Patricia L Sunderland - Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research

Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny

First published 2007 by Left Coast Press, Inc.

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2007 Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sunderland, P. L. (Patricia L.)
Doing anthropology in consumer research / Patricia L. Sunderland and
Rita M. Denny.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59874-090-5 (hardback: alk. paper) -
ISBN 978-1-59874-091-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Business anthropology--Research. 2. Consumers--Research. I.
Denny, Rita Mary Taylor, 1956- II. Title.
GN450.8.S86 2007 658.834--dc22 2007034206

All photos, unless otherwise noted, were taken by
and (c) Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny.
Figure 5.1 reprinted with permission of Photosport Ltd,
P.O. Box 99804, Newmarket, Auckland, New Zealand.

Cover design by Lisa Devenish

ISBN 13: 978-1-59874-091-2 (pbk)

Dedication

To Mekonnen and Steve
Two of the most patient and supportive souls this world has ever produced.

To Sarah
A master of the nuanced cadences in her mother's replies (grunts) to her home-from-school greeting, "How's the book?"

With love and thanks.

To our research participants and to our teachers, our muses throughout.

We have been conducting ethnographic consumer research for corporate and institutional clients since the 1980s. We have worked with the producers, suppliers, and advertisers of consumer goods ranging from drain cleaners and power drills to 24-carat-gold ingots and fine art. We have worked with financial, healthcare, and educational institutions, retail conglomerates, energy and emerging technology industries, and governmental nonprofits. Our cultural analyses have helped clients to brand and market their goods and services in relevant and resonant ways as well as to think about entirely new products and services.

Over these twenty years, we have witnessed what one could call a seismic shift in the location and integration of ethnography within the consumer research world. The arena shifted from one in which "ethnography" was an esoteric term and as a mode of research was only rarely commissioned, to one where ethnography has become so commonplace that virtually every company offering qualitative consumer research has had to incorporate ethnographic work into the toolkit in one fashion or another. Advertising agencies and other business corporations have hired ethnographic specialists, and many have created entire departments dedicated to ethnographic inquiry.

As anthropologists, it is difficult not to applaud these developments. Ethnography has been the hallmark methodology of cultural anthropology for almost a century, and to see the methodology move beyond the bounds of our arguably niche academic field is to envision the influence of anthropology in a wider sphere. However, there is also no question that it is one-handed applause. Traditionally, for anthropologists, the applause might have been one-handed because anthropologically based insight was being incorporated into corporate pursuits. But the troubling reality of the situation is that this is precisely what has not always happened. The misuse and misappropriation of ethnography in consumer research has been part and parcel of its use. A myriad of research techniques within consumer research (from the few-minute in-store intercept interview, to the one-hour "depth interview," to the online focus group) have become redefined as "ethnographic" with barely any change in the underlying assumptions regarding method or analysis. Researchers have transformed themselves into "ethnographers" with few changes in practice beyond the name. In moments of need or desperation, clients have embraced ethnography as a crystal ball or magical resolution of their business problems, rather than as a mode of understanding and analytic catalyst for business-relevant ideas.

The truly troubling side of the proliferation of ethnography in consumer research, then, has been the relative absence of an accompanying proliferation of anthropological cultural analysis. Within anthropology, ethnography as a methodology has been honed in the service of understanding sociocultural phenomena and practices. "Culture" and "society" are at heart concepts with long histories, and long histories of disagreement among specialists. In the last decades, anthropologists have been active in combating notions of culture as static phenomena or as geographically located entities. There have also been strong efforts against cultural essentialism, or the "the X do this because of their culture" school of thought. In current anthropological conceptualizations, individuals are not pawns of the social or the cultural; rather, they are simultaneously its agents and its pawns, its creators and its destroyers, its advocates and its adversaries. Despite theoretical differences and disagreements, what anthropologists have generally maintained is an interest not only in the individual but in the extra-individual. The social milieu or metaphoric space that supports, catalyzes, organizes, and transduces, as well as confounds and constrains, individual thoughts and practices is seen as crucial. But in the use of ethnography within consumer research, the problem one frequently witnesses is that the goals of the research do not include any understanding or interest in analyzing the lived context of people and brands, that is, in the shared or contested cultural meanings and values imputed to brands or products and the common (and contested) cultural practices that surround categories or brands of products. Rather, ethnographic inquiry is too often embraced as simply a means to obtain a deeper psychological understanding of a target audience. In essence, even when the "new" methods of ethnography have replaced the traditional focus groups and other qualitative techniques within consumer research, ethnography has simply been subsumed as another technique of psychological research. An implicit paradigm and theoretical framework that assumes individual motivation and make-up are the key to consumption practices has been left intact.