Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Situated at the crossroads of visual culture and consumerism, this essay collection examines visual merchandising as both a business and an art. It seeks to challenge that scholarly ambivalence that often celebrates the spectacle but denies the agenda of consumerism. The volume considers strategies in the imaging of selling from the mid nineteenth century to the present, in terms of the visual interaction that occurs between the commodity and the consumer and between body and space. Under the categories of Promotion, Product and Place, contributors to the volume examine the strategies in the presentation of retail goods and environments that range from print advertising to product design to store display and architecture. Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling is located directly at the nexus of business practice and cultural myth, where the spectator never loses sight of their status as buyer and the object of desire is always still a commodity.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: the image of visual merchandising
• Part I Promotion
• Corridors of consumption: mid-19th-century commercial space and the reinvention of downtown
• Hieroglyphs of commerce: the visual rhetoric of the German Sachplakat
• Selling perceptions of space: AT&T print ads, 1908-1930
• Part II Products
• Pontiac hood ornaments: marketing the Chief
• The store mannequin: an evolving ideal of beauty
• Selling China: class, gender and orientalism at the department store
• 'The art of draping': window dressing
• Part III Place
• Selling automobility: architecture as sales strategy in US car dealerships before 1920
• Mansions as marketing: the residential funeral home and American consumer culture 1915-1965
• The common place of the common carrier: the American truck stop
• A tale of two cities: image, space and the balancing act of luxury merchandising
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This collection of essays on the history of visual merchandising offers outstanding variety and detail for specialists of the advertising and merchandising trade. Editor Iarocci (architecture, Univ. of Washington, Seattle) states in her introduction, "in terms of its perceptual and psychological impact, the goal of visual merchandising has been not simply to promote and display commodities, but ultimately to engage and persuade the potential possessor of the goods." Essays are organized in three parts: "Promotion," "Products," and "Place." In "Promotion," essays discuss the development of mid-19th-century commercial space centering on downtown, and specifically how windows and architectural space were used. By 1900 the Germans had accentuated this in the creation of Sachplakat, visual ad domination. Finally, a history of advertising is represented by Bell Telephone (AT&T). Essays in "Products" define the marketing of Pontiac (General Motors) hood ornaments; the store mannequin as an attraction for female consumers especially; and in London the booming market for Chinese and Oriental goods. The historical focus in "Place" is on the architecture of early US car dealerships; funeral home expansion to the consumer market; the burgeoning American truck stop industry; and finally, luxury merchandising in New York City and Los Angeles. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections. A. M. Mayer College of Staten Island