Ethnography / Emerging Consumers

Abstract

For several decades 'Emerging' has been a staple prefix applied to such entities as markets, nations, democracies, cultures, and business opportunities. The term has been used to label virtually anything about "less developed" others deemed new to the world of market-led consumption, especially by corporate actors looking for new markets and consumers worldwide. This session explores theoretical and practical issues involved with doing industry ethnography within the 'Global South'. BoP (Base-of-the-Pyramid) was a powerful predecessor and marketing mantra that the late C. K. Prahalad made compelling by going beyond development ideology to characterise all 'segments' as active agents for at least for some kind of consumption. But, following BOP's demise as both a discourse and research program, what lessons can we, as ethnographers, learn from the way it tried to account for this contested category of consumers who are supposedly emerging-yet towards what? If BoP had had more of 'our' input might it have fared better, or simply imploded later?

On-the-Go Settlements: Understanding Urban Informality Through Its Digital Substructure

“…This addiction to the older, more clandestine web of video gaming has now been taken up by the newer circuits of mobile data addiction among teen boys whose data plans are dictated by affordability, access and addiction. Rangaswamy and Yamsani (2001) talk about the ‘digital lives’ of the teens in Hazeezpet, a squatter settlement in Hyderabad, where one interviewee’s admission aptly describes this addition, ‘Mental kartha hai’ (lit. makes me go crazy): This used to be a gaming parlour but it began to have a negative influence on the kids due to the bad language they used while playing.…”