Guest editorial

Guest editorial

About the Guest Editors

Pauline Maclaran is Professor of Marketing at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her research has two main strands: gender issues in marketing and consumer behaviour; and the experiential dimensions of contemporary consumption, particularly in relation to utopia and the festival market place. Much of this work draws on the tools and techniques of literary theory to gain insights into the symbolic aspects of consumer behaviour. She is co-editor, with Miriam Catterall and Lorna Stevens, of Marketing and Feminism: Current Issues and Research (2000).

Miriam Catterall is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the Queen's University of Belfast (Northern Ireland) where she is responsible for marketing and research methods programmes. She has considerable business experience in the market research industry and in management consulting. Her research interests lie in consumer research, feminist issues in marketing and in qualitative market research, particularly in focus group theory, methodology and practice.

Lorna Stevens is a Lecturer in Marketing in the School of International Business at the University of Ulster. Her PhD is in consumer behaviour and her research interests lie in the area of feminist perspectives and gender issues in consumer behaviour, consumption, and the media, with particular emphasis on women's magazines and advertising. She is particularly interested in interpretive approaches to consumer research, including reader-response theory, feminist literary theory and critical approaches generally. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including the Journal of Advertising, European Advances in Consumer Research, and European Journal of Women's Studies.

Over the past two decades consumer researchers have begun to more fully explore the role of cultural values, beliefs and traditions in buying and consumption behaviour. Drawing on sociological and anthropological perspectives, this has marked a shift in focus away from individual consumers' attitudes and perceptions towards the study of consumer behaviour as it occurs in situ, conceptualising consumers as socially connected beings rather than as information processors. Concomitantly, there has been an increase in the use of interpretive research methods, such as ethnography, by both academic and commercial marketing researchers to better understand the role of consumption in consumers' everyday lives (see for example, Sherry's 1998 study of Nike Town, Chicago and Fuller and Adams' 1999 research into youth and gay markets in major European cities). These interpretive perspectives lend credibility to innovative ways of gathering qualitative data, such as videography (Kozinets, 2002) and subjective personal introspection (Brown, 1998). They have also heralded new ways of representing the consumer experience as, for example, through the use of narrative devices, music, pictures, photographs, poetry, cyberspace imagery and multi-media technology (see Stern, 1998).

The last two decades, however, have also witnessed a "crisis of representation" throughout the social sciences, a crisis that has prompted considerable discussion on how qualitative research is undertaken and on the ways that researchers report their research findings. More specifically, a number of key questions have arisen, including:

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  What should our relationship be with our research subjects?

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  How do we know that what we observe is "true"?

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  How might we best communicate our research findings to our audience?

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  Who should comprise our audience?

The postmodern critique has exposed the value-laden nature of terms such as reliability, validity, generalisability and trustworthiness, suspecting all "truth" claims as masking, and serving, particular interests. Whose voice(s) do we claim to represent – the subjects of our research or merely our own? As interpretive researchers, interpretation can too easily become misrepresentation. How much is too much, and when does researcher involvement become intrusive and at odds with the interests of our research subjects and, indeed, the reality of their experience? The representation of qualitative research thus presents us with many dilemmas and a bewildering range of voices and choices.

This special issue is designed to stimulate discussion on the assumptions and decisions that qualitative researchers make in representing their research subjects, their data and themselves. It is also intended to encourage dialogue between academic and commercial qualitative marketing researchers. The first two papers are from an academic perspective and both, in different ways, debate the assumptions we make as researchers and the ways that these assumptions impact on how we represent consumers.

Goulding's paper explores the concept of postmodernism and its impact on how consumers are positioned and represented in consumer research. As well as offering insights into postmodernist perspectives, it also builds a compelling case for us to adopt a more flexible and open approach to research, one that is derived from the data and the "reality" of that which is being researched. As such it is an approach that challenges us to broaden the debate so that we embrace multi-disciplinary approaches. In so doing postmodernism becomes less of a prescriptive straight-jacket of ontological rights and wrongs, and more of a liberatory influence that centres on consumer experience. This, Goulding argues, will enable us to create "meaningful pictures" and glean insights into consumption in the twenty-first century.

The focus of Hogg and Garrow's contribution is gender and how we conceptualise it in our research. The authors argue that too much emphasis on gender as a bi-polar variable can skew our research and how we interpret and represent consumers. Instead, the article presents a differentiated view of gender in relation to the consumption of advertising. Drawing on Bem's Sex Role Inventory, the research explores gender in relation to self-schemas. The authors argue against the perception of gender polarisation as a unitary variable in advertising, highlighting the fact that gender is neither necessarily homogeneous nor isomorphic with sex, and suggesting that other issues may be more significant in relation to gender and the consumption of advertising text, including the degree of involvement and interest respondents have in the product category itself. As researchers we need more nuanced contextualisations of how we interpret and represent consumer responses.

This journal is widely read by marketing practitioners and we are pleased to include two papers that address issues of representation in consumer research in the commercial worlds of advertising and market research respectively. Both papers illustrate vividly that issues of representation in consumer research are as likely to find expression (implicit and explicit) and attempts at resolution in the world of commerce as they are in the academic world.

Hackley points out that advertising agencies draw on both neo-positivist and interpretive consumer research to inform their decisions and his paper focuses on the increasing use of the latter. In order to grasp the cultural meanings that creative advertising should mobilise, advertising agencies need to take an imaginative leap from research data to consumer understanding. He argues that agencies engage in a hermeneutic form of understanding of consumer cultures that help them create advertising that resonates with consumers.

Thorpe argues that commercial qualitative researchers, who normally undertake interpretive consumer research for the advertising agencies, do not explicitly focus on issues of consumer representation in ways that engage their academic counterparts. Nevertheless, issues of representation abound in the commercial qualitative research context, including the ways that research agencies position themselves in the market place and communicate this to clients. Currently the industry's answer to consumer representation is to focus heavily on context-dependent research techniques such as ethnography and accompanied shopping trips. These "ultra-qual" techniques, he argues, can end up valorising the process but losing the subject. In response, he makes a case for a shift in thinking and practice away from trying to achieve "authentic" representation towards virtualism.

Finally, Brown questions the whole idea of a crisis of representation and asks, in his inimitable style, what crisis? Arguing that in fact there is no crisis of representation in marketing research, he explores the representation of crisis and the purpose that this type of discourse serves. He highlights the fact that marketing has never been so richly represented. The real problem, he suggests, is not that we need more experimental or varied forms to represent marketing research, but rather that we need to raise the quality of non-traditional representations. To this end he sets out a representational agenda that both exhorts and encourages us to improve and develop our creative and artistic endeavours. Quality, not quantity is his key message and this has also been our intention in putting together this selection of articles. We hope that you will find this special issue on representation as stimulating to read as we have found it to edit.

Pauline Maclaran, Miriam Catterall, Lorna StevensGuest Editors

ReferencesBrown, S. (1998), "The wind in the wallows: literary theory, autobiographical criticism and subjective personal introspection", in Alba, J.W. and Hutchinson, J.W. (Eds), Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 25, Association for Consumer Research, Provo, UT, pp. 25-30.Fuller, K. and Adams, J. (1999), "Crossing the respondent divide", paper presented at the Association of Qualitative Research Practitioners Seminar, June.Kozinets, R.V. (2002), "Rituals without dogma: a consumer videography", distributed by the Journal of Consumer Research, electronic edition (eJCR), March.Sherry, J.F. (1998), "The soul of the company store: Nike Town Chicago and the emplaced brandscape", in Sherry, J.F. (Ed.), Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary Markets, NTC Books, Lincolnwood, IL, pp. 305-36.Stern, B.B. (Ed.) (1998), Representing Consumers: Voices, Views and Visions, Routledge, London.