مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber spent two years living among the Arapaho Indians and studying their material and social values using the cultural relativism paradigm. Embedding himself in the Arapaho culture, Kroeber learned the language and customs, offering insights not accessible to average observer. Examining moccasins, Kroeber remarks, “[t]his strongly-marked decorative character of Arapaho art, however, is accompanied by a realistic tendency of such development as at first acquaintance would not be suspected by a civilized person” (Kroeber, 1901, p. 309). He notes that combinations of symbols serve as written records or stories about personal experiences, maps, or myths. Kroeber’s experience suggests that the key to understanding human behavior is field work and emersion into the group of interest. A one-shot data point probably misses the mark both regarding the informants’ values and feelings as well as how the researcher interprets the behavior.

This special edition offers an example of how marketing researchers use anthropology data collection methods. Like Kroeber, these researchers seek a deeper understanding of human behavior. Field observations, unstructured long interviews, studying cultural folk tales, examining consumer artifacts, and digging through secondary data provide new insights on how and why people behave. Longitudinal studies also demonstrate transformative behavior. The evidence supports the proposition that consumer behavior is like a finely cut diamond and the popular consumer behavior research methodologies provide a view of only one facet. Using different methodologies tile the diamond in different directions and reveal other equally important aspects of consumer behavior.

To better understand consumer behavior, Marketing Anthropology Research (MAR) offers a unique vantage point for contributing to the discipline of marketing research. MAR embraces adherence to several central propositions including the following viewpoints. Advances in theory in the field of marketing research require accurate and deep explication of naturally occurring thinking, assessments, communications, and behavior of consumers (see Woodside & Martin, 2015). MAR recognizes the severe limits in asking questions and encourages advancement of methods beyond scaled response metrics. MAR researchers are historically and locally situated within the phenomena studied. They recognize that research methods are not neutral in their effects on theory creation and testing. Consumer research joins the research and researched (see Denzin, 2001). Rather than adopting a net effects standard on the influence of individual independent variables, MAR researchers more often embrace a gestalt recipe perspective – both in crafting and in testing theory. MAR researchers are bricoleur, piecing together data from multiple sources.