ABSTRACT
Market research in international and multicultural contexts sets out to increase and organize our understanding of other cultures within the framework of marketing’s needs and advertising strategies. This process of gathering information about a culture, ordering that information within domestic institutions, and then instituting policy decisions based on that information parallels the ethnographic process in anthropology. Ethnographers go “out in the field” and establish relationships with members of cultures under study (“informants”), attempting to gain knowledge about those cultures’ belief systems, values, family structures, economic relationships, and social behaviors. The anthropologists return home (generally to universities) and create a text that both uses the material they have gathered in the field and conforms to some degree to the professional paradigms of anthropological research (Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Richer, 1988).
