April 2009 • Anthropology News

17

i n f o c u s

Evaluating Sensory Experienceself-Reporting consumers and commercial fieldwork

TimoThy de Waal malefyT BBdo WorldWide and Parsons/neW school

This article explores the rise of marketing to consumers’ multisen-sory experience. This occurs in two mutually interactive ways. Many research companies in the field of consumer marketing today employ a variety of multisensory methods to understand the consumer expe-rience of their clients’ brands and products. These methods include the use of cell phones, blogs, video cameras and disposable cameras, among other tools. Consumers are recruited in research to use these devices and report back their own sensations and experiences when using a product or brand in everyday life. Research compa-nies then collect and analyze these data and present their findings to corporate clients. Such use of consumers in research indicates the rise of technology-based individual self-reporting, and it also shows a growing interest among marketers in understanding the sensory and emotional responses of consumers to everyday brand experiences.

This trend of collecting consumer experiences echoes another dynamic in marketing: selling products and brands through multisensory advertising. Notably, marketers are moving away from unidirectional, gener-alized mass approaches that push advertising messages, in prefer-ence for more interactive, direct and immediate approaches that engage consumers personally through PDAs, Internet, direct marketing and event sponsor-ship. For instance, online and viral marketing through cell phones and online games is the fastest growing part of many ad budgets. This dynamic indi-cates a seismic shift in thinking: media and marketing companies once regarded consumption as a linear and sequential process that moved from newsprint to radio to TV programs. Driven in part by trends of consumers who multi-task while using their computers, video game consoles, cell phones and PDAs, media exposure has changed from one-media-at-a-

time to multi-media across all sensorial dimensions.

As these trends reveal an increased use of technology in research to gather immediate consumer responses to brand and product use, they also indi-

cate the increased engagement of consumers through technolog-ical devices to convey advertised messages. This reflects a new perspective on consumers that reprioritizes direct multisensory marketing over mass marketing, with personal technology as the vehicle, and the sensorial body as the site for consumption. But what does the use of self-reported consumer feedback mean for (and in relation to) the kinds of knowledge that trained practi-tioners produce through ethno-graphic research?

new Marketing Tactics: The sensory BodyImplicit in this marketing shift is the belief that mass marketing via tradi-tional means of heavy texts and generalized messages is less effective than personally directing ads through the senses and the body. This places the sensorial, emotive body as a new site of consumption over the cold, rationalizing mind. In this view, consumer responses gleaned from surveys, focus groups and even stan-dard ethnographic interviews are perceived as more rational, calcu-lated and less “truthful” than unfil-tered “raw” responses of consumers spontaneously reacting to branded stimuli. Indeed, popular litera-

ture (such as Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink) discusses the power of trusting immediate bodily im-pres-sions over rational thought. This season’s TV programs “Lie to Me” and “The Mentalist” extol detec-tive work that reads body signals

and sensations over what people report on their own. By using fast technology to receive and relay informa-tion directly to researchers and consumers, marketers believe they bypass the rational guarded mind and access truer “gut” re-sponses through immediate reac-tions and sensory feedback.

Reason is out, Emotions Are inAccording to Catherine Lutz, western belief holds that physical sensations of the body link directly to human emotions, whereas thought and reason are perceived as pure mental phenomena. This notion supports marketing experts who now claim that the failure of traditional marketing approaches is due to overesti-mating the reasoning power of consumers, and ignoring the way consumers actually think and feel about making decisions. If people buy with their gut feelings not with their reason, then the surest way to connect with consumers is through their bodies. The

rapid rise of sensorial marketing approaches in the last decade is witnessed in car manufacturers who focus on the sound of the car’s doors closing, or Singapore Airlines’ patented “warm towel” smell, or even Harley Davidson’s attempt to market its throaty motorcycle roar. Marketing to the senses is perceived as natu-rally more personal and individ-ually focused than heavy textual images that require reading and

thoughtful reasoning for responses.

By directing market-ing strategies and media tactics to reach consumers on indi-vidualized, personal and sensory lines, marketers and advertisers are restructuring a new marketing reality for consumers—one in which consumers participate in producing a body of knowledge through instant responses using personal technologies. This occurs in parallel to the marketing of new modes of sensory consumption to suit consumers’ individualized tastes, as self-reported. These prac-tices allow marketing and adver-tising to produce cultural meanings that build on the self as the private site of consumption. We also witness in this how new commu-nication technologies change with consumer tastes, from a cerebral reading culture to a more visceral audiovisual-kinetic culture, where the immediate interplay of images, sounds and graphics are central to a cultural system that supports the self.

What does the rise of multisen-sory consumer research and instan-taneous self-reporting consumer behavior mean to modes of ethno-graphic enquiry and forms of anal-ysis, and where does this situate the role of the modern ethnographic practitioner? How do multisensory media create new challenges to interpreting fieldwork? How is the work of interpretation produced through these new media and tech-nology? These and other questions raise challenges to both practicing anthropologists in the fields of consumer research and academics interested in consumption, as new modes of being, produced by fast technologies and sensory brands, reveal a changed landscape by which we understand and relate to each other.

Timothy de Waal Malefyt is vice president and Director of Cultural Discoveries at BBDO Worldwide advertising agency, leading an in-agency ethnographic practice. He also teaches advertising, design research methods, and consumerism and shopping as an adjunct professor at Parsons New School for Design. Malefyt is co-editor of Advertising Cultures (2003). He can be contacted at timothy.malefyt@bbdo.com or malefytt@newschool.edu.

Malefyt talking to a consumer about running for a sports equipment company. Photo courtesy Elaine Epstein

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