ABSTRACT
‘Ethnography, which involves observation techniques, in-depth interviewing, and using tape or video to record people in their natural settings, is gaining ground in market research, supplying detailed information on customers that other qualitative research techniques don’t provide, experts say.’ The specific request and the general call for ethnography and anthropologists would lead one to expect that the request is for a cultural understanding of brands, products or services in everyday life. A striking aspect of the homes and offices of the technology leaders was the elimination of books – traditionally potent symbols in our society of intellect, reason and knowledge. Ethnographic methodology was developed by anthropologists for situations where the researcher was unfamiliar with the social or cultural worlds of the participants, and an important goal of that research was to explicate and translate these worlds for outsiders.
