Luxury retail strategy differs from other retail strategies not merely in distinctive formulations of product, price, distribution, and appeals to customer distinction. Instead, it increasingly stands or falls on the legitimacy of a charismatic creative director. The director offers an aesthetic brand ideology. Luxury retail draws on the principles of art and magic to assemble the charismatic persona of the creative director and to diffuse his aesthetic ideology to the brand. Moreover, luxury retail strategy enlists magical and aesthetic principles within and without the store to achieve these ends. Finally, retail luxury is producer rather than consumer oriented and seeks to generate awe rather than community. This strategy appears to be to some extent a response to legitimacy crises provoked by recent strategic extensions of luxury brands into mass marketing. We offer some implications for marketing in which the charisma of a key personage is at stake.

Although a large body of research has investigated how consumers use goods to signal their status, little is known about how brands manage status. The very few studies that have examined this topic are grounded in the traditional conception of status and focus on the possession and display of status signals. The authors offer an alternative understanding of status management by investigating the role of interactions in the service encounter. Drawing from extensive ethnographic work in luxury stores, they investigate how brands (re)configure the status games that surface in the service encounter. They show that through the material and social cues of the servicescape, brands shape consumers' class subjectivities-that is, they make consumers behave as class subjects who have a specific understanding of their position in the social hierarchy. Thus, managing status requires the active creation and management of consumers as class subjects. There is a shift from managing branded goods that signal status to managing customer experiences that make consumers enact status positions. This research helps identify new ways to manage status brands, especially luxury brands.

To provide high quality services under conditions of crowding, it is important to understand the relationships between crowding and personal control. Indeed, in recent years, there has been growing belief that personal control is significant in coping with crowding. However, most studies have been of limited theoretical and practical value because they did not provide an integrated conceptualization of crowding. The results of a field study demonstrate that the personal control‐crowding relationships depend on the individual's crowding experience and the nature of personal control.

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Hanging up our coat, tidying our desk, classifying our books, what meanings do these mundane practices convey? Extending Mary Douglas's work, this article investigates tidiness from the angle of symbolic pollution. Based on photo-elicitation, it shows that, similarly to symbolic pollution described at a macro-social level, tidiness depends on two conditions, namely, a set of classifications and the dangerous transgression of these classifications. However, at a micro-social level, individuals negotiate boundaries between classifications in order to cope with symbolic pollution. Consumers define their domestic classifications through a juxtaposition of micro-practices, which does not necessarily create a hierarchically ordered system but which enables these consumers to avoid anomalies and transgressions. Furthermore, respondents are willing to break tidiness rules on specific occasions because the danger-beliefs associated with transgression are context-dependent. This analysis of tidiness gives new insights into materiality, emphasizing the cultural meaning of ordering one's possessions.H anging up our coat, sorting out papers on our desk, classifying our books, storing our groceries in the kitchen, why are these everyday and apparently normal practices so important to study? What specific meanings do these mundane daily activities convey? According to Mary Douglas (1967), these ordinary practices deploy our system of symbolic classification, that is, the social assignment of things to their place. Putting things in their place is more than placing them in a specific physical Delphine Dion (dion.iae@univ-paris1.fr) is associate professor of marketing, Sorbonne Business School, Paris. Ouidade Sabri (ouidade.sabri @u-pec.fr) is professor of marketing, Paris-Est University, UPEC, Créteil, France. Valérie Guillard (valerie.guillard@dauphine.fr) is associate professor of marketing, University of Paris Dauphine, Paris. The authors thank the JCR editorial team for their very helpful and insightful comments and particularly the associate editor for his remarkable involvement and suggestions. They would also like to thank Eric Arnould, Søren Askegaard, and Barry Babin for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. The authors wish to express their gratitude to the informants for sharing their time and aspects of their home and of their domestic lives. They are grateful for support provided by the Sorbonne Business School and the DRM research center at Paris Dauphine University.

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Cet article présente les méthodologies développées en anthropologie visuelle et discute leurs applications en recherche et étude marketing. Après une rapide description historique de l'émergence des images en anthropologie, nous présentons les évolutions épistémologiques et méthodologiques de l'anthropologie visuelle. À partir de cette réflexion, deux modes d'utilisation des photographies et vidéos sont proposés: l'image comme outil d'enregistrement et l'image comme objet de recherche. Dans la première approche, les appareils photo et vidéo sont utilisés pour obtenir une description ethnographique plus fine, plus riche et plus vivante. Soit le chercheur essaie de dresser une liste la plus exhaustive possible des objets possédés par les consommateurs (logique de l'inventaire), soit il utilise les appareils photo et vidéo pour fixer les éléments remarquables qu'il souhaite étudier de façon plus approfondie (logique de la prise de notes visuelles). Dans la seconde approche, initiée par Jean Rouch, la vidéo est utilisée de façon plus réflexive et subjective. La caméra n'est plus considérée comme un outil d'enregistrement mais comme un objet de médiation avec les consommateurs pour développer une compréhension partagée des expériences vécues, qu'il s'agisse des expériences de magasinage ou d'usage de produits et services. La caméra devient participante et collaborative.