In marketing, the interest of ethnographic research has focused on the ways consumers form communities around consumption artifacts but also the ways in which marketing is performed especially concentrating on marketing practitioners. New trends how to study marketplace behavior and interaction are arising from critical-, visual-, virtual- and autoethnography.
Speed and temporariness define today’s consumption communities.
In today’s international, mass-mediated and technology intensive society field work is a challenge to carry out: meanings are produced and mediated beyond concrete boundaries. Moisander and Valtonen suggest the concept of servicescape to define the field: a physical setting or environment of a place and it includes dimensions such as ambience, spatial layout, signs and symbolic artifacts which affect how customers and employees behave, interact and experience the space.
Consumption of a certain object does not express a commonly shared identity; rather communities always include overlapping and often conflicting identities and meanings. Even though community is using shared set of images and symbols, intertextuality over objects and ideologies are always present and meanings are produced within community. In marketing and consumer studies people under study are taken as natives who form achieved or ascribed communities/subcultures which include interpersonal relationships, social structure, and unique ethos and shared set of beliefs, values, rituals and symbolic expression. Usually subcultures such as brand communities are seen as secondary to the wider culture.
Contemporary consumer-related communities are periodical in nature. Also, the produced meanings are ephemeral. Even though communities can be based on brief social ties, the intensity of sharing of meanings over certain activity can be strong. Especially in technology-intense culture, social life is scattered and occasional.
In addition to Moisander’s and Valtonen’s notions of postmodern community characteristics, I would upraise anonymity as a distinctive community feature. Even though community socializing is more and more making its home into the Web, people still participate anonymously through avatars or pseudonyms. Tehy are afraid of virtual risks such as identity robbery. Only being identified by real life acquaintance can be embarrassing even though comments made would have been in a newspaper site.
Virtual communities play various roles: a person engages in communities of relationships, communities of transactions, (anti)brand communities, communities of interest and so forth. Depending on person’s level of engagement to the certain subject or community, s/he will create account for the platform. Nowadays many communities require login, and apps such as Facebook and Twitter have brought synergies so that a person doesn’t necessarily need to create separate account for every platform.
Supposedly anonymity will lessen with the change of generations as people open up. For example, Facebook’s Zuckerberg fantasizes of an open Web where people wouldn’t have the need for privacy. Realistic or not for people to engage to Internet medium rather than the subject of choice, anonymity will be around for a long time. Autoethnography, where the researcher is simultaneously the subject and object of the study, would be an interesting way of studying anonymity and identity development in online media.
Avatars and pseudonyms are virtual representations of a person’s self. Whether acting anonymously or manifesting the openness of Internet, the question for marketers is what kind of relevance is given to the opinions of anonymous comments. Are they real opinions? Why were they made? Do they matter? Is flaming the axioma of anonymous members? This obviously depends of the context - the meaning the community gives for the comments and the commentators. There are no black and white solutions for approaching anonymity, but it is one of the key areas what to observe in the field of virtual communities.
What is observing in Consumption-related Communities?
Notes, writings, tapes, photographs, images, artifacts, newspapers, interviews etc. What should we observe from these? The challenge of ethnography is not observing itself but distinguishing what to look. Moisander and Valtonen present areas such as intertextual linkages of objects, texts and ideologies in cultural systems of meaning.
As noted earlier, contextuality is always present as the goal is to distinguish discourses in which people interpret and produce meaning. Relationship between cultural production of subjects and the setting in which such subjects can be produced. Obviously traditional social categories such as race and age still play an important role how these communities are constructed.
Virtual ethnography (or netnography) requires acute lingual and interpretative skills from a researcher as virtual communities lack face-to-face interactions. Non-verbal cues are limited but diverse: standard emoticons are widely in use but every community has its own ways and meanings of using them in addition to creating their own.
The focus of observation is also dependent of the field of ethnography. For example, critical ethnography challenges the conventional, taken-for-granted nature of social reality by asking ‘What could be?’ instead of ‘What is?’ It’s fundamentally political approach concentrating on power, control and subjectivity of the ethnographer and the researched while linking the results of the field to a broader context. It also highlights the role of research in producing both restricting and emancipating alternative possibilities.
Conclusions
Ethnographic is time-consuming method as it involves attaining the insider perspective. Moreover, researcher must be familiar with the routine of documenting: recordings, writing and interviews and such. Thus all the examples given here, needless to highlight that the role of ethnographer is challenging. In addition to observing the phenomenon, s/he manages the relationship between the self and the others in the field.
It is obvious that the observations are not the truth of the phenomena but rather truthful accounts. In contemporary approach of ethnography the researcher is not non-biased but has a voice, power and own (personal, academic, career etc.) background to reflect on. Writing and expressing something is always excluding something else. Knowledge is built on us through history and this should be defined in the study as researcher’s orientation determines the whole research agenda and process. The role of critical reflexivity is to highlight researcher’s biased role rather than neutralize it. Moreover, when gaining the insider perspective, the researcher is likely to affect the field and through her/his own actions participate in cultural production of the community.
Objectivity has ruled academic and business world the last century. In such context ethnography is radical approach and offers detailed data of social and marketplace behavior. Ethnographic methods can provide perspectives on marketing strategy and questioning assumptions of marketing inquiries. Social media is THE site for ethnographers and marketers where thumping up and site peaks don’t really unfold the story of the consumers. Many online communities that are full of people engaging in hobbies, buying and selling, socializing and expressing are open for lurking and monitoring. Virtual ethnography is called for more than ever in the era of mediated consumption. Semantics in general, such as sarcasm, is still unreachable to search engines.
Moisander, J. and Valtonen A. 2005, p.45-67, Sage Publicications
No comments:
Post a Comment