Consumer culture poetry: insightful data and methodological approaches

Abstract

Consumer culture poetry: insightful data and methodological approaches. This article makes a case for greater inclusion of poetry as distinctive data within interpretive consumer research. It considers that alternative means of representation provide insight into difficult to access consumption fields. The poetic voice allows the emergence of an emic language of experience as the subject engages in self-reflexivity expressed in ways unconstrained by typical research norms. The article also considers some of the methodological choices inherent in engaging with poetic data and illustrates the research value by considering poems that unpack hidden and mundane consumption and consumer resistance. It shows how intimate experiences can be accessed and interrogated using poetic analysis, how poetry can capture the minutia of mundane consumption while laying bare the poet's reflexivity about its meaning and how the reclamation of a dead art-form can become an active form of rejection and consumer resistance.

Poetizing to improve consumer representation

“…Poetry has long been an ally in our understanding of markets and consumers (Brown and Patterson, 2000;Stern, 1998). Since Sherry and Schouten's formative work ( 2002) arguing for more poetic representation in the field of consumer research, interest in poetics and consumer research has grown (Brown and Wijland, 2015;Canniford, 2012;Downey, 2016Downey, , 2020Rojas-Gaviria, 2016Sherry and Schouten, 2002;Tonner, 2019;Wijland, 2011;Wijland and Brown, 2018).…”

“…The idea of poetizing to improve consumer representation in marketing theory rests not only on Stern's critiques of our well-rounded analytical tools, or on Heidegger's philosophy of poetry but also on two decades worth of conscious efforts by poet-researchers to bring the power of poetry to marketing theory (Brown and Patterson, 2000;Brown and Wijland, 2015;Canniford, 2012;Downey, 2016Downey, , 2020Rojas-Gaviria, 2016Sherry and Schouten, 2002;Stern, 1998;Tonner, 2019;Wijland, 2011aWijland, , 2011bWijland and Brown, 2018).…”

The listening guide: voice-centred-relational analysis of private subjectivities

“…As Montgomery et al (2015) demonstrate, I-poems have played a practical role in health training programmes for improving medics’ understanding of patient needs. Consumer authored poetry as a source of data can also illuminate mundane, hidden and anti-consumption sentiments (Tonner, 2019). Through I-poems, voice amplifies the nuances of internal conversations (Raider-Roth, 2005) providing researchers with a conceptual tool to hear changes and continuities in participants’ sense of self over time (Edwards and Weller, 2012).…”

Elucidating ethnographic expressions

“…The author’s poetry created from transcribed interviews of migrants, express more instinctively lived experiences (Canniford, 2012) that attend Sherry and Schouten’s (2002, p. 222) ideas, “consumer research that does not allow for the visceral collection […] of data is incomplete”. For others, poetry’s usefulness, drawn principally from researcher reflections (Tonner, 2019, p. 258) is critiqued and advocates for consumers’ poetic voices, to capture lived experiences within the consumer research domain. Maréchal and Linstead (2010, p. 66) promote the “metropoem” as a means to move away from an internalised researcher position, to be more, “focused in the moment, in place, and in motion”.…”

“…Authors (Faulkner, 2007; Lahman et al , 2010; Tonner, 2019) identify alternate ways researchers can capture the poetic voice (Table I) to represent consumers’ lived experiences. Despite the different labelling attributed to the various poetic forms of representation, there exists synergy.…”