| Describing her first visit to Hollister, the wildly successful lifestyle retailer, Shauna is bedazzled by its in-store evocation of everything she believes, as a nineteen year old Irishwoman, about the United States of America. “I look up,” she recounts, “and a humungous American flag dangles above my head. The American flag representsthe American Dream in my eyes which gives me butterflies in my stomach. The American dream is all about freedom and being your own self in this world. It inspires me to be a stronger person. . .This is what people of my age want. They want to be adventurous. Walking around this shop gives me a lease of energy to go into the world and make my Q4 own dreams happen!” Shauna’s emotive words are akin to what literary critics call panegyric, a heartfelt hymn of praise. The panegyric is a key component of epic poetry alongside lamentation, invocation and the dying fall (Abrams 1993). To be sure, Shauna’s accolade was not devised with poesy in mind, yet she unwittingly realizedRalphWaldoEmerson’s celebrated contention that America is an epic poem waiting to happen. For some, as McWilliams Q5 (1989) shows, America’s national epic is best expressed in its magnificent movies, novels, musicals, and television series. But for Shauna at least, it is brilliantly articulated by Hollister. Although Hollister has latterly lost some of its luster, this too accords with the epic tradition, where hubris is unfailingly followed by nemesis. The epic literary form may be thousands of years old; however, it remains a rich conceptual resource that affords striking insights into contemporary retail branding. This article, therefore, arguesthat epic poetry’s principles are relevant to retail management and scholarship. It shows how HCo’s consumers enact elemental aspects of epic poetry. It reveals how the in-store encounter concurs with the epic’s combative character. It illustrates, with the aid of qualitative research methods, how Hollister’s evocation of an idyllic, southern Californian lifestyle strikes a resonant chord with some of its customers. It contends, in short, that the epic contains lessons for academicians and executives alike. We begin with a summary of the epic tradition, noting its poetic origins, cultural modifications, and relative neglect in marketing, retailing, and consumer research. A succinct introduction to Hollister Inc., a subsidiary of Abercrombie & Fitch, follows thereafter. Next is a brief but necessary discussion of research methods best suited to the subject matter, as well as a synopsis of our subsequent data gathering and literary theory-led analytical procedures. The findings reveal how consumer experiences in HCo echo components of the classical epic, in accordance with the genre’s conventions (Abrams 1993; Sutherland 2010). Comparisons are then made with prior studies of flagships (Kent 2009), martworlds (Joy et al. 2014), brand museums(Hollenbeck, Petersm, andZinkhan 2008) and contrarian consumer encounters more generally (Dobscha and Foxman 2012; Kozinets 2002a; Hietanen et al. 2016), before concluding with a consideration of epic and myth’s affinity. |
