Market Oriented Ethnography Revisited

Market-Oriented Ethnography Revisited

This article discusses and illustrates the benefits of an approach to market-oriented

ethnographic research that leads to insights somewhat different than those provided

by two dominant approaches in applied ethnography. Our approach privileges

relationships and participation in relatedness as the object of analysis. This contrasts

with the macro-level approach of trying to “get inside the consumer’s head” and also

contrasts with micro-level approaches that narrowly focus on “the consumer’s feelings

about my brand.” The insights our meso-level approach provides are enhanced

understanding of the place of firm-provided resources (products, services, symbols,

slogans, environments, etc.) in the conduct of everyday consumer’s lives in consumer

centric marketspaces. We illustrate our meso-level approach drawing on an

empirical illustration of homemade food preparation and related managerial

opportunities.

Here would be a cultural shift of Copernican

magnitude —from presuming a self at the center of the

social world to seeing relationships as the enduring

reality of which the self is an integral part.

—Kenneth J. Gergen (1996, p. 135)

Others enter our world and our everyday lives not as

instruments by which we achieve our own personal

satisfactions but rather as partners in a shared enter-

prise without which we could never hope to be who

we are.

—Edward E. Sampson (2000, p. 1431)

THREE APPROACHES IN APPLIED

MARKET-ORIENTED ETHNOGRAPHY

Three approaches in applied market-oriented eth-

nography (Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994) can be

defined, two of which have garnered the bulk of

research attention in recent years. We may de-

scribe them as macro, micro, and meso in orien-

tation as we explain below. All three approaches

adopt a general ethnographic orientation. All con-

sumer ethnography aims to produce generative

insights from the application of a broad and deep

understanding of how cultures are organized, care-

ful attention to the details of how culture plays

out in everyday life, and disciplined curiosity

about what people are up to. This, of course, is

something that individual members of a culture

only partially grasp. Capturing informants’ words

alone leaves out much of the human experience

that ethnography wishes to capture. Effective con-

sumer ethnography grasps the priorities in con-

sumers’ life worlds through examination of the

socially meaningful practices that comprise them.

In other terms, good ethnographies uncover tacit

knowledge, referring to the largely unarticulated,

contextual understandings that are manifest in

routines, nods, silences, humor, postures, and ges-

tures as well as statements about belief and val-

ues. Acting as the glue that joins consumers’

ERIC J. ARNOULD

University of Arizona

eja1email.arizona.edu

LINDA L. PRICE

University of Arizona

[email protected]

JAR46(3) 06-037 1/12 09/20/06 10:35 am REVISED PROOF Page:251

DOI: 10.2501/S0021849906060375 September 2006 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 251

intentions to concrete behaviors, tacit

knowledge enables informants to define

social situations and act appropriately

within them. It may also be described as

distributed templates for action and inter-

pretation (Hannerz, 1992), not entirely un-

like the “lay theory” some psychologists

talk about (Chiu, Dweck, Tong, and Fu,

1997; Dweck, Chiu, and Hong, 1995). Thus,

ethnography aims to make sense both of

understandings and experiences people

articulate and the nondiscursive ones that

are implicated by people as they perform

their everyday lives (Altheide and John-

son, 1994).

Moreover, all three approaches recog-

nize that cultural context is not a sort of

background factor or antecedent to indi-

vidual behavior, but a public space in

which the individual, his or her social

relations, and meaning intersect in a

dynamic process of co-constitution. We

offer this stipulation because the psycho-

logical folk model of individual needs,

wants, and motivations is deeply en-

trenched in applied marketing research,

and the notion of culture as a dynamic

field of action is often sublimated in

this shared folk understanding (Denny,

2007).

MACRO-LEVEL MARKET-ORIENTED

ETHNOGRAPHY

The macro-level ethnography perspective

focuses on the identification of cultural

templates for action and interpretation that

consumers draw upon to give structure to

their consumption choices and life goals.

These techniques indeed promise to get

inside people’s heads to capture brand

character. Researchers working in this vein

include the controversial consultant Clo-

taire Rapaille (2006), famous for identify-

ing the PT Cruiser as uniquely designed

to pique U.S. consumer interest. Rapaille

discerns unconscious archetypes derived

from the work of psychologist Carl Jung

in the dominant consumption orienta-

tions of national consumer groups and

key market segments. Rapaille’s approach,

much like cross-cultural psychology’s five

factor theory or Hofstede’s worker-values

approaches to culture, is interested in ab-

stract and static psychic orientations even

though he may speak in exotic terms about

the reptilian brain or the limbic-emotional

connection to brands.

Another popular applied macro-level

approach is the Zaltman-Metaphor Elici-

tation Technique (ZMET). This technique

also identifies archetypal images but

grounds these in specific empirical in-

stances. It adopts a much greater degree

of cultural specificity than Rapaille’s

approach. ZMET focuses on surfacing met-

aphors, a key link to informants’ uncon-

scious thought. The method combines

informant-selected images, depth inter-

views, laddering, photo and art therapy

techniques, sensory inventory, structured

fantasizing, and collage creation. The

ZMET interview employs several sequen-

tial steps to bring key metaphors to the

surface and determine their interrelation-

ships, including (1) storytelling, (2) missed

images, (3) Kelly Repertory Grid and lad-

dering, (4) sensory images, (5) the vi-

gnette, (6) the summary image, and (7)

the consensus map and sensory and vi-

sual dictionaries (Coulter, Zaltman, and

Coulter, 2001; Zaltman and Coulter, 1995).

In a nonproprietary illustration, the tech-

nique has revealed consumers’ metaphor-

ical understandings of the functions of

advertising: for example, metaphors of

hostess, teacher, counselor, enabler, and

magician deal with information provi-

sion; the performer metaphor connects to

entertainment; and growth stimulation is

tied to an engine metaphor. However, con-

sumers’ goodwill toward advertising is

countered by important liabilities epito-

mized by countervailing metaphors of the

omnipresent being, nosy neighbor, con-

man, seducer, and evil therapist (Coulter,

Zaltman, and Coulter, 2001). These meta-

phors suggest useful overall strategies for

advertising formats and likewise formats

to avoid.

Not unlike ZMET in result is the work

of Belk, Ger, and Askegaard (2003) on

cross-cultural consumer desire. These re-

searchers employed interviews and col-

lages in an attempt to discern broad

patterns of similarity and difference in

the ways consumer desire, or people’s

general consumption aspirations, was ar-

ticulated by men and women in North

America, Northern Europe, and Western

Asia, respectively.

Douglas B. Holt (2004) has pioneered a

third approach distinctive from those above

that he terms cultural branding. This

approach is also interested in discerning

enduring cultural templates for action

and interpretation. Unlike the above ap-

proaches, Holt argues that these mythic

templates are often in a state of dynamic

tension. Thus, the rebel-man-of-action

(think James Dean and Clint Eastwood)

masculinity template is in dynamic ten-

sion with the responsible-family-man

template (think Bill Cosby) for male gen-

der identity in North America (Holt and

Thompson, 2004). Holt argues that a special

category of brands that he calls iconic

brands help consumers mediate these ten-

sions. Consumer goods may achieve dra-

matic breakthroughs in capturing demand

when they find new ways to articulate

these tensions. Through careful case study

of advertising treatments and sales data,

he illustrates for instance, how Mountain

Dew has with varying success mediated

the tension between these models of mas-

culinity over the brand’s 50-year history.

Similarly, the massive popularity of the

animated film The Incredibles may be at-

tributed in part to its portrayal of what

we might call a family-man-of-action cul-

tural template in the remarkable person


MARKET-ORIENTED ETHNOGRAPHY REVISITED

252 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH September 2006

of Mr. Incredible who finds a way to be

both a family man and an action hero,

something Batman, Superman, or Spider-

man have yet to achieve!

A weakness of macro-level approaches

is that while it aims to identify cultural

templates, it generally searches for those

templates within the psyche of the indi-

vidual (Shore, 1996). Broad templates for

action are abstracted from the practices of

relatedness and social life that, we argue,

are central to consumers’ worlds. The dy-

namic everyday practices and discourses

that are the constituents of both meaning

and relationships can get lost in this focus

on the mind of the individual as the pre-

dominant cultural lens (Gergen, 1996). And

while these templates may be enduring, if

too much focus is laid on cultural tem-

plates or cultural tensions, we may miss

the everyday relational dynamics that drive

changes in how consumers enact or cope

with them, respectively.

MICRO-LEVEL MARKET-ORIENTED

ETHNOGRAPHY

Unlike macro-level approaches, micro-

level approaches to market-oriented

ethnography focus on the relationship be-

tween a given market-provided resource

and the individual consumer. These ap-

proaches include the product, task, or

application-specific research that charac-

terizes much corporate-sponsored eth-

nography such as a study of showering

behavior conducted for a major plumbing

supply manufacturer, tooth-brushing be-

havior conducted for a marketer of mouth-

care products, tailgating at an NFL team’s

games (Arnould and Epp, 2006), or P&G’s

in home ethnography on how people han-

dle household spills. Much design ethnog-

raphy falls into this category as well with

its concern for products-in-use (Squires

and Byrne, 2002). Such task-oriented

approaches are valuable as they often

uncover regularities in behavior that indi-

vidual consumers cannot articulate, for

example, that many people stand motion-

less and entranced for long moments as

they shower, or that women often grasp

the hot water handle to steady them-

selves as they shave their legs!

Micro-level approaches also include

studies of brand and consumption com-

munities that have flowered in recent years.

Researchers have examined Winnebago-

Itasca Travelers (Peters, 2004); Harley-

Davidson HOGs (Fournier, Sensiper,

McAlexander, and Schouten, 2000);

Camp Jeep� devotees (McAlexander and

Schouten, 1998); acolytes of the Apple

Newton (Schau and Muñiz, 2006); classic

British sports car tinkerers (Leigh, Peters,

and Shelton, 2006); and a host of others.

This research has focused on the symbolic

dimensions of these products building on

Sidney Levy’s (1959) pioneering insight

that people buy things for what they

mean, and Grant McCracken’s (1986)

model of meaning transfer from brands to

consumers.

This type of work has allowed firms to

develop both product and service offer-

ings that incorporate core elements of the

brands’ meaning—in-use targeting to more

loyal segments, fine-tuning product

positioning, and developing innovative

communication strategies. In the realm of

marketing communications, for example,

the depiction of multiethnic male drinking

fraternities in Miller Brewing Company

advertisements emerged from in-home

ethnography as did the development of

P&G Swiffer advertisements targeting

housewives for whom cleaning was ex-

perienced as a pleasure or a chore, re-

spectively (Berning and Manning, 2006;

Kallenberger, 2006).

The weaknesses of the task-oriented

brand-consumer approach to applied

market-oriented ethnography are three-

fold. First, consumer culture is so frag-

mented and so dynamically entwined with

corporate action that such approaches of-

ten lack transferability to other brand

or communication contexts. Second, they

perform no better than many other ap-

proaches in suggesting alternative posi-

tioning that might out-compete with the

firm’s own in facilitating customers’ pur-

poses or enacting their important loyal-

ties. Third, they typically do not get to the

“why” of particular consumption pat-

terns, embedded as we suggest below in

the relational loyalties central to consum-

ers’ lives.

MESO-LEVEL MARKET-ORIENTED

ETHNOGRAPHY

We have identified several characteristics

of the macro- and micro-level approaches

that invite the deployment of a somewhat

A weakness of macro-level approaches is that while it

aims to identify cultural templates, it generally searches

for those templates within the psyche of the individual.

Broad templates for action are abstracted from the

practices of relatedness and social life that, we argue,

are central to consumers’ worlds.



September 2006 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 253

different approach. This approach is char-

acteristic of classic ethnographic research

but less common in applied market-

oriented ethnography. Distinguishing our

meso-level approach is an interest in con-

sumers as intentional actors with per-

sonal projects that are embedded in their

sociocultural life worlds. From this springs

a methodological focus on what people

do, rather than what they say; and what

they say about their goals and how they

organize their everyday lives, rather than

what they may say, when asked about

specific brands, products, or tasks. We

assert that customer-centricity is not un-

derstanding how customers feel about and

use a firm’s brand but instead is under-

standing how people use resources pro-

vided by firms in the culturally, socially

situated practices of their everyday lives

(Coupland, 2005). Companies can iden-

tify new opportunities and increase value

by understanding where they stand in

consumers’ share of heart, that is, by un-

derstanding who and what really matters

to consumers. A deep understanding of

the cultural tensions acting upon consum-

ers enables managers to position their

brands as sutures for rents and tears in

the social fabric that matters to their

customers.

Ideally to develop understanding of con-

sumers in their social networks, multidis-

ciplinary, bigendered research teams should

collect multiple data sets, including things

as diverse as essays focusing on critical

personal incidents and their resolution with

marketplace resources, long interviews,

participant-observation notes, informant-

produced collages related to personal loy-

alties, photograph series, videos, and even

brand maps that foreground the partner-

ing dimensions. Understanding should be

iterated over time and across social space.

Many manuals of ethnographic practice

are readily available (e.g., Atkinson, Cof-

fey, Delamont, Lofland, and Lofland, 2001).

The difference between the meso- and

micro-level approaches can be well illus-

trated by our approach to “home visits,”

a now common tool of corporate market-

oriented ethnography. Rather than focus

on the needs or tasks of a teen in his

room, a housewife in her laundry, or a

father in his workshop, or even a family

at their computer, we try to track holis-

tically on a “cultural field,” that is, a

self-organizing consumer activity space

and associated social network. Thus, in

trying to get a grasp on the elusive, yet

charged topic of family dinners, we have

spent hours participating in shopping,

carting the children around, preparing,

eating, and cleaning up after such din-

ners. We have interviewed multiple mem-

bers of the family about family dinners.

And finally we have pursued an interest

in one particular subset of industry inter-

ventions in the family dinner—meal as-

sembly services.

Figure 1 and informant commentary re-

veal how the meaning and uses of a

kitchen and its props become a negoti-

ated field of interaction:

You know when we redid the kitchen

there’s a little bar with four bar stools

and the kitchen table is going to be a

game table in the family room for my

husband who carries his papers, who

spreads them out every morning, and

[then] you carry it all the way back to

that house and carry in breakfast for

everybody, and no one picks their plates

up, so eventually the table ended up

right by the bar stools; no one uses the

bar stools. I had to have that bar and

no one uses them but that little table

with four chairs is where more things

happen. Now so I think that table re-

flects family activity in our home. The

meals are at that table. Belinda comes

home twice a week with a study group

and they are at that table. All craft

projects are at that table so the table

kind of [is] almost the heart of home I

think.

The mother’s hopes for the bar and table

went unfulfilled. Instead, the table has

become the “heart of the home” where

meals, crafts, and study occur under moth-

er’s watchful eye. The open plan of the

redone kitchen signals this. And this ac-

tivity set tells us that these activities share

commonalities. Marketer intervention into

this space should therefore unpack what

these things are.

But this is not the only space of impor-

tance in defining the cultural field of fam-

ily meals for this family, as shown in

Figure 2 and in additional commentary:

Micro-level approaches to market-oriented ethnography

include the product, task, or application-specific

research that characterizes much corporate-sponsored

ethnography. . . . Task-oriented approaches are valuable

as they often uncover regularities in behavior that

individual consumers cannot articulate.




Informant: I will redecorate the dining

table instead of washing dishes or clean-

ing, dusting. I don’t want to do that stuff.

Let’s decorate the table. We’re not going to

use it this week but that’s kind of what I

do. . . .

Informant: I enjoy it. I have my grand-

mother’s dishes and my mom’s vase and you

know those type of things and I enjoy my

things so I enjoy having a place to put them.

Interviewer: How does the rest of your

family feel about that dining room table?

Informant: I think probably the same way.

You know every once in awhile when we

sit down and eat at the dining room table

it’s always a big occasion no matter

whether we’re having hot dog dinner. Ev-

ery once in awhile life is crazy every-

body’s going here and there and we’ll sit

down and light some candles on the table

and everybody gets excited. That’s a fun

thing whether it’s hot dogs and macaroni

and cheese or salmon, broccoli and carrots

no one cares it’s just sit at the table and

that signifies no TV; don’t answer the

phone.

The dining table is a focus of special

attention; aesthetic detail, heirloom pos-

sessions, and use of candles signal its

sacred status, as does its occasional use.

Our informant indicates that this is the

place the family has to gather sometimes

because “life is crazy,” and the family

needs to refocus and gather energy from

a shared meal. We notice too that the

meal itself need not be something special,

although it may be. It is the use of the

space that makes it so.

Finally Figure 3 depicts the informant

participating in a group home meal as-

sembly activity. In this case, she orga-

nized the trip and brought the wine for

the group of eight women to share as

they cooked the recipes prescribed by the

service. Her delight is evident. This then

is a third social space relevant to under-

standing family meals in the context of

this informant’s life. Insofar as her family

accepts these assembled meals as at least

on a par with “hotdogs and macaroni and

cheese,” these meals help her fulfill her

maternal role, yet they also provide her

with an opportunity to publicly enact this

role with other similar women outside

the home.

This meso-level work reveals interest-

ing tensions and disjunctures in people’s

lives that invite further interpretation

and often reveal untapped marketing

opportunities. One informant told us of

the importance of making a special meal

for her husband. The husband inter-

viewed later could not remember what

had been served except that it had meat,

starch, and vegetable components. Thus,

we pick up a disjuncture between family

perspectives on meals (see also Charles

and Kerr, 1988; Grieshaber, 1997; Valen-

tine, 1999). This informant also told us

that eating family meals every day was a

priority, but close questioning revealed

that they had not done this during the

previous week, and in one case, she had

Companies can identify new opportunities and increase

value by understanding where they stand in consumers’

share of heart, that is, by understanding who and what

really matters to consumers.

Figure 1 The Kitchen and Its Props: A Field of Interaction




fallen asleep and the kids had dined on

candy and sweets. This picks up a dis-

juncture between behavioral ideals and

behavioral enactments. Finally, our infor-

mant also spoke of sharing the labor of

meal preparation and cleanup with her

husband but observation revealed that this

never occurred. This picks up a disjunc-

ture between informant’s and observers’

representations of reality.

Sometimes a photo, such as Figure 4, viv-

idly depicts the tensions between compet-

ing commitments in one family’s life. A

young father of two young children has

rushed home to share a family dinner, but

the cell phone, the cluttered kitchen table,

the beans in the pot, and the cold tortilla

show that dinner competes with other

priorities. The meager meal, haphazardly

served, speaks to time pressures and limits

to the creative energy the family can de-

vote to this meal. Mom is a graduate stu-

dent after all. The cell phone speaks to the

importance of work or social ties elsewhere

than in the family circle. The cluttered table

tells us both that the kitchen is a hub of

activity, but one in which such activities of-

ten clash rather than seamlessly mesh.

In sum, this section has sought to

provide some insight into our meso-

ethnographic method. The following sec-

tion provides some more detailed empirical

illustration.

EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION

We will take family food as an example of

what we can learn from our meso-level

ethnography. Research tells us that food

production and consumption practices

remain at the heart of intrahousehold

relationships and the social constitution

of home and family. Household food

practices also reflect aspects of gender,

power, identity, and social stratification.

Moreover, food and meal preparation

remains one of the few consistently

Figure 2 The Significance of the Formal Dining Room Lies inOccasional Uses.

Figure 3 A Meal Assembly Service is Part of DomesticSpace.




productive activities for contemporary, ur-

ban households. Finally, food represents a

particularly strong form of anchorage to

the past linking historical, individual, and

household life cycles together (Charles and

Kerr, 1988; DeVault, 1991; Dorfman, 1992;

Grieshaber, 1997; Lupton, 1994; Morgan,

1996; Valentine, 1999; Wallendorf and

Arnould, 1991).

Our intuitions jibe with research that

shows how homemade food plays an im-

portant part in reproducing the family as

a social unit everyday as well as in calen-

drical rituals like Thanksgiving, Passover,

Christmas, and so on (Charles and Kerr,

1988; Wallendorf and Arnould, 1991), even

as it shows that people cook less, eat out

more, and spend less time around the

family dinner table. Hence, the prolifera-

tion of “home meal replacement” prod-

ucts is more socially significant than the

merely functional issues of how house-

holds allocate scarce time and money (Park

and Capps, 1997).

Understanding homemade food

in relational terms

Our ethnographic research shows what

homemade food is and why it is of im-

portance to families. Thus it offers insight

into how to create it commercially, and

why it is useful for firms to market prod-

ucts and services that allow families to

achieve their homemade ideals. So what

is it? The following excerpt captures a

number of the themes that run through

our data.

I: First, what words or phrases do you

associate with “homemade?”

R: Elegant, artistic, exquisite, time con-

suming, and made with loving hands. Cre-

ativity that comes from someone who

appreciates the beauty of fashioning, or

shaping a work of art their way. Apple pie,

mom’s cooking. Whenever I think of home-

made I see my mom or grandmother mak-

ing something in their kitchen . . .

homemade requires a certain type of mas-

tery. I mean cooking out of a box is not

what I consider homemade. I’m talking

about from scratch. A pinch of this, some

of that, now that’s cooking. (male, 41,

married, 2 daughters)

As illustrated in this quote, homemade

food generally is something one chooses

to do; it embodies creativity. It also refer-

ences the past, possession of skills, and

most often particularizes the producer;

the producer is personal and is known for

her pie; it helps define who she is. Not

surprisingly, homemade is often women’s

work.

Informants contrast the qualities of

homemade food with manufactured food.

Homemade food is resistant to mass

production:

And whenever something is manufac-

tured, it loses some of its originality because

Figure 4 The Tensions Between Competing Commitments inFamily Life

Research tells us that food production and consumption

practices remain at the heart of intrahousehold

relationships and the social constitution of home and

family. Household food practices also reflect aspects of

gender, power, identity, and social stratification.




it’s now being made by a system that

produces it the same way each and every

time. (male, 41, married, 2 daughters)

A number of relational elements pro-

vide homemade foods with an aura of

authenticity. These include: congealed la-

bor (you pour yourself into it), voluntary

preparation, uniqueness, mixing creativ-

ity with fidelity to tradition, and intergen-

erational heritage. This excerpt captures

this idea of congealed labor and volun-

tary preparation:

I: Um. Can you tell me a little bit about

your sister?

R: Well, my sister. She’s a very wonderful

lady. She talks all the time, more than I do.

She loves, always loves to cook. She’s good-

hearted, she’s making pies and goodies for

all her church, whenever they have a birth-

day or something, she’s always bringing

something. She brings treats to the kids.

She’s just a good person all the way around,

as far as that goes. She, uh, I think she’s

very lonely because she lives in the coun-

try and doesn’t see many people, so when

she can bake something to take it to them,

it makes her feel good.

This notion that homemade food is some-

thing that one does, not simply a product,

comes through very clearly in our inter-

views and observations of consumers. A

young woman named Emily says:

. . . now when I think of homemade food, I

think of my mom’s and she is an excellent

cook, but was very underappreciated grow-

ing up. Now that I am on my own, I see

how much time it takes to make homemade

food and appreciate it so much more.

Homemade is something one does, and

something one does for others, not for

oneself, and not just for anyone but for

persons’ for whom one’s interpersonal loy-

alties are strong. Typically this means close

family members. Thus, a young man re-

calls the taco dinner his mother prepared

for him as a special birthday gift.

. . . I thought of my mother’s taco dinner

as “homemade food” because it was an

exciting treat that was made only on spe-

cial occasions. It made me feel special be-

cause she took time to make my favorite

dinner. . . .

Molly writes:

When I hear the words “homemade food” I

automatically think of my mom at home in

our kitchen. She would start the cooking

while still in her work clothes and then

would be running to and from the bed-

room changing while preparing the food.

When I think of homemade food, I think of

the love that it is prepared with.

Another woman remarked:

. . . my mother always prided herself in

several items of food and ah, luckily for her

or fortunately for my children, ah, they

seem to have grown and as we visited

grandma and grandpa they liked these par-

ticular food items and even at this time of

their lives they will ask for her to prepare

these items.

This processual dimension of homemade

food, the evidence of personal labor, and

its embeddedness in kinship relationships

are reasons why it is difficult for firms to

market “homemade” foods that consum-

ers find credible.

The following excerpt speaks to the

themes of spontaneity and mystery asso-

ciated with homemade foods.

I: How do you prepare them?

R: Oh, my gosh, don’t ask me the recipe.

Um, I don’t know. Just basically breaded

cinnamon rolls, cinnamon rolls, I don’t

know, I got a recipe in front of me when I

do it. I don’t even know what I put in

them.

The next excerpt captures the themes of

uniqueness and mystery, and the more

evidently relational themes of fidelity to

ethnic tradition and assumptions about

intergenerational heritage. The informant

also begins the text by imputing loving

motives to the grandmothers who cook

homemade food.

R: Yes, even for holidays, still she makes it

cause she knows that my dad and I both

love it. My other grandma makes home-

made noodles. . . . Everybody in the family

loves grandma’s homemade noodles, be-

cause nobody else —I mean, her family’s all

from Germany, and they made this in Ger-

many. It’s kind of a family tradition.

Grandma taught us all how to make ’em,

and we all know how to make ’em. We

just, for some reason, can’t make ’em as

good as grandma does.

A final excerpt from a youthful infor-

mant also illustrates the links between

homemade food and ethnic tradition,

nurturing women relatives, and special

holidays.

Yes, I associate the homemade pies with

my grandmother, oh my mom and my

grandmother. My family is German. They

make a lot of homemade German dishes

that I associate with my family. Oh, let me

see, I associate beef stew with my Dad’s

family because we always eat it on Christ-

mas. And the homemade bread I think of

my family. I think that’s all I can think of.

(female, age 24, married, no children)

A final relational dimension of home-

made is that homemade food is a gift.




Gifts of course are embedded in a moral

economy that is culturally constructed as

oppositional to the market economy (Cheal,

1988; Sherry, 1983). Both producers and

recipients identify homemade food as a

special gift, and both men and women

recognize homemade food should be

shared.

Another thing people use to like to make

was homemade beer. I can remember my

dad making it when I was a kid. I can’t tell

you how good it was. And then my son

John, he makes it quite often. A lot of

people make it. And I think people make it

not necessarily because it’s good, but it’s

fun. It’s something they’ve done them-

selves and then they can talk about it and

share it. So that’s the good part about

things that are homemade. I think that.

That’s what I think about as being home-

made. Things that you use yourself and

share with others. . . . You know, and the

same with the things that my wife cooks

and bakes. You know, she shares that with

our daughters and daughter-in-law. And

those are all good things and good times.

(58 year old, male, married, 5 children,

four grandsons)

A woman talks about the enjoyment

she gets from home baking for others. In

one place she comments:

Well if you bake, you make something, you

know, for someone. You do it because you

enjoy doing it for people. And it’s your

own little personal touch, some special rec-

ipe that you like to make or special cookie

that you’ve made for years, or you just like

doing things for people, you know, to give

a gift. (female, ages 66–70, retired,

widow, 3 children; three grandchildren)

Thus, what makes homemade food is

congealed, personal labor performed pri-

marily for kinsfolk; creativity; tradition;

altruistic gift giving; spontaneity; fidelity

to ethnic tradition; evidence of intergen-

erational continuity; and mystery.

The importance of homemade

So why is homemade cooking important

to families? First, given that it is embed-

ded in the cultural logic of interpersonal

gift giving, homemade food helps assert

boundaries between market and nonmar-

ket domains of life. For example, the in-

formant quoted below rejects the very

idea of value in mass merchandised baked

goods:

I: . . . are there certain foods that you feel

are best if they are homemade?

R: Oh yeah. Definitely. Well, any baked

goods I would think. In my experience I

just can’t even stand to buy packaged mixes

for anything —for cakes or cookies. I don’t

even know what all they have nowadays. I

just prefer to do them from scratch.

I: Are there some special homemade foods

that you prepare?

R: Yeah. I like to make my own cookies and

banana bread, soup, pies. My husband’s

favorite is pumpkin pie, so I make a lot of

pumpkin pies and I always make the crust

from scratch. I don’t purchase it ’cause I

just, I don’t like the taste of packaged

things. I think they have an artificial taste.

Second, homemade helps people tie gen-

erations together; it represents a defense

against the ravages of time on memory

and continuity, on identity. Thus, a gap

between the past and present is a com-

mon feature of narratives about home-

made food. Informants describe with pride

their rendering of a family recipe to pro-

duce homemade food, only to conclude

that “they cheated a little.” A women in

her 40s describes:

I cheated a little bit on those. Um, I bought

the frozen noodles. And they’re just as

good as the homemade noodle but I just

don’t, (long pause) I don’t have time to

make homemade noodles myself, so I use

the frozen ones. They’re pretty good.

Third, homemade foods are often pre-

pared in devotional contexts or received

from church members in devotional con-

texts or transitional moments in life, and

as a result, the “odor of sanctity” wafts

over a home-cooked meal:

Oh, ya. Like, for instance, the waffles.

Um, there a homemade recipe that came

from my grandmother and my mom would

make those for us kids every Sunday after

church . . .

. . . on Sunday nights I go to Bible study

and the church ladies make us a home-

cooked meal and so every Sunday night I

get a home-cooked meal from the Church

ladies. So that’s probably at least once a

week. . .

That reminds me after the funeral, Mar-

vin’ s funeral that day, the church sent up

stuff that was left over, there was a gelatin

salad with vegetables in it, everything. I

never heard of it before, but it made sense.

Don was not here for that. I think Roger

was here; you were not here.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly,

homemade meals are like an heirloom

from which consumer extract narratives

that encode kin and gender relationships,

as below:

R: I like, when I made the pie crust at

Christmas, it was always a big thing . . .




my grandma’s crust and that was when

she was starting [to deteriorate] . . . it was

harder for her to do it, so there was like

this timeframe where probably about two

years . . . kinda like she was turning over

the reins in the family. There’s a real emo-

tion . . . being my part. . . . So there is that

sort of heirloom effect of the things that

I make of theirs, you know, you

kinda pass it on and the tradition of things

and you know, otherwise people wouldn’t

. . . whole recipe box of my grandma’s . . .

recipes that are like, you know, it’ll be a

recipe . . . it’s like water, sugar, butter,

milk —no measurements, nothing —but you

keep them because. . . (female, single 24)

In a second excerpt the role of home-

made foods in fostering intergenerational

continuity in role performances and role

relationships is made more explicit:

I: You mentioned cookies. Can you tell me

more about the cookies that you prepared?

R: For Christmas, especially cookies. We

have a special um, ah, sugar cookie that

ah, which has been in the family for, for

many years and ah, we always make that

ah, sugar cookie.

I: What makes it so special?

R: Well, because um, my mother made it

and ah, ah, her, her mother made it and ah,

ah, so I just naturally ah, make it myself

and, and made it with my girls when,

when they were little as, as my mother

made it with me when, when I was little.

So that’s I guess what makes it special.

(53, female, married, 2 children)

Thus, four factors make homemade foods

important; they differentiate home from

market (and all it implies in terms of

self-interest, risk, and mass production);

they foster a sense of historical continu-

ity; they link the household to the domain

of the sacred; and they help people enact

important roles and role relationships.

This ethnographic surfacing of home-

made as a relational practice, and the

significance of homemade to families qua

families, helps explain the success of a

recent marketplace innovation, home meal

assembly services such as Dream Din-

ners, Simply Dinners, and Gourmet Girl-

friends. Curiously, in some ways, meal

assembly services are less convenient than

home meal replacements. Appointments

must be made; one must travel from home

to these kitchens. There is less choice

than in homemade meals, perhaps even

than home meal replacements, and fam-

ily recipes are not accommodated. How-

ever, such services offer value; they are

far more convenient than “from scratch”

home cooking; they reduce the labor re-

quired to prepare menus, shop, and as-

semble ingredients. They take the thought

out of meal planning. They produce nov-

elty in home made meals and a break

from meal routine. And importantly, they

allow for women to enact their roles as

bearers of a tradition of home meal mak-

ing; customers are able to do homemade

rather than buy homemade; they are able

to tinker with the recipes to respond to

family preferences; people believe they

know what goes into the meals and per-

ceive the ingredients to be wholesome;

when served, they allow customers to

perform that important boundary be-

tween market and home. Further as some

of our ongoing research shows (Gutier-

rez, Price, and Arnould, no date), home

meal preparation service customers often

include kin groups like couples, or friends

as depicted in Figure 3 within one’s gift

exchange networks (Cheal, 1988). Finally,

the marketer’s role in homemade food

preparation is driven out of the house

and up the value chain, away from hearth

and home.

DISCUSSION

Our meso-level ethnographic approach to

understanding homemade as a relational

practice certainly surfaces enduring cul-

tural tensions such as that between home

and marketplace as in the macro-level

approaches identified above. It suggests

that certain enduring archetypes such as

the “Great Mother” may be discerned in

informants’ representation of semimythi-

cal generations of provident care-giving

food preparers as in these macro ap-

proaches, as well. Our meso-level ethno-

graphic approach with its focus on an

important task also surfaces some of the

kinds of insights that micro-level ethnog-

raphy work does. Thus, in the first part of

our findings section, we uncovered some

of the key elements that make up the

cultural model of homemade and how

this model is behaviorally performed.

Our meso-level ethnographic approach

illustrated here and exemplified in the

fortuitous emergence of the home meal

preparation service industry suggests that

This ethnographic surfacing of homemade as a relational

practice, and the significance of homemade to families

qua families, helps explain the success of a recent

marketplace innovation, home meal assembly services.




companies can identify new opportuni-

ties and increase significant bottom line

metrics such as customer lifetime value

by understanding where they stand in the

consumers’ nexus of important relation-

ships and relational practices, that is, un-

derstanding who and what really matters

to consumers, and how they enact this

care (Price, Arnould, and Malshe, no date).

Our meso-level ethnographic approach

also suggests an alternative way of think-

ing about customer-centricity, a rather hot

concept in companies today. Our argu-

ment is that customer-centricity is not

about “how does my customer really feel

about and use my brand,” but instead is

customers using firm-provided resources

in the culturally, socially situated prac-

tices of everyday life. Our approach shifts

the lens from a dyadic firm-customer fo-

cus to how the firm is a relational re-

source that facilitates performances of

important interpersonal loyalties and

commitments.

................................................................................................

ERIC J. ARNOULD is the Petsmart Distinguished Profes-

sor, John and Doris Norton School of Retailing and

Consumer Sciences, at the University of Arizona.

................................................................................................

LINDA L. PRICE is a professor of marketing and the

Soldwedel Family Faculty Fellow at the Eller College of

Management, University of Arizona.

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Documents

Market Oriented Ethnography Revisited