Celebrating excellence in audio-visual representations in market research

Citation

Caldwell, M. (2010), "Celebrating excellence in audio-visual representations in market research", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2010.21613aaa.001

Celebrating excellence in audio-visual representations in market research

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Volume 13, Issue 1

About the Guest Editors

Marylouise Caldwell Has a diverse range of research interests including: the diffusion of innovations in public health; cultural capital consequences for entertainment, sports attendance and tourism; female gender and consumption. She has articles in The European Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Arts Management, Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, Qualitative Market Research and Advances in Consumer Research. She is a passionate advocate of audio-visual methods in market research.

Paul Henry Has published articles in numerous international journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Psychology & Marketing, Academy of Marketing Science Review, Journal of Sociology and Qualitative Market Research. His primary focus has been social class and consumption. His current research focuses on understanding the foundations of consumer rights and the way consumer perceive and react to these rights in different contexts. His video-ethnographies and documentaries (with Marylouise Caldwell) have won numerous international awards.

We take great pleasure in introducing the inaugural audio-visual and written special issue of Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal. We applaud the Editor, Len Tiu Wright for having the vision to celebrate an increasingly significant area in qualitative consumer research by providing a timely outlet for high quality audio-visual work. The submissions in the special issue are of exceptional quality, attesting to the originality and skill and of the contributors. The submissions illustrate some of the diverse ways in which audio-representations feature in consumer research. By way of introduction to the special issue, we single out and briefly describe each of the contributions.

“A study of hoarding behavior and attachment to material possessions” by Hélène Cherrier and Tresa Ponnor, provides a fascinating account of how and why functional hoarders accumulate possessions. Functional hoarders are persons who accumulate objects that appear to be of useless or of limited value and display difficulties in disposing of such items. In contrast to problem hoarders, functional hoarders do not exhibit display pathology. Rather the hoarding practices of functional hoarders do not negatively impact their lifestyle or their ability to regularly and happily socialise. In the written part of their submission, the authors provide a conceptual foundation for studying functional hoarders, clearly showing that little if any research has been carried in the field of consumer research. Their exploratory research based in-depth interviews with eight functional hoarders reveals that three main drivers underpin functional hoarding, including:

1. 1.

   emotionally connecting to the past;

2. 2.

   securing the future; and

3. 3.

   enjoying the present.

Each of these main-drivers of functional hoarding is characterised by a subset of distinct sub-drivers. The accompanying documentary increases the credibility of their written assertions by showing each of the informants explaining their hoarding behaviour and showing their hoarded objects.

“‘Behind Closed Doors’: opportunity identification through observational research”, by Cynthia M. Webster, Richard Seymour and Kate Daellenbach has practical marketing research applications. The video demonstrates the combined use of video-recording and observation in effectively collecting and conveying consumer data likely to foster product innovation. The video captures the lead author’ family consuming a range of everyday products in unexpected, original and personally relevant ways. In their paper, the authors present their written findings based on an analysis of the data captured on video. Using Holbrook’s axiology of values as a framework for analysis, they conclude that consumer’s innovative practices centre around values such as efficiency, status, play and ethics and to a lesser extent values such as aesthetics, esteem, excellence and spirituality.

In a similar fashion to Webster et al.’s paper, Giana M. Eckhardt and Anders Bengtsson’s “Naturalistic group interviewing in China”, has a practical bent. The video component illustrates the application of techniques useful for collecting rich conversational data when conducting market research, specifically focus groups in China. These techniques include:

• •

  presenting Chinese consumers with scenarios and thereby stimulating meaningful discussion;

• •

  breaching people’s expectations and thereby allowing people to articulate underlying meaning systems; and

• •

  conducting interviews in existing, naturally formed social groups so that naturalistic discussions ensue.

The written paper provides a detailed rationale for each of the techniques featured in the film. Eckhardt and Bengtsson further suggest that the likelihood of informants feeling comfortable enough to openly share their views increases when focus group members in number, typically three to five participants, and same-sex groups.

In their submission, “Cross-border shopping: family narratives” Raquel Castaño, María Eugenia Perez and Claudia Quintanilla present a fascinating series of insights about how Mexican families construct family identity via cross-border shopping. Both the video and written paper show that this construction process involves key consumption activities, including family purchase-decision-making, the transferral of intergenerational consumer knowledge and the enactment of attitudes, in this case responses to “glocalization” and “malinchismo”. In the context of Mexican culture where family is a fundamental value, the research shows how modes of communication such as:

• •

  family narratives;

• •

  family rituals; and

• •

  intergenerational transfers, mobilise family identity through highly ritualised shopping trips.

Marta Rabikowska’s “Whose street is it anyway? Visual ethnography and self-reflection”, explores the potential of auto-ethnography in video-ethnographic research. The film focuses on a single community in South-East London where the author and director of the film used to live. This film incorporates the director’s voice, also a character in the film, and the voices of other inhabitants who are the consumers of The High Street. The film shows the everyday life of The High Street and its people, depicting the spatio-material topography of the street as a market-place. The High Street serves as a symbolic representation of the socio-cultural practices of the local community. Reflecting Thrift’s (2007) theory of space, the street is “porous” – with no boundary to incoming memories, messages, or encounters, and with no stable landscape for communication. The written paper complements the video piece by combining different kinds of writing to self-reflectively analyse the process of film making and observations of the resulting film on the author/film-makers own perceptions of consumption, belonging and place.

Finally, “Constructing audio-visual representations of consumer archetypes”, a submission by the Guest Editors, Marylouise Caldwell and Paul Henry, and Ariell Alman, a commercial market researcher, explores how market researchers can develop audio-visual representations of consumers likely to resonate with market practitioners and thereby engender a consumer likely to resonate with market practitioners and thereby engender a consumer orientation. The written paper details the theoretical foundations of this technique, notably drawing upon theories regarding:

• •

  the usefulness of audio-visual representations to marketing practitioners; and

• •

  the contribution of archetypes to marketing practice.

The paper outlines the process of constructing audio-visual consumer archetypes, relying on well-established theory to initially identify consumer archetypes likely to characterise the market for fashion, food and fun in Sydney, Australia for middle-class females.

The accompanying video presents audio-visual representations of the following archetypes: Material Girl, Pampered Princess, Discerning Modernist and Yummy Mummy. Empirical testing of these audio-visual representations suggests that marketing practitioners are likely to find such stimuli useful when developing marketing communications or creating new product concepts.

Marylouise Caldwell, Paul HenryGuest Editors