Strengthening social marketing research: Harnessing “insight” through ethnography

• Explores the utility of ethnography for social marketing as means to extend the social marketing toolkit.
• Explores visual, digital (virtual) and rapid/short-term ethnography to generate deep insight into human behaviour.
• Contributes to deepening insight into the social systems in which behaviours are embedded.

This paper aims to challenge social marketers to extend their research repertoire beyond restrictive ‘individualised rationalities’ driving reliance on scientifically proven evidence, population data and focus groups as insight-oriented research. Social marketing, as a discipline, is constrained by using techniques aimed at (dis)proving scientific hypotheses, thus misses the mark when it comes to creating effective social change. Gaining insight into human conduct requires research tools that examine the deep ecological context of behaviour. Ethnography has the capability to generate deep culturally based insights that captures the social world through the eyes of the consumer, yet to date remains largely underutilised in social marketing. This article explores the value of ethnography as a social marketing research method enabling in-depth and meaningful engagement with the social and cultural experiences and the performative practice that is the manifestation of human existence.

Chinese Abstract本文旨在驳斥社会营销人员，以扩展他们的研究才能，使其不局限于限制性的“个体化合理行动”，促使其从洞察力导向性研究的角度，依靠被科学证实的证据、人口数据和讨论组等。作为一门学科，社会化营销受限于旨在证明（或反驳）科学假设的技术的应用，因此，当涉及到建立有效的社会化变革时，便忽略了目标。需要研究工具才能深入了解人的行为，这些工具能考察行为的深层次生态背景。人种学能够产生基于文化的深层次洞察力，这种洞察力可从消费者的审视角度，抓住社会世界，然而，至今它在很大程度上仍未被充分应用在社会化营销中。本文探讨了人种学作为一种社会化营销的研究方法的价值，使人们有机会深入和有意义地接触社会和文化体验、以及体现人类生活方式的行为习惯。