Consumer ethnography’s goal is to understand the non-discursive meanings and experiences that materialize as people go about their everyday lives. It attempts to uncover tacit knowledge, unarticulated and contextual understandings that are in routines, nods, silence, humor, postures, gestures and verbal statements. Tacit knowledge enables people to define social situations and act accordingly within them. In this attempt to discover the tacit areas of consuming, three approaches are present: macro-, micro- and lastly meso-level ethnogprahy introduced by Arnould and Price.
Macro-level ethnography focuses on the identification of templates or spaces for consumer action with which they give structure to consumption choices and life goals in general. Interesting examples of macro-level approach are ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) and cultural branding by Holt. The goal of ZMET is to understand informant’s unconscious thought through analysis of metaphors that are present in informant-selected images/photos and interviews. The photos taken and images chosen by informants are key element of the method as it’s heavily based on the belief that people think in images rather than in words. The method has been used to discover consumer’s metaphorical understandings of the functions of advertizing and goodwill towards advertising.
Cultural branding, on the other hand, takes metaphors to another level by discerning cultural templates for action and interpretation. Holt argues that the mythic templates are dynamic and charged in nature. The examples are numerous: the template of a home-mom is in tension with career mom, apple users are in tension to pc nerds, snacks are in tension with full meals. Holt furthermore argues that iconic brands can help consumers mediate these tensions. The potential of consumer goods to break through is in finding new ways to articulate these tensions. In other words, boost the need to be unique and belong.
Micro-level ethnography focuses on the a) relationship between the market-provided product/service and the consumer by observing behavior and b) analysis of symbolic dimensions the products build on. The first, product-in-use or task-oriented approach has been favored in marketing and the popularity lies on the method’s potential to uncover regularities in behavior that cannot be articulated. The latter, studies of brand and consumption communities, has risen previous years but the builds the grounds to the common assumption that people buy things what they mean.
Meso-level ethnography, introduced by Arnould and Price, lies on the basis of understanding how people use resources provided by firms in the culturally, socially situated practices of their everyday lives. The focus of the cultural and social space is the factor what differentiates to the other two. For example, in the case of home visits the researcher tracks the ‘cultural field’, the self-organizing consumer activity space or social network rather than focusing on the tasks performed at dinner table. Thus in their study of family meals and homemade as cultural model, Arnould and Price extended the cultural field of this family occasion to shopping, the role of children, preparing, eating, cleaning etc.
The strength of meso-level approach is its ability to distinguish disjuncture between behavioral ideals and realized behavior as well as between informant’s and observer’s representations of reality. Also, competing tensions of commitments and meanings can be discovered. For example, household food practices reflect aspects of gender, power, identity and social stratification. In Arnould’s and Price’s study one informant spoke her mind of sharing household work with her husband, but the observation revealed that this never happened. Family dinners are seen as sacred rituals but time, meals and other activities define the tensions of every participants meanings of that activity.
Homemade is not easy to sell to consumers as it’s highly personal and somewhat mysterious. However, in their meso-level research when questioning the ideal and concept of homemade, Arnould and Price found four factors why homemade is important. They differentiate home from market, they foster a sense of historical continuum, they link the household to the domain of the sacred and they help people enact important roles and role relationships. Home meal assembly services have managed to find a niche in this relational practice: customers are still able do rather than buy homemade leaving the marketer’s role away from the heart of home.
Conclusions
The weakness of macro-level approach is that it aims to generalize cultural templates by aggregating psyches of individuals while the relational, changing dynamics and discourses of everyday life may be unidentified. The micro-level approaches, on the other hand, tackle with transferability of results as consumer cultures are so fragmented and dynamic. Also, task-oriented ethnography doesn’t usually grasp the ‘why’ of particular consumption patterns.
Arnould and Price highlight the positioning of brand. With their example study of family meals and meaning of homemade, they pinpoint the importance of understanding who and what really matters to consumers. They call for this kind of new customer-centricity where firm is seen as relational resource that facilitates performance of consumers’ meanings. By acknowledging where the brand stands in consumer’s life, companies can better position themselves and identify new opportunities.
Reference: Arnould Eric J. and Price Linda L. ‘Market-Oriented Ethnogrpahy Revisited’ Journal of Advertising ResearchSeptember 2006, 251-262
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