Brand museums, commodification of cultural heritage and cultural transfer: The case of IKEA museum

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. • This paper examines how brand museums share organizations' cultural heritage with stakeholders in themed environments • The study explores how a brand museum facilitates the commodification and cultural transfer of a brand's heritage • The study presents the SCTIM frameowork showing enablers and processes that support commodifying brand heritage • The results present the Value outcomes of the cultural transfer process from brands to stakeholders.