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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the position of the museum shop within dark tourism sites. In doing so, it argues that the shop has the potential to act as a further meaning‐making vehicle by reconfirming the museum mission within its merchandise selection. The analysis of the particular position occupied by the museum shop as a for‐profit institution within a not‐for‐profit institution will reveal the friction that exists between the competing aims of the museum shop to ideologically, as well as economically, support dark tourism.

The author analysed institutional literature and merchandise selection at three case studies, to explore the relationship between dark tourism sites and their respective shops.

The retail operations of dark tourism sites are highly complex and fraught with potential issues relating to taste and decency. Museums situated at actual sites of death are particularly constrained in regards to the type of merchandise they are able to stock. However, it is not just the locational identity of the museums which dictates the type of shop they are able to operate but their particular subject matter and the way this subject is approached in the gallery space.

This paper is limited by a small survey size. Further research could include interviews with museum shop professionals and other museum professionals to see how different areas of the museum see the role and value of museum shops at dark tourism sites.

This is an under‐researched area. There has been a growing amount of research in to the meaning‐making potential of museum shops; however, little attention has been given to dark tourism sites and how dark content impacts upon the nature of the shop.

The purpose of this paper is to identify ways to develop museum shop product, which will possess competitive advantage, and to recommend what should be done to develop such product so that it has a positive impact on the city brand of St. Petersburg.

In total, 76 museums have been studied through the observation method to describe their shops’ inventory in terms of percentages of each product. Mostly St. Petersburg museums were included in the analysis. The observation method enabled the researchers to analyse the inventory of the museum souvenir shops. The findings of the analysis enabled the researchers to reach conclusions about museums’ strategies of product development.

The research allowed to make the conclusion that although the museum shops in St.Petersburg demonstrate positive tendencies in the development of competitive stores’ products a lot of work is still to be done. Not all museums are characterised by availability of clear strategy for product development. They offer souvenirs (if any) which do not differ from those existing on the market according to topics and functions which are characteristic for them. Recommendations on how to make the product of museum shops more competitive were proposed.

Cities need new and fresh ways to create and promote their brands. Museums can contribute to this significantly with the help of souvenirs production. This research will provide insight into the process of how museums can do this by developing their shops’ inventory strategies. Recommendations to improve strategies for creation of competitive product were offered in the paper.

In today’s competitive conditions, museums are creating augmented products and create museum shops. Nevertheless, the role of museum shops in brand creation is underexplored. Museum shops have a high potential for creating high-quality products that may influence the museum and city brand in a positive way, as souvenirs and visual images of museum artifacts play an essential role in making an impression on tourists.

The main aim of the present research is to investigate the tea and coffee experience of travellers around the world and clutch the dimensions of tea and coffee museum experience.

Travellers who had experienced tea and coffee museums were purposefully selected as a sample group for the study. As tea and coffee museums that are benefiting from user-generated content (UGC) are limited, a qualitative multiple case study method has been chosen to enrich more comments and obtain more data. For the data gathering, as a UGC platform, TripAdvisor was benefited.

According to an inductive content analysis of reviews, the model of dimensions of tea and coffee museum experience that consist of nine main categories revealed: educational experience, authentic experience, memorable experience, participatory experience, shopping experience, atmosphere, facilities, employees and tour guides and negative experiences (negative staff attitudes and skills, lack of foreign language explanations and cleanliness).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the tea and coffee museum experience of travellers around the world. It contributes to the gastronomy literature by providing the dimensions of the tea and coffee museum experience.

This study attempts to demonstrate how a tourism attraction (i.e., museum) could establish its brand equity. It involves a case study on one of the most famous museums in Taiwan which involves an in-depth interview. The results show that the museum under investigation has established a clear brand identification and its brand communications but has a limited interpretation of its brand assets. Recommendations include strengthening its experiential propaganda, organizing large-scale intercity festivals, coordinating with other vendors to sell cultural products, increasing the number of professional exhibitions, and establishing a self-evaluation mechanism.

This paper suggests mobile ethnography as a method for data collection, where Generation Y customers are integrated as active investigators. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on museums as experience‐centred places, to understanding how the experience is perceived by Generation Y, to identifying the customer journey, to providing an insight into service experience consumption and to deriving managerial implication for the museum industry of how to approach Generation Y.

Mobile ethnography is applied to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra with a sample of Generation Y visitors as the future visitor market.

The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in measuring museum experiences, especially with regard to the definition and improvement of the service‐delivery processes. Service experience must be appropriately managed by museum operators by collecting, evaluating, storing and reusing relevant data on customer experience. Mobile ethnography and tools such as MyServiceFellow offer an important potential source of sustainable competitive advantage by improving customer experience, particularly for Gen Y.

The most significant limitation is the exploratory nature of the single case study derived from a small sample within only one museum.

This is one of the few studies to have addressed mobile ethnography in a service context and examined the museum experience of Generation Y. The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in service design to improve the service‐delivery process, especially with regard to the different mindsets of the Millennials.

Postcards have been sold by the billions over the past 100 years or so, but you never would recognize their popularity by checking library holdings. Most libraries ignore them, yet a reporter observed at the 1981 national poster and postcard show: “Postcard collection—a nostalgic pastime that has become a consuming passion for thousands of Americans—is more popular today than when picture postcards first caught on at the turn of the century.” Among the dealers of new cards, Kennard Harris says that “in the past five years there has been an explosion of museum postcard publishing and sales in this country.”

The main aim of the study is to empirically investigate the relationship between strategic orientation and a dual conceptualization of performance (i.e. non-economic performance and economic performance) in the research context of corporate museums, which are owned and run by private companies. Furthermore, the study aims to explore the nature of the relationship between the dual performance, shedding light on the relevance of non-economic results for this peculiar category of museums.

The study is based on survey data from 105 Italian corporate museums, which represent almost the entire population in the country (91%). A structural model was estimated using SmartPLS software in order to examine the direct and indirect effects of strategic orientation on corporate museums' non-economic and economic performance.

The findings show that only if corporate museums are able to achieve non-economic performance, creating value for the owning company and the local community, they can also have good results in economic terms. Thus, the non-economic performance acts as a mediator into the relationship between strategic orientation and economic performance.

The current work is a pioneer study for the empirical investigation of performance within corporate museums. The empirical model of the study, based on a dual conceptualization of performance and a mediation analysis, is completely innovative in this research context.

As some areas of the luxury market have been industrializing because of their expanding scale and scope, the commoditization trend is threatening luxury brands along the value chain. Too many products might flood the market. Because the commodity trap has not so far been commonly referred to as the source of the problem, the efforts of firms to decommoditize have seldom been described. The purpose of this paper is to describe and interpret one type of successful reaction to this problem: the exclusive partnership made by Louis Vuitton with artist Takashi Murakami. The paper identifies the strategy along the value chain and its step by step implementation and influence on commoditization.

The paper identifies the strategy behind this partnership and its step by step implementation. It uses a qualitative method because it would like to understand complex phenomenon and explore in depth, some strategic operations and decisions. More precisely, it is a case study research because it works on a contemporary situation and allows to retain the meaningful characteristics of real-life events as organizational, managerial and social processes

LV strategy raises the difficulty for competitors to imitate or to propose same value products as the value added to LV product is almost unique with Murakami ' s touch. With this strategy they impact commoditization as defined by Reimann et al. Also, we formulate a few recommendations and insist on the integration of all the parts of the upstream value chain- especially operations – to achieve a successful long-term retail strategy.

There are no research on partnerships between art and luxury. Our extensive analysis of the partnership between LV and Murakami gives a comprehensive view of how this kind of collaboration helps to fight back commoditization. However, more case studies should be studied to know if the strategy is replicable.

This research gives a comprehensive analysis of the adaptation of the value chain to make the partnership a success. It also underlines the need to conduct and to adapt the whole value chain to the specifities of the artist.

There are few research investigating the links and partnerships between artists and luxury brands. The originality is to describe a particular partnership concerning all the parts of the upstream value chain – especially operations – it also makes recommendations concerning potential partnerships between art and luxury to fight back against commoditization.

Even though many libraries now have sales counters where postcards (usually reproductions of old views) and some local histories (usually published by the library itself — like Northamptonshire Libraries' new, profusely illustrated and documented Waterways of Northamptonshire) are on sale, few if any have proper shops dispensing a full range of printed material on local topics (do send details if they exist).

Last year, the American Library Association paid federal income taxes!