How IKEA's Museum Turns Corporate History Into Cultural Capital
A new study reveals how brand museums strategically package company heritage to shape customer loyalty and preserve organizational identity across generations. The research suggests that themed corporate spaces function as powerful tools for cultural transfer—transforming business narratives into shared memory that influences how stakeholders perceive and engage with brands.
Originaltitel: Brand museums, commodification of cultural heritage and cultural transfer: The case of IKEA museum
<p>This paper examines how brand museums, as themed environments, commodify and transfer the cultural heritage of organisations to their stakeholders. We conduct a qualitative study based on six in-depth interviews with top management professionals at the IKEA Museum. Rooted deeply in the Swedish socio-cultural ecosystem, the IKEA Museum uses various strategies to commodify its cultural heritage, such as displaying historical artefacts, creating interactive exhibits, narrating stories of innovation and social responsibility, and offering co-creation opportunities to visitors. In doing so it plays a prominent role in enabling cultural transfer and fosters intergenerational cultural memory among its stakeholders. The theoretical conceptualization is presented by proposing the Synthesis of Cultural Transfer, Value Outcomes, and Intergenerational Memory framework (SCTIM), and implications are discussed.</p>