This chapter examines how service providers use music in assembling experiencescapes in the context of contemporary and street dance classes and group exercise services. Taking a socio-material approach, the role of music is explored in the interplay of practices, meaning making and entanglements between material/digital and social entities making up the service brand experience. The chapter discusses ways in which music is utilized, and draws attention to elements and interactions, and symbolic complementarities and tensions involved with its integration into the dance / exericise experiencescape. The rich empirical account draws on multiple forms of qualitative, ethnographic data, including in-depth interviews with dance and exercise class instructors.
After the warm up track, I feel ready and energized to get going. A musical jazz choreography begins to the tunes of an old Abba song. I like the easy flow of the movements, and in this moment, even this super worn-out song feels fun to move to. I hum the familiar lyrics in my mind as I go….Then it’s time for the street styles parts of the workout. The participants change from barefoot to sneakers, I lace up my Vans, and a hip hop tune starts playing. In my mind, I transform from the middle-aged ABBA-savvy woman to someone with 21th century street cred, bouncy moves and a cocky posture. That’s not the usual me, but it’s a version if me, that only surfaces in these dance classes and performances. I love how this part of the workout class really gets me pumped up and going. During the whole course of the workout, I shift identities a few more times as the music and dance genres change, and so do my feelings about how fun or tedious this hour of exercise feels.
TopIntroduction
The autoethnographic note above, from participating in a group exercise class consisting of a mix of different dance styles, illustrates the role of music in shaping customer experience within a specific service context. It highlights the agentic role of music in influencing feelings, moods, motivation, and even the consumer’s temporary identity, helping carry the consumer momentarily in and out of different, culturally constituted worlds, such as different subcultures, like hip hop, latin styles, or contemporary dance.
In this setting, music connects a multifaceted pool of symbolic resources of different stakeholders, from artists and choreographers to clothes brands and performances that serve as markers of different (sub)cultures of consumption, and functions as an element in an experiencescape (Mossberg 2007; Mody et al 2019; Kandampully et al 2022).
To conceptually grasp these interactions, this chapter draws on socio-culturally informed branding literature (e.g. Vallaster & von Wallpach 2013; Norrgrann & Saraniemi 2022), and specifically the idea of brand assemblage (Lucarelli et al, 2022; Hill et al 2014) based on assemblage thinking (Canniford & Bajde 2016). In doing so, we highlight the role of music in a service experience not only as a tactical marketing variable, but as a part of a broader set of interrelationships and dynamics that need to be understood in order to know when and how music has the ability to provide value in a service experience.
The empirical part of this chapter depicts a rich ethnographic study of dance and group exercise culture. It is based on multiple types of data from participant observation and author engagement in the community to qualitative, in-depth interviews with dance class instructors. In this chapter, the focus is foremost on the interview data, as these research participants can be seen as key actors in assembling the sonic experiencescape through their particular role in choosing music, and secondly, as the key connectors between service provision and co-created customer experience. Their front-line role is in other words crucial for assessing how the service experience unfolds in relation to the intended.
The interviewees represent both international exercise brand franchises and independent service providers who have established their own workout concepts. These two categories of informants illuminate the use of music in exercise from somewhat differing starting points, providing variation with regard to standardization/adaptation, and degree of autonomy in the sonic service design process. Secondary data such as company website material and social media content are used as a complement to the interviews.
To sum up, the purpose of this chapter is to examine how service providers use music in assembling an experiencescape. To this end, this chapter combines literature on assemblage thinking, and experiencescapes, and empirically explores the phenomenon in the context of dance and exercise class services. The empirical material illuminates symbolic complementarities and tensions involved with the attempts to use music to steer the design of the experiencescape; what it entails to attempt to bring consumers into differing cultural worlds through music.