Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research

Patricia L Sunderland, Rita M Denny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315430157
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research is the essential guide to the theory and practice of conducting ethnographic research in consumer environments. Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny argue that, while the recent explosion in the use of "ethnography" in the corporate world has provided unprecedented opportunities for anthropologists and other qualitative researchers, this popularization too often results in shallow understandings of culture, divorcing ethnography it from its foundations. In response, they reframe the field by re-attaching ethnography to theoretically robust and methodologically rigorous cultural analysis. The engrossing text draws on decades of the authors' own eclectic research—from coffee in Bangkok and boredom in New Zealand to computing in the United States—using methodologies from focus groups and rapid appraisal to semiotics and visual ethnography. Five provocative forewords by leaders in consumer research further push the boundaries of the field and challenge the boundaries of academic and applied work. In addition to reorienting the field for academics and practitioners, this book is an ideal text for students, who are increasingly likely to both study and work in corporate environments.

Part I
Introduction

Figure 1.1 USA Today, February 18, 1999

1
Anthropologists and Anthropology in Consumer Research

The headline pictured at left, "Hot asset in corporate: Anthropology degrees," appeared in the business (i.e., "Money") section of a February 1999 issue of USA Today.¹ Popular press articles detailing the virtues of anthropology, and more specifically those praising the value of ethnography as a tool for consumer research, flourished around that time. Articles featuring ethnography as the "new" means for companies to "really understand" consumers appeared with an almost predictable regularity in the decade from 1995 to 2005. A wide variety of publications, not only USA Today, provided this attention—The New York Times, American Demographics, Fast Company, U.S. News & World Report, Harvard Management Update, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune Small Business, Newsweek, The Smithsonian, The Financial Times, and many others took part in spreading the news.²

Radio, television news and documentary, and video snippets on the Web also played a role.³ Highly visible among these was "The Persuaders," a 90-minute documentary that initially aired on public television's Frontline in November 2004.⁴ This portrayal of the market research industry was clearly fascinating for many. And it also appears to have made Clotaire Rapaille—well known in corporate arenas for his research work associated with Chrysler's PT Cruiser, and variously cited in the media as "medical anthropologist," "psychiatrist," and "car shrink"—a bit of a celebrity.⁵

Within business circles, the interest in anthropological viewpoints and ethnographic research is real. Many Fortune 100 firms do hire anthropologists, whether celebrities or not, and as we write this in 2007, ethnography is a standard offering of qualitative consumer research firms in the United States. Theorists and practitioners alike have located much of the business interest in ethnographic methods to a shift in marketing's focus—from the production of things to a production of experiences in the marketing of brands.⁶ While it can be argued, and we would, that consumers have always encountered experience with products and brands, i.e., creatively produced meanings and experience in the act of consumption, there is no doubt that focus on "experiential marketplaces" (Disney to Nike Town to ESPN Zone to Starbucks) spurred marketing managers and advertising researchers to consider new models and alternative methods of research.⁷ There is also no doubt that crowded shelves, the unending array of products for sale, the widespread availability of credit, and the loss of "loyalty" to brands (a standard metric in the industry) also produced a sense of urgency for marketing managers to find a way to make their products stand out. The use of ethnography has often become a kind of Holy Grail quest in the effort to sell one's brand.

Without question, many of the ways ethnography has been understood, as well as implemented, in consumer research have not been in line with the ways in which most anthropologically oriented researchers would frame their work. As we discuss further in Chapter 2, quite often ethnography has been embraced as simply "observation" and combined with an individual-oriented frame of analysis both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.⁸ In the hands of unskilled and/or creative market researchers, ethnographic efforts have also, at times, Careened toward the absurd, be it maddening or comical. Some of these developments have undoubtedly been driven by the passion of the quest, and as Intel anthropologists Nafus and Anderson have trenchantly noted, "There are quacks in every profession."⁹ Nonetheless, a crucial result of this heyday of ethnography in applied consumer research has been the flourishing of high-quality, theoretically informed ethnographic work carried out by serious practitioner-scholars—many of them working, quite explicitly, as practicing anthropologists.

Our goal in this chapter is to provide a bit of context surrounding this movement of anthropologists and anthropological outlooks into consumer research. In doing so, we want to illuminate relevant strands in academic consumer research (generally carried out by researchers in business schools), as well as among anthropologists engaged in the practice of applied consumer research. We do so, necessarily, from our vantage point as anthropologists engaged fulltime in the practice of applied consumer research, and in the spirit of ethnographic inquiry, we want to show some of the lived realities that comprise this movement. There seem to be a number of activities currently aimed at melding academic anthropology, academic consumer research, and applied consumer research together in the United States. A question for a later history is whether these activities will actually forge a meaningful and durable bond. Our contextual review has the vantage point of U.S. developments, but the world of consumer research is carried out on a global stage and cannot by any means be seen as limited to the United States, nor necessarily from this point of view.

Popular Attention: Incipient Norm or Irregularity?

The attention in the popular media to the commissioning of ethnographic research and the hiring of anthropologists in business during the 1990s may seem a clear indication of the impending normalization of ethnography and anthropologists within the business world. On the other hand, the flourishing of attention in the popular press might simply be an indication of the fact that ethnography and anthropology remain non-normative cultural and research practices. As Sidney Levy, a professor of marketing recognized in academic marketing for his enduring contributions to symbolic analysis, maintained in a masterful essay on the history of marketing and consumer research, "Regardless of the long history I am describing here, it is a sign of the irregular situation of qualitative research that examples of its application still turn up in the press as if it were some remarkable newcomer."¹⁰ As he reminded readers, "reinventing the wheel is a common occurrence."¹¹

Notably, in September 2006, the Journal of Advertising Research published a special issue devoted to ethnographic research. This issue was co-edited by Joseph Plummer, the chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation. In an editorial that introduced the issue, Plummer wrote of his embrace of ethnographic work, maintaining that he felt "pleased to see an approach that was so valuable to advertising early in my career enjoying such a resurgence" and hoped the interest would not be "a passing fad."¹² Plummer's early advertising career was spent at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in the 1960s. Plummer recounted that he had taken several courses in anthropology in graduate school, was "smitten" by ethnographic methodology, and then had been inspired to incorporate "ethnographic thinking" into his research work for Leo Burnett when he attended a talk given by Burleigh Gardner "on the value of personal observations of rituals and symbols apparent in consumption or purchase of consumer goods."¹³ After an initial ethnographic study in the late 1960s successfully led to Kellogg's trademark "A Kellogg Kind of Morning" campaign, Burnett often used ethnographic research. Ethnographic research was applied, per Plummer's list, to develop advertising for detergents, beer, washing machines, homeowners insurance, and air travel, before it was "abandoned by agencies and marketers" and replaced by focus groups.¹⁴

Crucially, part of the long history that Levy described in his essay were his activities in the late 1940s and 1950s at Social Research, Inc. (SRI), a Chicago company founded in part by anthropologist Lloyd Warner, along with Bill Henry and Burleigh Gardner, whose talk had inspired Plummer to apply ethnographic methodologies. SRI, which provided organizational consulting as well as consumer research for advertising agencies and companies, was, as Levy pointed out, dynamically infused by the charged intellectual climate of the University of Chicago at the time. The interdisciplinary Committee on Human Development, in which Levy was a graduate student, and the departments of sociology, anthropology, and psychology provided both people and ideas to SRI. The climate at the time included the teaching and ideas of not only Lloyd Warner, but also, among others, Carl Rogers, Robert Redfield, Everett Hughes, Herbert Blumer, David Reisman, and Donald Campbell. Among Levy's fellow graduate students and friends, peer interlocutors in philosophical, topical, and methodological debates, were Erving Goffman, Herbert Gans, Anselm Strauss, Lee Rainwater, and Gerald Handel; the latter two also became core members of SRI. Brand image was one of the concepts that emerged from SRI's work, along with groundbreaking studies on the social symbolism surrounding consumer behavior and products ranging from cigarettes (at the time symbolic of virility and potency) and television (then relatively new) to Coca-Cola, soap, the telephone, baseball, flowers, and cars. Levy described his ten years of work at SRI, which entailed living "SRI from breakfast until bedtime, brooding over methods of data-gathering and seeking penetrating insights" as "among the most exciting and intensely absorbing" in his life.¹⁵ These years also led to Levy's influential articles "The Product and the Brand" (coauthored with Burleigh Gardner) published in 1955 and "Symbols for Sale" in 1959, both in The Harvard Business Review.¹⁶

Disdain-Induced Separation (Exceptionally Transgressed)

If the decade of the 1950s was a time of acknowledged links between applied consumer research and the academy, as well as between anthropology and consumer research applied to business, these links were subsequently both obscured and severed. As Levy, again trenchantly, put it, "The receptivity to qualitative research by business offends people who despise business and those who study consumers on its behalf."¹⁷ Levy hinted, citing Veblen, that this disdain-induced distancing from the "base" world of actual marketing and selling is not, culturally, a novel idea either, and it exists within as well as outside of marketing departments and business schools. One need only attend a few sessions of an Association for Consumer Research (ACR) meeting to realize that this is true. ACR meetings are comprised of academics who work (for the most part) in business schools. As someone looking into the field with the eyes of an anthropologist, the naïve expectation might be that there would be a celebration of consumption in the context of business practices. An embrace of consumption practices does reign, but the affection frequently resides squarely in the "pure" pleasure of the analysis.

Certainly, within U.S. anthropology, the cultural and professional climate of the 1960s and 1970s produced great efforts among anthropologists to symbolically distance themselves and the field not only from business, but also from business schools. This sentiment was perhaps heightened for anthropologists because of the covert research scandals of the 1960s, resulting in the 1971 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Principles of Professional Responsibility that prohibited anthropologists from undertaking research that could not be openly published (business research is often proprietary, at least in part).¹⁸ But distancing practices were very strong and have had enduring impact. For instance, despite studying anthropology at the University of Chicago and New "York University, universities with prominent business schools, as students we had no contact with the business schools, and (implicitly) learned to think of business dismissively.¹⁹ At the University of Chicago in the early 1980s, anthropology graduate students could look out their office windows on Friday afternoons and down on the business students having their usual Friday barbeque in the quad. We often did; it was a matter of smug pride to be working while others played.

This culturally produced sentiment has carried through years and generations. In the mid-1990s, while teaching an undergraduate course in linguistic anthropology at New York University one of Patti's students who was such a pleasure to have in class and so clearly delighted in and enjoyed the material, was also studying business. As he discussed one day after class how he felt about the fields, he maintained that while anthropology was interesting to him, business was not; his study of business was based solely in matters of practicality. Moreover, not only did anthropology have the courses he liked, they were more intellectually challenging and required more work. He may not have liked his business courses, but he did not have to work at them either; they were easy. In other words, again, a form of double disparagement—business (in the abstract, at least), though practical, was not only boring, it was stupid. Anthropology was for the more intellectually inclined. About ten years later, at the meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of North America, after Patti had given a paper discussing consumer research in anthropology, a graduate student in anthropology approached her. This student had an MBA, had worked for many years in business, and had quit her job to go to graduate school in anthropology. What perplexed (and annoyed) her was the way business was so frequently characterized in such simplistic terms among anthropologists, and meanwhile anthropology was conceived in different, but equally simplistic, terms by her business friends. Straddling and aware of both worlds, she could not help but be troubled because she knew that neither caricature fit.

This does not mean, however, that a few pioneering anthropologists did not navigate the terrain of business schools and/or business. In the late 1970s anthropologist Steve Barnett was a vocal proponent of anthropology's methods and theory in applied consumer research. Arguably, it was Barnett who made anthropology visible to Madison Avenue during these years through both his consulting practice and his column in the trade periodical Advertising Age in the 1980s. His column enlightened on issues such as why cultural beliefs sunk issue ads, why lifestyle was a myth that deserved debunking, how consumers had become performers, and the ways "I seem, therefore I am" had become culturally true. By charismatic force, a discourse of "symbols and meanings" in proposals as well as reporting, a savvy awareness that to be heard cultural analysis needed at the time to coexist with survey results, Barnett demanded that clients consider an alternate way of knowing.²⁰ Trained at the University of Chicago, Barnett introduced others into commercial practice during the 1980s, including us.²¹

In 1984, anthropologist John F. Sherry Jr. was hired by Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business, not coincidentally into a department chaired at the time by Sid Levy. Since that time Sherry has worked—tirelessly it would seem—to incorporate (or perhaps more accurately to help reinstate) a cultural, anthropological frame into c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Ethnographic Consumer Research and Anthropological Analysis
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Engaging Approaches
• Part III Engaging Entanglements
• Part IV Engaging One Another
• References
• Index
• About the Authors