The Distribution of Monastic Products: The Online Merchant Space, a Potential to Extend Physical Place Attachment—An Extended Abstract

Abstract

French monasteries and abbeys played a religious, cultural, political, and economic role throughout the Middle Ages (Le Goff 1994). Today, their local, spiritual, and architectural secular anchorage has made of them a major factor of national heritage (Heinich 2009). The contemplative monastic orders integrate work into their life of prayer (Nursie de, sixth century) and their tie with the contemporary world through trade is most real. Nowadays, so as to survive autonomously, monasteries produce and sell today’s consumer products through innovative multichannel distribution. Offline and online channels coexist, embodied by a variety of religious and secular points of sale. This research concerns the distribution of monastic products on the Internet, and seeks to discover whether the virtual channel conveys to cyber-purchasers the heritage power of a physical monastic place. To answer this question, we focused our study on the purchasing experience felt by those using the virtual marketplace Les Boutiques de Théophile, managed by a cooperative of 14 abbeys. We first present the contemporary monasteries’ economic activity and the characteristics of today’s monastic consumer products. We then anchor the research in the works linking marketing and place, and describe the qualitative methodology employed when interviewing cyber-purchasers. We demonstrate that the results reveal the potential that the Internet has to extend the physical place attachment for people who already know the monastic heritage place. A segmented usage of this channel will be recommended.