Reflections on journeys within the supermarket

• Grocery shopping is a series of rituals expressing family identify and a way for consumers to construct relational selves.
• We use ethnography to uncover the role of emotive brand loyalty on grocery purchasing and offer reasons why this occurs.
• To develop insights we should adopt complex designs where consumers are centre stage.

In this paper, we deconstruct the ethnographic process to examine how adopting a multifaceted approach impacted our interpretation of the findings. The original intention was to undertake (only) structured, observational research to consider a fairly standard marketing problem – why do consumers choose some grocery brands over others. However we soon realized that such a format was unsatisfactory. Instead we recognized the need to consider both the content and process of shopping to understand the complexity of behaviours reflected. The results suggest that many consumers' lives are created around various realities and they use consumption to engage and experience these.

Chinese Abstract在本文中，我们解构了人种学方法，以研究采用多方面的方法如何影响我们对研究结果的解释。初衷（只）是为了开展结构性、观察性研究，以考虑一个比较规范的营销问题 — 为什么消费者选择一些食品品牌而不是其他的品牌。然而，我们很快意识到，这样的形式并不能令人满意。相反，我们认为有必要考虑购物的内容和流程，以了解所体现的行为的复杂性。研究结果表明，许多消费者的生活都建立在各种现实情况的基础之上，并且他们利用消费去参与和体验这些生活。