Scripts people live in the marketplace: An application of script analysis to confessions of a shopaholic. (December 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Molesworth, Mike; Grigore, Georgiana
• Is Part Of: Marketing theory. Volume 19:Number 4(2019)
• Page Start: 467
• Page End: 488
• Publication Date: 2019-12
• Subjects: Popular fiction -- racket system -- Script Analysis -- shopaholic -- shopping; Marketing -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Marketing research -- Periodicals; Marketing research -- Methodology -- Periodicals; Marketing -- Periodicals; 381.01
• DOI: 10.1177/1470593118821725
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1470-5931

Abstract

This article shows how Script Analysis can produce new marketing theory by applying it to contemporary shopping behaviour via British novelist Madeleine Wickham's novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. We show how Becky Bloomwood, the central character, is a Scripted Shopaholic for whom shopping is the activity around which everything else in her life falls in and out of place. In presenting a Scripted Shopaholic Racket System, we theorize: how shopping is used to structure time and relationships with others; the role of injunctions and attributions and related discounting in fulfilling shopping scripts and the possibility of freedom from excessive shopping scripts. We therefore bring together psychoanalysis, literary texts and shopping theories to generate new insights about why people shop (and often shop too much) and how such behaviours might be transformed.