Viewpoint: The faddish breakouts of ethnography

Clive Boddy
Honorary Visiting Professor in Marketing at Middlesex University and Visiting Professor of Marketing esearch at the University of Lincoln.

In 1988 the comeback of ethnography as a market research tool was being trumpeted in the trade magazine Marketing News (Mariampolski 1988) and yet, about 20 years later, it is a technique that is still said to be becoming popular and fashionable in market research (Nafus 2006). As such it was deemed to be worthy of a Special Issue of IJMR (Desai 2007; Mouncey 2007). However, a recent (2008) search of the respective UK and Australian online Research Supplier Directories revealed that just 17% of all UK market research companies listed claim to provide ethnographicresearch services (MRS 2008). In the Australian Market and Social Research Society’s online directory, for example, only 17 out of 324 Australian research suppliers offer ‘ethnography’, ‘ethnographic’, ‘accompanied shopping’ or ‘participant observation’ (AMSRS 2008) as techniques. This means that only approximately 5% of market research suppliers in Australia claim that they offer ethnographic- type research services. These are hardly levels of supply that can be described as ubiquitous or that indicate a great level of underlying popularity for the technique.

The language used in some articles to describe ethnography (‘show-pony’, ‘buzzword’, ‘novelty’) is characteristic of descriptions of a fad product or service. A fad is defined in marketing as a fashion that arrives swiftly, quickly peaks in popularity and then declines rapidly thereafter (Kotler 1984). Fads appeal to those marketers and consumers who want to differentiate themselves from others and have something unusual and new to talk about. However, fads fail to satisfy strong needs or do not satisfy them well enough compared to other ways of satisfying the same needs, and so they decline rapidly. This is what appears to periodically happen to ethnography in market research.

Ethnography as a ‘fad’ approach to market research

One research commentator described an ethnographic approach to market research as a fad that promised to look beneath the rationalisations of consumers but did not in fact deliver the insightful cut-through promised by research agencies (Barrand 2004). This perhaps provides a clue to the emergence and relative disappearance of ethnography over the past 20 years and to its recent re-emergence. The question raised here is whether ethnography was a research fad that over-promised on results, which led to disappointment among clients and, in turn, led to its neglect and relative disappearance.

Comments in Barrand’s article (2004) indicate that many agencies offer ethnographic research in response to client demands but are not specifically skilled in the ethnographic approach and so fail to get as close to consumers as promised and fail to deliver the insights promised. In other words, the standard of execution of the research is not high and few companies are reported to undertake well-executed ethnographic studies.

Another factor in this fad product life cycle that ethnographic research seems to have, is that research buyers may not be qualified to make the judgment of when an ethnographic approach would be worth the additional costs. Reportedly, many buyers are amateurs when it comes to differentiating between different research approaches (MarketingWeek 2005) and so may make inappropriate buying decisions based on whether ethnography was
popular or in decline rather than on its appropriateness to the research or marketing problem under consideration. Its time-consuming, high-cost nature relative to other forms of research has already been noted by commentators, and this may also be a barrier to its continued use after its popularity declines, compared to other forms of research – especially if it is not delivering as much as promised.

It can also be argued that many of the claimed special benefits of ethnography are not special at all, and can be gained through alternative and cheaper approaches. This arguably fuels the development of ethnographic research as a fad product because many clients soon realise that they could have obtained the same answers more cheaply and quickly elsewhere and so they revert back to traditional approaches to research once the popularity of ethnography has waned.

A benefit of an ethnographic approach is that the novelty of the approach attracts senior marketers and even the occasional CEO into the research setting or results presentation, and so achieves the objective of getting marketers close to their customers (Williams 2005). This is not to say that other types of research cannot get close to customers equally well, but merely that the very novelty of the ethnographic research process is the attraction for senior client-side personnel. However, it should be noted that this attractiveness due to novelty is a benefit that is characteristic of a fad product.

Conclusions

To the generalist market researcher, ethnography appears to come and go in terms of its popularity and appeal in market research, and in this respect it appears to have the markings of a fad product. To avoid being disappointed about what an ethnographic approach can bring to an understanding of consumers, clients should reportedly involve a qualified anthropologist (Serf 2007) at the commissioning stage of a project to make sure that such an expensive and time-consuming exercise is really warranted in terms of the extra insights it can bring. Similarly, clients should engage research companies with a long history of undertaking ethnographic studies and with expertise in the area rather than those who jump on and off the bandwagon as it passes through the stages of popularity and decline that are characteristic of a fad product.

International Journal of Market Research 51(1), 2008

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