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The evolving consumption landscape creates challenges for retailers in accommodating their modus operandi to negotiate changing consumer needs, arguably requiring a ‘new’ type of retailing to hopefully facilitate future success. We suggest that an important aspect of such negotiation will be the use of ‘pop-up’ activity, and we critically evaluate the potential of these ephemeral consumption spaces to constitute and shape consumers’ brand-oriented relations and experiences into the future. Informed by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, we take a territorological perspective. Drawing on data from eight UK-based pop-up cases, we (1) analyse how these temporary ‘territories’ of brand experience are developed and implemented; (2) analyse what differentiates them from other, traditionally conceived, territories of brand experience; and (3) critically evaluate pop-up’s neglected characterisation in terms of a more ‘fluid’ spatial-temporal retail territory, to better understand its role in contemporary consumer culture. We posit that the development of pop-up activities occurs through the coordination of actions of a variety of stakeholders, constituting a spatial-temporal confluence of both material and processual elements to create a ‘ refrain’, through the compression and compaction of interior, intermediary, exterior and annexed milieus. In doing so, we offer a new lens through which to view the creation of retail consumption spaces.

'pop-up' concept as a possible means by which retailers can help acquire the requisite flexibility and agility to respond effectively to these challenges. In recent years, the 'pop-up' epithet has become ever more commonplace, and we discuss its potential to achieve retailers' strategic objectives by virtue of its temporal, spatial and material flexibility.

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