How To Serve (and Market To) Humans

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on

"The study of people in their natural environment is, The Hartman Group believes, the future of marketing," explains a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story. So this market research firm, which has worked for Whole Foods, PepsiCo and Campbell Soup Company, has sent two sociocultural anthropologists into a private home for up to nine months, to "observe the family's eating habits." This new approach - called "reality marketing" - will fill "an enormous void in the intellectual capital of the entire industry," said The Hartman Group's Michelle Barry. Pepsi's vice-president of consumer and customer insights, Dwight Riskey, agrees. "This generates a richness that we wouldn't get from standard techniques," he said. The Hartman Group's CEO, Harvey Hartman, stressed the importance of observing one family over time: "The fluidity of life is the power behind reality marketing."

Main Source: 
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 1, 2005
Topics: 
Corporations
Marketing

Comments

nwander replied on

While this use of anthropology isn't new, it looks to becoming increasingly invasive and consequently manipulative. As an anthropologist, I believe this to be an unethical use of our training and our skills, and a betrayal of any public trust we might otherwise earn. Anthropologists who engage with corporate capitalism would do better to study the corporatists and teach the rest of use how to better resist. We need anthropologists who will teach us how to reclaim our citizenhood, not anthropologists who will help drive us further into consumerdom. (P.S. I appreciate the Damon Knight/"Outer Limits" title.) Nathaniel Wander UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education

Diodorus Siculus replied on

Socio-cultural anthropologists have long studied such things as the thinking, cognitive aspects, and even the emotions of people in different settings. So invasiveness, per se, is not the issue, but the intent behind the studies. What we see here is a recent brand of colonial anthropology, in which there is a definite intent to use the results of the studies to manipulate the subjects’ peers. Actually, it’s a bit reductionistic to focus an anthropological research on one family or even a few families. The family of this study is part of a larger cultural context. It would be better, it seems to me, to study how families fit into and are manipulated by the larger context of modern corporate American.

jcnichols replied on

After reading this, I couldn't help but think about a movie called "Kitchen Stories", a Swedish movie where researchers in Norway set out to study the kitchen habits of single men, perched upon a "man-sized" high-chair in the corner, unable to speak or interact with their subject. Of course, this "research" could morph into a great reality show!