The faddish breakouts of ethnography

Ethnographic research has been described as a fad that promised to look beneath the rationalisations of consumers, but did not in fact deliver the cut-through promised by agencies.
  

Viewpoint – The faddish breakouts of ethnography

Clive BoddyMiddlesex University/University of Lincoln

In 1988 the comeback of ethnography as a market research tool was being trumpeted in the trade magazine Marketing News (Mariampolski 1988) and yet, about 20 years later, it is a technique that is still said to be becoming popular and fashionable in market research (Nafus 2006). As such it was deemed to be worthy of a Special Issue of IJMR(Desai 2007; Mouncey 2007). However, a recent (2008) search of the respective UK and Australian online Research Supplier Directories revealed that...

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