ABSTRACT

In the introductory chapter of her 1999 book, Goodthinking, U.K. practitioner Wendy Gordon recounted her surprise, with some amount of exasperation, that a then current handbook in qualitative methods made no mention of the work of applied qualitative market research. Despite a trail of published work, and the huge industry that marketing research constitutes globally, applied market research protocols and thinking remained invisible in academic treatises sharing a common subject. 1 Academic anthropology, at least in the United States, United Kingdom, and parts of Europe, has construed and constituted theory and application in oppositional terms for decades. Consumer culture theory (CCT) in academic marketing, developed explicitly in the last two decades in response to prevailing models of consumption and marketing in business schools, has also rested on a perhaps unavoidable, but equally unfortunate, bifurcation between managerial practice and consumption theory. 2