Board games and postdigital consumer culture

Marketing theory offers extensive insight into the impact of digital technology on consumption, consumers and consumer culture. Yet, these theorisations are largely centred on digital goods, services and platforms, whereas phenomena such as the analogue revival, typically understood through the lens of material objects and their affordances, remain peripheral to this discussion. Drawing on a qualitative study of adult board game consumption in the UK, this paper adopts a postdigital theory perspective to bring these ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ strands together. The paper theorises the analogue revival as a manifestation of postdigital consumer culture in which digitalisation not only produces new commodities and practices but also transforms the meaning of existing ones through the dialectical tension and entanglement between digital and non-digital. In doing so, this paper advances marketing theory’s understanding of the current cultural condition shaped by digitalisation while also informing postdigital theory by showing how this condition is lived and made meaningful through everyday consumption.