Etno para os íntimos: a etnografia pelas multinacionais de pesquisa de marketing, uma correspondência com os especialistas

Abstract

In the nineties, the marketing research created a new qualitative product: ethnographic research techniques. The difference between the newest technique when compared to the traditional ones, is the abandonment of the laboratory environment, mirror rooms, to then, conduct the research at the "native" site: at their home, at their neighborhood, at their supermarket or at any other space that allows research specialists and brand managers to experience and enter into the life of the other, not only to listen to their opinion, but to experience it. Applied at the beginning by small research institutes, ethnography was perceived as a craft tool. However, with the arrival of the market research multinationals in Brazil, the technique becomes imported and a widespread tool replicated by their specialists. Ethnography in Anthropology is a field of contention without consensus. For some Anthropologists, ethnography is not a technique or a method, it is the manner of doing it which has its methods and techniques. In order to understand what is the ethnographic technique is for three market research international companies operating in Brazil, namely TNS, GFK and Ipsos, and Icorresponded with their specialists. The dissertation is divided by three chapters. The first chapter, I contextualize the companies, then, I introduce the history of the market research in Brazil and the concept of homo economicus on which Marketing is based on. The second chapter, I relate the techniques and the qualitative methods presenting the Ipsos Ethnography Centre of Excellence, such company is a good example to understand and analyze the technique and their specialists trajectory. Finally, in the last chapter, entitled "ritual," I describe the entire flow of ethnographic technique in the market research companies, who does it and how it is done. Furthermore, I discuss the tensions between Anthropological ethnography and the Marketing research ethnography, along with the concepts of time, observation and image. Equally important, I present the definition of the technique and its application, as well as a reflection exercise on what kind of the translation Marketing brings to Anthropology, as Marylin Strathern states "when we talk about the other, we talk more about ourselves"