Supervisors: Sascha Steinmann & Polymeros Chrysochou
Discussants: Anne Peschel & Jessica Aschemann-Witzel

Abstract
The ways in which retailers and customers interact with each other are radically and perhaps irrevocably transforming. Today’s retailers enter the market stage as brands, striving to connect to their consumers and becoming more intertwined with people’s lives both on- and offline. Simultaneously, new technologies emerge and evolve rapidly, leading to a greater dispersion of the brand across a growing multitude of touchpoints and channels and forming a multi-associative network for consumers to navigate and make sense of. As a result, traditional decision-making models are increasingly struggling to account for consumers' real-life practices, leading to a need for new approaches of understanding the ways consumers and retailers interact in this context. Aiming to address this issue, this project contributes to existing retail marketing and branding knowledge by generating a consumer-based understanding of meaning co-creation based on narrative theory. In so doing, it contributes insights into brand storytelling practices and the value of fragmented narration in omnichannel retail contexts to a research field which has thus far placed its emphasis on cohesion and seamless integration. This presentation covers two research papers engaging with the subject on different terms. Research paper III represents an illustrative qualitative study undertaken with a Danish furniture retailer brand and is concerned with the brand-as-narrative. Research paper IV focuses on the concept of retailer brand touchpoints in a longitudinal qualitative study.

Everyone is welcome!