Gettysburg Co-Constructed: Producing and Consuming Narratives in an American Battlefield

While established marketing knowledge sets the consumption experience apart from production, this paper argues that the creation and development of experiential products are an outcome of a co-constructive process between marketers and consumers. Using the Gettysburg storyscape as the experiential context where narratives are commercialized and consumed, it is shown that while marketers are responsible for staging the storyscape in both substantive and communicative ways, consumers are actively participating in shaping the experiential product by using their prior familiarity with history, by struggling to fill narrative gaps, by re-contextualizing their new experiences, and by vividly using their imagination. This study extends Arnould, Price, and Tierney’s (1998) work on commercial staging, builds on existing under-theorized ideas on consumer agency and the co-construction of experiences, and provides insight on the nature of consumer narrative imagination.

Citation:

Athinodoros Chronis (2007) ,"Gettysburg Co-Constructed: Producing and Consuming Narratives in an American Battlefield", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 34, eds. Gavan Fitzsimons and Vicki Morwitz, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 67-69.