ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on the conflicting perspectives the licensing field has shown toward digital platforms from social media to online retail. On the one hand, these sites are imagined as generating new ways of knowing consumer wants for branded product(ion)s and experiences as well as selling directly to them through online portals, which in turn have offered licensors and brand owners new approaches in negotiating with licensees and retailers. On the other hand, digital platforms have contributed to consumers supposedly gaining greater control—or, perhaps more accurately, making greater demands for control and customization of their brand experiences, leading to both managerial quagmires and uncertainties about whether established licensing practices and shop talk are transferrable to these environments. The chapter analyzes how the licensing field has attempted to negotiate the perceived risks and rewards of digital culture, how brands born online are positioned by licensors and licensees as “different” than those developed through other media and means (and how that difference generates both possibilities and problems when it comes to merchandising), and how the potentiality of virtual merchandise both challenges and is stymied by the hegemony of materiality that pervades the field.
