Selling Jennifer Aniston’s Sweater: The Persistence of Shoppability in the Television Industry

• In Event: Business Models and Business Strategies in Journalism and Television

Abstract

This paper contributes to historiography on television and new media in the United States by investigating the concept of “shoppability,” attending particularly to the promise of selling merchandise directly via television devices. The paper demonstrates that shoppability—a convergence of marketing and marketplace—has been a feature of virtually all efforts to establish interactive services through multichannel television systems, and that the promise of facilitating instant shopping remains a fixture in the industrial logic of electronic media. Would the multichannel environment, and the nature of information and entertainment services, have developed differently if stakeholders had not aspired to building an interactive storefront? The paper looks to institutional theory and science and technology studies to explain the persistence of this strategy.

Author

• Lee McGuigan, U of Pennsylvania