Material for thought

In recent researches I have made about Ethnography, I read that it is important to “recognize the human capacity to spin, twist, turn, invent, tangle, tear and live by, through, and between symbolic meanings” [Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research by Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny]. Cultural symbols and signs used in things such as language, media and advertisement are dynamic, in constant negotiation. We would be merely executors of cultural conventions if we didn’t constantly alter, reassemble cultural symbols and practices at our own convenience. Yet, they are the only means by which we can comprehend this world and communicate our thoughts. We are thus living a paradoxical relationship with culture, at the same time restrictive and liberating.

What is the role of corporations and consumer research in this relationship? Consumer research is culturally agnostic, it doesn’t defend anything else than the interests of its commissioners, that is their  financial return on investment, most often achieved by pleasing their customers. It is these customers who are arbitrating on cultural symbols and practices, not corporations that are merely playing with cultural meanings at their own risk. The book Ethnography for marketers (a guide to consumer immersion, by Hy Mariampolski) defines the techniques now widely applied in corporations to better understand their customers. Better the customers are understood, better the services they get, better are also the intangible benefits they get from brands and marketing campaigns (such as being able to identify with a brand, use it as a symbol of belonging to a group). But as I explained in a recent lecture about the heterotopia of Walt Disney World, the risk is that cultural assets valuable in the mediation of our reality, but less attractive for brands, could slowly fade away in the profit of less effective meaning systems, more in tune with consumerism and manufactured consumer lifestyles. By observing customers instead of people, customer researches are influencing our perception of existence. It is a little like quantum theory, you cannot observe something in culture without influencing it. The issue is not commerce and its consumer persona, but the lack of other narrative forces. Or maybe even worst, it is the incapacity to recognize the significance of other systems of meaning simultaneously at play in our lives.