THE WORK OF THE NEW ECONOMY: Consumers, Brands, and Value Creation

Abstract

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AND KNOWING CONSUMERSSeveral years ago, as part of an internship with the New York office of a transnational advertising agency, I was dispatched to do laundry. My destination: Astoria, Queens, where I visited the home of Lois, a white, married, 40 something, college-educated, middle-income mother of two school-age girls. Lois had been previously identified by the agency as a brand loyalist-someone whose last six purchases of laundry detergent were of a brand that I shall call "Wave."During a previous one-on-one interview at the agency, a Wave account planner asked Lois to make two collages by cutting and pasting pictures from dozens of glossy magazines spread out across a conference table. One collage expressed how Lois felt when her dirty laundry had piled up or when a favorite piece of clothing had become irremediably stained; the other collage expressed how Lois felt after she had finished washing and drying her clean laundry. My field trip, during which Lois and I did a load of whites together, was intended to follow up the office visit both by comparing word and deed and by gleaning bits of the laundry process that had not been gathered in the interview. The goal of my qualitative research was, in effect, to ascertain the unspoken emotional and symbolic implications of doing laundry by determining the social contexts and relations that Lois constructed through her use of Wave detergent.

The Ethnography <i>of</i> versus <i>for</i> Question in an Anthropology of/for Business

“…Multiple positionings also evidence how the boundaries between individuals and businesses have become increasingly blurred, particularly as work lives and consumer products become increasingly central to individual agency and how people identify themselves (Dittmar 2007, Foster 2007 and how everyday life is impacted by organisational livelihoods, actions and policies.…”

Rebranding a South Los Angeles Corner Store: The Unique Logic of Retail Brands

“…Agha 2015;Foster 2007;Graan 2013;Luvaas 2013;Mazzarella 2003;Nakassis 2012Nakassis , 2013Shankar 2012;Thomas 2013;Weiss 2012, Lury 2004. Research on brands demonstrates a potential to illuminate our understanding of how contemporary political economics impact the everyday lives of consumers.…”

“…Recent cultural anthropology scholarship has attended to wellknown product brands as commodities, such as Mazzarella (2003) on various product brands in India, Thomas (2013) on counterfeit clothing product brands in Guatemala, or Foster (2007) on Coca-Cola worldwide. These works focus on aspects of brand more controllable by producers, lawyers and professional branding or marketing agencies, such as logos, visual identity systems, product packaging, advertising, communications, and quality control.…”

“…Instead, the team sought to imagine connections between the curation of the healthy snacking category and some source of unique community identity or Garcia's identity that might lend credibility, meaning or dimension. In this sense, the team was well aware of their role in the cultural production of this new retail brand, and sought to co-create value with their consumer base (see Arvidsson 2006, Foster 2007. The naming process was less focused on invention, and more focused on how to channel cultural meanings from elsewhere, placing the brand at an intersection.…”

Participation and Investment in Local Agriculture: What’s in a Community?

“…Despite its problematic nature from an academic context, the notion of community has become another way to brand commodities and create enduring bonds between companies, products, and consumers (Foster, 2007). The most effective brands, arguably, are co-constituted by multiple publics, such that they mean many things to differently situated individuals who nonetheless express strong preferences for the same products (Foster, 2007).…”