume a facilitator role by encouraging and nurturing particular forms of social interaction among and between customers and employee (it has a linking value!), this postmodern argument adds uncertainty to the impact of physical settings on customer satisfaction. Thus, the manager has now to face a more elaborate repertoire of questions concerning servicescape, but still has little response. Modern atmospherics has moved into a postmodern mist. In a tangible and operational way, in order to understand if servicescapes can support the social link in a postmodern society, and thus make constructive proposals for the management of servicescapes, it is necessary to consider the way in which service places produced the social link in the traditional world and what became of this link in modernity and then in postmodernity. To do so, we shall refer to works of anthropology and urban ethnology, of ethnology of the present day and of sociology of daily life, grouped together, in France, under the term ethnosociology of the present day (Barreyre, 1993).
Modern Non-Places or the Vanishing of the Linking Value The broader, latent, linking function of commercial and service places returns us to the historic importance of the marketplace as a meeting place, a site of communications and social exchange. Market days have long been social occasions. The same has been true of stores. This latent linking function or community role of service places has been investigated by many sociological researchers, starting with the school of thought from Chicago. Lefebvre (1974) calls this the sense of ‘‘social centrality,’’ which characterizes those good urban spaces Whyte (1980) calls ‘‘schmoozing’’ spaces. Service places can be said to support specific ‘‘behavior settings’’ (Barker, 1968) of a community nature. Barker (1968) implies that recurring social behavior patterns are associated with particular settings and that when people encounter typical settings, their social behaviors can be predicted. Thus, community encounters are associated with particular service settings. Noschis (1984) in his remarkable study of the emotional
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significance of the traditional district (in Venice) shows how some places, which he qualifies as service places (i.e., the shop, the pub, the wash-house), possess a linking function for the community of the district that is at least as important as their use-value. It is as if these places had a key for contact that allows a co-presence in a ritualized framework where the interactions between individuals give rise to emotionally charged experiences that constitute and fuel the identity of the inhabitants: • in the local shop, ‘‘strings are pulled by the shopkeeper or the salesperson who spends his/her day in contact with people whose habits and expectations he/she quickly learns to know . . . . Shopping in the local shop is therefore a privileged opportunity for meeting where the initial exchange is ritualized. It is true that this possibility only exists if the shops of the district are used daily by a large number of inhabitants and not, as often tends to become the case, when it is only a question of local shops being used for additional items. In the first case, customers have the opportunity, while waiting to be served, to chat with each other and to comment on the salesperson’s remarks about the degree of freshness of the fruit and vegetables . . . . These instants are moments of presence during which the inhabitant is confronted with his/her identity in relation to the district’’ (Noschis, 1984, pp. 76–77); • in the local pub, a place of consumption but above all the privileged scene of meetings between men, ‘‘one leans on the bar, eats a hardboiled egg on it, makes the talk drag on with the owner when wanting to keep one’s distance from the pub community, from these groups of men who, very quickly, take over the individual, become his memory, leaving him little opportunity to the other than the card player or the conversation partner of the neighbor who recognized him’’ (Noschis, 1984, p. 109); • at the wash-house, ‘‘one is in a group, passing on information, during the washing and during the coffee breaks. The peddler and fortune tellers pass by. Women dance with each other. It is a women’s place, where people protect and help one another for example when an abortion is needed. The wash-house appears to offer a real opportunity for social life’’ (Noschis, 1984, p. 111). In these three examples, as in others (the town square, the landing stage, etc.), Noschis (1984) demonstrates that what he calls extensions of the home are privileged places for the exercise of the social link. They are common places, neither public nor private. The extension of the home is private space extended into public space by material or immaterial extensions that protect the intimacy of individuals while partially exposing it. The washing lines can almost serve as a metaphor here: washing lines between the houses in the old districts of the town are the extensions of the home on which private
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undergarments are exposed, whereas the rest of one’s private life is protected behind the walls of the house. Thus, in the modern world, the ideal norm has become that of a home where everything that concerns the upkeep of the family takes place between four walls: the washing machine replaces the wash-house, the tumble drier replaces the washing lines between houses, the television replaces the cinema, the fax replaces the mail, the telephone replaces the local square. Perhaps the Walkman is the ultimate example of this modern phenomenon: everyone hears his/her own music behind the headphones and disconnected from others. In modern towns (and even villages), the extensions of the home are no longer places where domestic activities are carried out together with the neighbors, but they are increasingly places where specialized services can be bought. In a community perspective of social links, the concept of extension of the home is therefore losing its meaning. Other forms of encounter are replacing this—their main characteristic is that they are leisure activities, opportunities for sharing but around activities that are no longer necessarily for the upkeep of the home and that consequently do not expose people, neither do they force people to share aspects of daily family life. This progressive disappearance of common places, in the modern world, is compensated by the proliferation of what Auge´ (1992) calls non-places, places of anonymity where the individual is alone in the crowd. ‘‘Non-places are both the infrastructures necessary for the rapid circulation of people and goods (motorways, stations, airports) and the means of transport themselves (cars, trains or airplanes). Not to mention the big hotel chains with identical rooms, the supermarkets or, of a different order, the overflowing transit camps where the refugees of the planet are parked. The non-place is therefore quite the opposite of a dwelling, of a home, of a place in the common sense of the term. Alone, but like the others, the user of the non-place keeps up a contractual relationship with the latter, symbolized by the train or air ticket, by the card presented at the motorway toll, or even by a trolley pushed along the aisles of a superstore’’ (Auge´, 1992, p. 121). It is in this way that conditions of circulation are set up in areas where individuals are only meant to interact with texts stated by legal entities or institutions (airlines, traffic police, banks, hotel chains); this is the case for all the information technology–based service encounters. All these disembodied service experiences do not contribute to the construction of the specific identity of an individual, they lead to the emergence of the modern average man. Non-places welcome every day more and more individuals who leave behind their identity at the entrance barrier. In traditional places, all inhabitants recognized each other, knew what they could or should do, and what relationships they could develop with each other. On the contrary, in modern non-places, the individual finds neither the landmarks for a lost identity nor the conditions of an interaction or a dialogue with others. People are not necessarily unhappy in these circumstances but they are alone.
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Postmodern Common Places or the Return of the Community Link Modern non-places do not therefore cover the whole of the city today, and the postmodern individual is desperately searching for common places, inherited from the tradition or postmodern endeavors. Maffesoli (1990), in his study of the hidden centrality of megapolises, analyzes what is at play in postmodern places If we only observe the physical characteristics of the megapolis, we may only notice a sort of gregarian solitude which constitutes it while there is a multiplicity of networks which give a symbolic order to the tenuous but solid channels. I call that the subterranean centrality . . . . So, it can be said that the megapolis is made up of a succession of holy places in the religious sense of the term where different forms of cult take place: of the body, of sex, of the image, of friendship, of food, of sport . . . the list is infinite. The common denominator is the place where the cult is practised. The town is dotted with small holy places which have the same function: the mysteries of communication-communion are played out their. It might be the local bar, the bar where the ‘‘tierce´’’ is played, the local square, the public benches of the pedestrian precincts, enclosed areas or open spaces, the grocery store or the busy streets where the neighbors congregate. There are also the specific places such as gymnasiums where collective body-building goes on, or political committee rooms where the collective future of society and individuals careers are decided. There are the meeting places of charitable associations and all the clubs which bring people together on the basis of ideology, religion, or friendship, and where people come to touch, more or less euphemistically, this other with whom the work he/she lives in is made (Maffesoli, 1990, pp. 215–216). Our contemporary postmodern towns can therefore be understood as a juxtaposition of these tribal places, of these places that form links. They are places where it is possible to recognize oneself while identifying oneself with a community, places where without being in control of the future, the present is looked after. So, in postmodernity, we can stipulate that service places do not necessarily isolate but can, on the contrary, become vectors of communion; like totems for primitive tribes, they can be poles of attraction for postmodern tribes. They can be divided into two categories: closed places reserved for certain tribes or even traditional communities (private clubs), and open places (launderette, cafe´, restaurant) that form the common space between private and public. Closed places are anchoring places where people put down roots, where a community forms and keeps itself alive. The postmodern example given most often is that of fashionable and therefore ephemeral places that serve as identity markers for gangs of teenagers (night clubs). Open places represent exposure places where
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the link is formed, that is to say places where individuals can be exposed with a limited risk (Sennett, 1990). There, they are neither exactly at home, nor exactly in the homes of others, and, in any case, certainly not nowhere, in the anthropological sense, that is to say in a non-place. In our opinion, the extensions of the home are the pre-modern model of exposure places. The postmodern model of exposure places, or neoextension of the home, remains to be invented in order to be developed in the design of servicescapes to gain a linking value.
Adding Linking Value to Servicescapes: Two Case Studies The Call of the Mall Of all servicescapes, shopping malls and superstores are the first to have been the object of ethnosociological investigations. These investigations aim to understand the role that shopping malls can play in the destruction (Pe´ron, 1993), the construction (Shields, 1992b), or the virtualization (Belk and Bryce, 1993) of social links of a community type. For Pe´ron (1993), the societal role of retail today is catastrophic. Previously retail was the heart of the city and the support of social exchanges, it gave an identity to districts, towns and cities, but today it is one of the most active agents of the destruction of landscapes, of the impoverishment of social links in the neighborhood, and of the aggravation of the logic of segregation. Zones of retailing activity with the anarchical juxtaposition of cut price factory sales outlets proliferate on the outskirts of towns and disfigure them. As if to counteract such degenerations, town centers are filling up with luxury stores . . . . The disappearance of local service stations, of professionalism and the social role of shopkeepers, of salespersons, the impoverishment of the forms of social life associated with the neighborhood and everyday life, and with the interpersonal and community exchanges which are indispensable to the maintenance of close links of solidarity (Pe´ron, 1993, p. 300). In fact, the success of discount (and particularly of the socalled ‘‘hard discounters’’ is at least partly due to the decline of social links and to a kind of loss of city life. In this logic, it is not only exploitation costs in the organization of the distribution channels that are saved, but the price of all values linked to service, the words exchanged during the service encounter, the urbanity, and the sense of community. In a less negative fashion, but without illusion, Belk and Bryce (1993, p. 293) note that In a fruitless effort to escape from our increasingly privatized and fragmented lives, we go to the mall to experience at least the illusion of community . . . . We desire to escape the electronic sterility of our homes and join a human community, even if it is a community in which we are
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anonymous actors. Thus, even though the mall is a world of strangers, it provides the illusion of being a community, albeit a community based on shared beliefs in the value of consumption and the shared communion of purchasing the same brands. In an even more positive approach, Shields (1992a) considers that shopping malls, more than superstores, are today diverted from their initial commercial function by postmodern tribes to become privileged places of communication and communion. Indeed, malls have become important meeting places, especially for young people and seniors in North America (Feinberg et al., 1989). Observation of daily life in a shopping mall in France (Cova, 1994) does offer a semblance of social life, even if the overall picture is one of the mediocrity of people exposure and of the unexploited societal capacity, except by tribes of teenagers. The latter occupy certain places in the malls at particular times of day. They have meeting places that they abandon after a few days for other spots in the mall or elsewhere in the surrounding area. They therefore give these places in the mall an often brief existence but one that symbolically and emotionally is that of community. Apart from this adolescent phenomenon, the major expositional tension in the mall is related to a specific spatiotemporal condition: the end of the working day, or lunch break, at the restaurant areas. There are nevertheless privileged places, around the central points of the mall: they are almost obligatory passages where you have more chance of finally meeting up with the person you are looking for. But, on the whole, in spite of and perhaps because of their high level of frequentation, shopping malls offer the specific features of non-places, notably that of people invisibility: a retired couple spends whole days in a shopping mall, going from one seat to another without being spotted by other customers, nor being concerned about being seen by employees of the mall. A middle-aged man, badly dressed (old coat, worn-out tennis shoes) spends a whole afternoon lying on a bench. Once couple goes shopping in bedroom slippers. Nobody sees them. Like non-places, the malls seem to exempt people who frequent them from noticing each other, contrary to Shield’s claim (1992a, b). The climax of this phenomenon is reached at the cashdesks of superstores: whereas in a traditional shop someone who comes in is looked at, recognized, and integrated in the group of people who are buying and chatting around the cashdesk, in superstores, people stand in line, one behind the other, preserving their invisibleness (eyes never meet) and that of others, in front and behind. In this way, all discussion or suggestion of the social link is avoided. In some cases, the customer holds a ticket that indicates clearly that his/her identity is limited to that of a number in the line of one of these non-places. After such observations, the task of mall managers appears immense. But, first of all, they have to wonder if an effort must be made to restore the linking value of these non-places? If so, how can this be done? How can they be transformed,
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even partially, into places of ritualization, into extensions of the home? Some suggest to give priority to the street market or village fair atmosphere or of the North African souk or bazaar (examples: the ‘‘feˆte de la re´ussite’’ of Leroy-Merlin in France or the Iper shops of the Marco Brunelli Group in Italy), which would break with the ordered and sophisticated atmosphere of the mall, with the exchanges that take place between people (the unwrapping of goods, ferreting about in the stalls, chance meetings). It is in this way, rather than by putting theme parks next to them or creating street substitutes inside, that these malls should be enriched. One could also imagine playing with temporality and coupling with these places a series of mini-events that aspire to rebuild the community (Moles and Rohmer, 1982). Some mall managers have already built on this trend by instituting many special events such as home improvement expos, walking clubs, art exhibits, health screening, auto shows, and live music (Bloch et al., 1994). This is what the French chain of shops ‘‘Nature et De´couvertes’’ is trying to do: these stores organize classes, lectures on astronomy, group outings, and even petitions in defense of the environment; in short, any initiative that makes for close contact between clients and their exposure in a place designed to permit quasi-ritualized activities to take place around an ethical theme. In any case, it would appear that solutions to revive the linking value of shopping malls would mix space and time.
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which shuts clients into their cosy and over-equipped bedrooms. From the cocoon-prison to the open-contact type of hotel, the development of societal behaviors is forcing the hotel industry to question its role and to adapt to a new sociocultural framework. When one studies the majority of hotel chains, it appears that, as much because of where they are situated (generally at the edge of the town), as by reason of their design, they resemble non-places more than exposure places. In them, one is nowhere: in Manchester, or in Ve´rona, in Groningen, or in Roissy. But, they also resemble places of protection. Indeed, hotels do not play on the tension between avoidance and alienation of the social link; they are the two extremes at once, without ever being in between the two: the room is a place of protection and the foyer is a non-place resembling an airport lounge. There are very few keys for contact, few extensions of the home that make contact possible; restaurants resemble non-places too closely to assume this role. Some hotel chains, like Campanile in France, are trying to react by transforming the restaurant into an extension of the home where the individual can expose his/her intimacy in a tribal atmosphere: the managers, a young couple, eat with the clients around a big traditional table that facilitates contact and sharing. A whole ritual of integration (Siehl et al., 1990) is observed around the regular customers to make them feel at home, unlike the impersonal atmosphere of a self-service restaurant.
The Bowels of the Hotels Recently, the hotel industry, because of the crisis it has gone through, has been led to question its role in daily sociability. From the results of yearly observations of the International Research Institute on Social Change (RISC), in the framework of its program Anticipating Change in Western Europe (ACE West), which is based on a minimum of 30,000 interviews a year throughout Western Europe, a specific study of the hotel industry has been carried out to identify, out of the 34 Eurotrends defined by ACE West, that which seems best to explain the recession in the hotel industry. It emerges that the hotel industry has not managed to adapt to new sociocultural demands (Semprini, 1992, p. 26): The recession has forced the profession to observe its clients more closely and to discover that, behind the room occupancy rates, there are individuals with needs which differ and develop over time. One sociocultural trend has been neglected by this sector. It could be defined as seeking out socialization, a desire to participate and to remain in contact with others. Often, a client does not choose to remain cloistered in a hotel bedroom but has no choice, for nothing has been done to help him/her find his/her way around a town he/she does not know or to quickly identify activities compatible with his/her timetable and budget. Instead of making the hotel a point of contact with the local environment, those seeking outside contacts are discouraged. On the contrary, a strategy of cocooning is often practiced
Toward a Re-enchantment of Servicescapes An inductive approach based on the two precedent cases makes it possible to give some insights to the manager who wishes to give his/her servicescape a linking value. First, it is necessary to break with the rational and transparent layout of service sites, which tries to optimize the degree of accessibility, of availability, and of functionality of the service provided (use-value for the customer). On the contrary, it is a matter of reintroducing recesses, corners, and curves, fuzziness, enabling people to meet, to get together in a partopen and part-closed space that favors community encounters. The bazaar can be quoted here as a pre-modern reference. Second, it is necessary to break with standardized, ‘‘no surprise’’ service for the consumer (‘‘the best surprise is no surprise’’), which aims to reduce the gap between the service expected by the consumer and the service delivered by the provider (zero defect for the consumer). On the contrary, it is important to reintroduce, in the servicescapes, microevents, incidents, and happenings, making people get together. Street hawkers and strolling players can be used here as pre-modern references. All in all, it is a matter of re-enchanting the disenchanted world of services born of modernity by removing from them a little transparence, rationality, and rigor, which prevent
Servicescapes
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Table 1. Managing Servicescapes and Types of Exchanges Type of Marketing
Central Values Economic exchange Socioeconomic exchange Societal exchange
Use-value Use-value 1 linking value with employees Communal linking value
individuals from coming together (use-value versus linking value). The company turns then toward an alternative conception of business, turning away from the principles of direct maximization of profit as such, taking into account a community dimension in the service experience that is not directly oriented toward immediate profit. This dimension transcends the narrow notion of the consumer-employee interaction to encompass all types of interactions in the servicescape and above all moments of shared emotion between consumers, beyond the simple functional phenomenon of helping each other. The result can be even more beneficial for the company as the taking into account of the community (and not only relational) dimension corresponds to postmodern trends in consumption. Therefore, the manager, before taking any steps, must develop a strategic plan on the opportunity of integrating or recognizing the linking value in his/her servicescape. In fact, the physical environment can harbor several types of exchange (Table 1), depending on the nature of the interaction during the service encounter: • totally economic exchanges of a transactional type, for which the consumer seeks essentially use-value. The marketing model corresponding to this type of exchange is transactional marketing born of mass consumption (Kotler, 1994). Self-service is the type of servicescape which translates this model; • socio-economic exchanges, with relational tendency, for which the consumer seeks both use-value and linking value in the interaction with the provider and above all with the employees. The marketing model corresponding to this type of exchange is relational marketing born of the specific trend of services marketing (Gummesson, 1987). Advisory point is the type of servicescape that translates this model; • predominantly societal exchanges (although with economic effects) corresponding to the need of the consumer to form links with other consumers to satisfy his/ her sense of community, for which the consumer seeks essentially a linking value in interacting with other clients, the personnel in contact being a mere mediator and not a substitute (an often unfeasible and counterproductive task). The marketing model corresponding to this type of exchange is the so-called tribal marketing
Ideal Type of Servicescape
Transactional
Self-service
Relational Tribal
Advisory point Bazaar
(Cova, 1997). The bazaar is the type of servicescape that translates this model. The manager can decide, depending on the competence of his/her company and the specific needs of his/her consumers, to favor one type of exchange and to manage the targeted servicescape. He/she can also decide to host the three types of exchange; in this case he/she must work to a polyvalent design of his/her servicescape, which can mix together selfservice, advisory point, and bazaar.
Conclusion On one hand—the ethnosociological point of view—this article advocates that service places might no longer be designed as the modernist non-places of goal-directed individuals and utopian projects; rather, they might be designed as postmodern places of creation and development of social links and communities. On the other hand—the managerial point of view—this article argues that strategies for success in postmodernity are more and more based on the communal quality of the service or its ‘‘linking value.’’ Consequently, it is proposed that companies should regard servicescapes design, and especially the design of common places, as a managerial issue. Thus, the managerial point of view would cope with the social one: companies would owe their livehood to their ability to design common places and consequently to influence the communal quality. This conclusion needs to be tempered by a reflection about the meaning ascribed to servicescapes: it is not the service provider who decrees that his/her servicescape has a linking value, it is the people who are going to experience it who will give it this meaning. Moreover as, in postmodernity, the meanings of servicescapes are no longer fixed and connected with their functions, but free-floating; each individual may ascribe different meanings to the places (Aubert-Gamet, 1996). There is therefore an extreme relativity in the linking value of a service, contrary to its ‘‘universal’’ use-value as it was perceived in modernity. And, consequently, the servicescape is no more evidence that marketers should manage easily. This kind of statement could also be made for the two other categories of services evidence: prices become hyperflexible and the messages of communications evolve into fleeting and fragmented images. Thus, examining the servicescape in postmo-
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dernity could lead us to question the future of the concept of evidence itself in human services management and marketing.
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