Visual ethnography: Achieving rigorous and authentic interpretations

a r t i c l e i n f o Visual methods have a long history in ethnographic research and ethnographic methods are increasingly used to gain a depth of insight and understanding not achievable with traditional marketing research approaches. As a rigorous and valid research method, visual ethnography enables documentation of marketing and consumption as social and cultural phenomenon. Visual text collected through the process of cultural immersion serves as an effective and credible research tool in the quest to collect and analyze empirical evidence as well as disseminate research findings. As a case application, this paper builds on the ethnographic investigation of Schembri (2009). Visual ethnography is an appropriate and credible methodology in the quest to achieve rigorous and authentic interpretations in marketing and consumer research. As pioneers of visual anthropology, Margaret Mead, in conjunction with co-author Gregory Bateson, bravely put visual technology to work as early as 1942 in a photographic analysis of the Balinese character (see Mead & Bateson, 1942). Within the Balinese culture Mead and Bateson were studying and documenting native culture, whereas contemporary marketing and consumer researchers study consumer culture. As a social and cultural phenomenon, consumption is complex and messy and accordingly, many social scientists have started to shift the way social life is studied and consequently understood. As the " cultural turn " (Rose, 2001, p. 5) this paradigmatic shift includes an uptake of visual methods as an effective means to study the construction of social life through social practice. The premise of this form of social study is that different groups in society will make sense of the world in different ways and that these varying meaning structures direct the way people behave. Demonstrating the value and meaning of the Nutella brand and building on the earlier work of Muniz, Albert, and O'Guinn (2001), Cova and Pace (2006) for example, show how Nutella as an object of consumption holds a particular meaning within the online Nutella world as understood and shared by the members of that online community. The depth of detail is in part achieved by using visual documentation with Cova and Pace (2006) incorporating real pictures of real people consuming Nutella. From another analytical perspective, Grow (2006) uses visual methods to study the mediated construction of community life within the world of Nike women's advertising. Using a semiotic analysis of 27 Nike print campaigns that were implemented across …