Ethnographic Stories for Market Learning

Abstract

Although ethnography has become a popular research approach in many organizations, major gaps exist in the field's understanding of the way it operates in the corporate world, particularly in how ethnography facilitates market learning. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography, the authors describe how ethnographic stories give executives a unique means of understanding market realities. By working through the rich details of ethnographic stories infused with the tensions, contradictions, and emotions of people's everyday lives, executives are better able to grasp the complexity of consumer cultures. Overall, this research should help managers leverage the catalytic effects of ethnographic storytelling in their efforts to learn about and understand market contexts.

Design, consumption and marketing: outcomes, process, philosophy and future directions

“…Design as process is useful for overcoming this challenge as it focuses on how information can be reframed empathetically so as to give sense to others in ways that enable them to work efficiently and achieve better market-oriented outcomes. Thus, it is not just the information per se that is important, or even the methods used (Cayla & Arnould, 2013), but the resourceful sensemaking practices marketers as designers use to transform that information to enable greater understanding coordination that matters (Beverland et al, 2016).…”

Tradição Mercantilizada: Construção de Mercados Baseados na Tradição

“…Para isso, a coleta de dados envolveu inicialmente observação participante em 40 locais demarcados por práticas tradicionalistas em dez diferentes cidades. Como principal meio dessa coleta nos estudos etnográficos em marketing (Cayla & Arnould, 2013) e capaz de explorar a riqueza dos contextos culturais brasileiros (Belk & Casotti, 2014), a observação participante visou apreender fenômenos culturais particulares por meio da assimilação das categorias que ordenam o universo cultural em estudo. Para isso, buscamos um envolvimento direto com práticas culturais reconhecidas como gaúchas, participando ativamente em eventos e rodeios ligados ao MTG e realizando cursos de formação tradicionalistas.…”

Resourceful Sensemaking: Overcoming Barriers Between Marketing and Design in NPD

“…Existing research has often accounted for the why of conflict, but provided little insight into how to overcome such conflict and achieve improved outcomes. To address this gap, recent studies examining the cultural elements of market orientation and market learning that identify managing for interfunctional meaning as being crucial to collaboration and synergistic outcomes are drawn upon (Cayla and Arnould, 2013;Gephardt, Carpenter and Sherry, 2006).…”

“…As demonstrated by organizations considered, resourceful sensemaking involves recognition of alternate perspectives, and reflexive thinking requiring the realisation that one's own views may represent a barrier to others' understanding and communicating emotionally (Cayla and Arnould, 2013;Gephardt, Carpenter and Sherry, 2006). Table 4 includes numerous examples of specific practices from exposing, obtained by reframing corporate priorities, to co-opting and repurposing tools such as focus groups, prototypes and storyboards.…”