Emotional shops

Nowadays, shops are not anymore places for consumption but micro-worlds of individual and social life. Selling acquires many and various meanings and the shopping center becomes a cultural and spiritual center. The choise of a brand is not anymore a choise of consumption but a lifestyle. Many elements concur in defining the communicative strategies of selling (complex corporate image [1]): advertising, logo, marketing, design of objects, shop windows, promotional events. And all of them seem to become values of life: claim is a motto (“Impossible is nothing” by Adidas); the logo is an identification mark for the consumer-customer (‘swoosh’ by Nike is tattooed on the skin); the testimonials embody models of lifestyle, shops are real experience of life (in Nike Town the product is almost absolutely absent, as it is replaced by videos, motion-pictures and so on, the Golden Arches logo introduces to the magic and fantastic worlds of Mc Donald’s shops). Shop becomes a space really inhabited and texted, where the communicative strategy is acted by a new spatial perceptive project availing itself of new linguistic instruments of multimedial world, which, by modifying the perceptive experience of the consumer-customer, give him a complex bodily experience, involving his whole sensible sphere. This emotional and body experience excites particular states of mind and stimulates subtle moods and feelings. These new tendencies stimulated by the consumption world become unsuppresible features for the consumer-customer. The choise of a brand embodies the recognition of one own’s identity, the feeling of belonging to a group, the choise of a cer 1. See in V. PASCA, D. RUSSO, Corporate Image, un secolo di immagine coordinata dall’AEG alla Nike, Lupetti, Milano 2005. 2. Theory formulated in 1999 by Bernd Schmitt, who defines 5 categories through which the consumption experience of the consumer-customer happens: certain lifestyle. These are all strategic factors contributing to the faithfulness of the consumer-customer. A tacit behaviour agreement is established by consumer and the producing firm. Concepts such as experimental marketing [2] and sensitive branding [3] are introduced and these notions involve a whole range of sensual experiences only in order to create an emotional link between the consumer-customer and the brand. Going back to the original meaning of the word “brand” as “mark” or “stamp” [4], the experience the consumer-customer lives in the shops becomes an experience which “marks” or “signs” tangibly and persistently the consumer-customer.