Abstract
This study was conducted at the request of a French city interested in promoting artistic craftspeople in order to attract enlightened clients. Using naturalistic enquiry, we conducted in-depth interviews with craftspeople and enlightened clients and performed two content analyses. The first, structuralist in nature, made it possible to define the “experience of authenticity” that craftspeople share with their customers. The second, phenomenological in nature, made it possible to understand how this experience is (or is not) cultivated in two traditional meeting places: workshops and public exhibitions. The article concludes by putting our definition of the experience of authenticity in context based on both the fundamental propositions put forward by Peirce and the principal propositions that currently define the field of marketing.
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