PSYCHOLOGY VS. ANTHROPOLOGY: WHERE IS CULTURE IN MARKETPLACE ETHNOGRAPHY?

Ethnography, which involves observation techniques, in-depth interviewing, and using tape or video to record people in their natural settings, is gaining ground in market research, supplying detailed information on customers that other qualitative research techniques don’t provide, experts say. Marketing Research (Fellman 1999) These days, with the media world grown as fragmented as the American demographic map, the sales fantasy du jour is anthropology. Harper’s Magazine (Frank 1999) As anthropologists who make their living conducting consumer research for corporate clients, we have benefited from ethnography’s ‘gaining ground ’ and anthropology’s status as ‘sales fantasy du jour’. We work for advertising agencies or manufacturers (‘clients’) conducting research that leads them to relevant and resonant ways to market their products or services, or to develop new ones. In the past few years we have conducted research on cars and refrigerators, internet sites and internet appliances, luxury and more mundane package goods including beer and frozen dinners, healthcare an