ABSTRACT
Anthropologists working in or for business frequently conduct consumer research for their corporate clients in fields of marketing and advertising, product development, market research, UX research, social media, sustainable consumption and cross-cultural consumer research. Anthropology in consumer research can, thus, help to reveal the hidden domains of consumers’ cultural practices that often lead to creative outcomes. Women’s cooking practices of improvisation often go unnoticed and remain invisible, since many cultural practices lie hidden as being taken for granted. The most useful, informative, and “disruptive” forms of consumer research are developed from ideas that are produced “in” contexts with others during their activity, which makes all research collaborative. An ongoing challenge to the popularity of ethnography in consumer research has been the gradual “decoupling” of ethnographic methods from anthropological theory, as ethnography is used in other forms of non-anthropological consumer research.
