Guest editorial

,

Qualitative Market Research

ISSN: 1352-2752

Article publication date: 1 June 2005

412

Citation

Elliott, R. and Shankar, A. (2005), "Guest editorial", Qualitative Market Research, Vol. 8 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qmr.2005.21608baa.001

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Guest editorial

About the Guest Editors Richard Elliott is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Research at Warwick Business School and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is a visiting professor at ESCP-EAP Paris, Université Paris II, and Thammasat University Bangkok. Previously he was the first person to be appointed to a Readership in Marketing at the University of Oxford and was a deputy director of the Sai¨d Business School. He worked for 12 years in brand management with a number of US multinationals and as an account director at an international advertising agency. He is European Editor of the Journal of Product & Brand Management and has published books on Strategic Advertising Management and Interpretive Consumer Research and over 100 research papers. His research focuses on the symbolic meaning of brands, consumer culture and identity, and the dynamics of brand ecology.

Avi Shankar is a lecturer in Marketing and Consumer Research at Exeter University. His research interests include cultural critiques of consumption and studies of consumption based sub-cultures. Whilst he has published in numerous journals including this one, The European Journal of Marketing, The Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption Markets and Culture and The International Journal of Advertising he has not published in The Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research or The Journal of Marketing Research. When not pursuing his academic interests he grows vegetables and fishes. If anyone would like to offer him a senior lectureship he is open to offers.

We were delighted by the response to this guest edition of Qualitative Market Research on “New Paths To Thick Descriptions: Innovations in Data Collection and Interpretation”. Thanks to the effectiveness of our planned viral marketing communications campaign – “please forward this e-mail attachment to anyone that you know” – our call for papers seems to have infiltrated every corner of the Earth. Enquiries (and deadline extensions!) were received from America, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand as well as from the UK. In the end 14 papers were submitted and went out for double blind review.

We would like to thank all the reviewers. Possibly the most under-rated (especially in the UK in these RAE driven times) yet possibly one of the most important (and enjoyable) academic functions is that of reviewing. We only had to cajole a couple of reviewers for their ruminations, and on behalf of the authors we would like to thank them all for their constructive comments and the authors for revising their papers in line with these comments.

Based on the reviewers' comments we have selected seven papers from those submitted. Most focus on data collection and whilst none can claim to be completely new, all challenge our usual reliance on focus groups or depth interviews and challenge us to think more creatively of how we might get closer to the actual lived experience of consumers and consumption.

Our selection is international in dimension and we are particularly delighted to be able to publish papers by world-renowned colleagues alongside PhD students and academics at the start of their careers – all signs, we believe, of a vibrant and healthy research community. Too often – at least for our liking – innovative, but most importantly, insightful qualitative research methods suffer at the hands of restrictive editorial practices and conservative PhD programme supervisors or committees. We hope that in the future these practices will become less of a hindrance to the creativity that is evident in our research community.

The first paper by Russell Belk and Robert Kozinets explores the potential for using videography in consumer and marketing research. As they argue, videography poses many challenges to the researcher. If, as they suggest, a video is sufficient output for leading organisations that commission market research, this represents a challenge to all those engaged in teaching and training the next generation of researchers. Alongside our research methods courses we should also be thinking about research representation courses too. Their paper represents a starting point for all those interested in pursuing this path.

The second paper by Anthony Patterson kills two birds with one stone. He not only examines the popularity of text messaging – a potential data collection method in its own right – but does so by reminding us of the insights that can be gained in using qualitative diary research in an attempt to capture the richness and immediacy of lived experience. As with all data collection methods that involve the active participation of consumers, problems – that Tony argues can be overcome – exist in getting their co-operation. This encourages us all to think about research as a “civic, participatory and collaborative project – a project that joins the researcher with the researched in an ongoing moral dialogue” (Denzin, 2001, p. 326).

Active participation is a central theme of the third paper by Emma Banister and Gayle Booth, as they guide us through the challenges associated with researching children. As children increasingly become the targets of marketing activities, being able to monitor the effects of this activity will assume central importance as part of a moral dialogue, and Emma and Gayle provide us with an insightful, reflexive account of their own experiences of researching young children.

In the fourth paper Tina Lowrey, Cele Otnes and Mary Ann McGrath reflect on accompanied shopping, shopping with consumers (SWC), as a means of capturing the actual experience of shoppers and shopping – after all shopping is central not only to consumer marketing but also to the effective functioning of all industrialized societies. Whilst SWC is not a new method, the willingness of Tina, Cele and Mary Ann to reflect on how their method has been used and developed since they first developed it is an important lesson in its own right. Challenging, reflecting and questioning the assumptions upon which we make our knowledge claims are integral to the development of qualitative research. This continual reflexivity towards what we do and how we do it, stands in stark contrast to other more popular research methods.

Questioning the received wisdom of a research method is a theme pursued in the next two papers. Roy Langer and Suzanne Beckman highlight the difficulties associated with researching consumers when the topic in question is a sensitive one – in their case, cosmetic surgery. In this light, they review and modify Kozinet's netnographic method – literally ethnography on the internet – and highlight the importance of adapting research methods to the specific needs of a particular project. Their paper contributes to the emergence of netnography as an important research method in the age of the internet.

Robin Canniford recounts the problems he has experienced with adapting ethnography to study non-geographically bound cultures, in his case surf culture. Surf culture is a globally diffuse culture and to actively participate in it, in order to get close to surfers themselves, takes a high degree of skill – learning to surf – that takes years to develop. Luckily for Robin he possesses this skill and this allows him access to this global community that would be impossible for most of us and he moves on to argue for a “follow the actors” emergent research design.

In the final paper Stephen Brown, in his usual inimitable style, argues that there is much that we can learn about consumers and consumption, from people who portray the human experience with a clarity of representation that is often lacking from our efforts or any Lisrel model. The novel and novelists are just as adept as we are at capturing the lived experience of being a consumer, or what it is like to live in a consumer culture – perhaps even more so. So rather than embark on a lengthy (and possibly costly) research project – why not pop down to your local bookshop and purchase some “mart-lit” instead.

We hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we have enjoyed the process of putting this special edition together.

Richard ElliottWarwick UniversityAvi ShankarExeter University

ReferenceDenzin, N.K. (2001), “The seventh moment: qualitative inquiry and the practices of a more radical consumer research”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 28, pp. 324-30.

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