Virtual Ethnography

Ethnography and its applications to marketing and marketing research has been a huge interest of mine since I first found out its meaning. The origin of the word “ethnography” comes from ethnos meaning “people” and graphein meaning “writing”.

My first exposure to ethnography and a great example of it in action is an ethnographic approach to studying the Burning Man Festival. The festival is described as “an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance and takes its name from the ritual of burning a large wooden sculpture of a man on the sixth day” of the festival. Here, an ethnographic researcher would study the festival group through direct contact with the culture; however, the researcher would further describe the festival participants by writing about them while living amongst them.

However, in regards to my paper, I am still not sure if I want to take a broad look at ethnography or a focus on ethnography applied to a more specific area. I am interested in delving into every aspect of ethnography and how each kind applies to learning insights about niche markets or particular groups of people. For example, the different kinds of ethnography I would look at are in broad research or more specific research are: 1) critical ethnography 2) realist ethnography or 3) virtual ethnography.

Critical ethnography addresses the “false consciousness” that can be produced by cultural institutions. I believe marketers, being familiar with these false consciousness thoughts, could better target a given segment in a way that would promote action against these false ideas.

In realist ethnography, the focus is more on the exact writing style. Realist ethnography’s purpose is to put the reader in the story and make them feel as if they are experiencing what the author did in fact experience. This practice is so valuable to marketers and advertisers alike. As a marketer, you gain expertise in directly relating a product or service to the customer by making them feel as if they are experiencing it first hand.

In virtual ethnography aka online ethnography or amusingly also known as netnography is a form of online community research. You might say some companies already do this, but by applying past and current ethnographic research methodologies, current companies might look at online research in a new way.

So, as you can see each of these specific areas are really interesting to me. Right now, I’m not sure if I want to cover all of them broadly or really dig into just one form ethnography. Virtual ethnography however, really interests me (didn’t know it existed), and I would like to explore it more through my paper.

Here is an article which discusses the emergence of virtual ethnography more: http://fmx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/1/3. It discusses some of the questions that come up from doing online fieldwork resarch and ways in which the ethnographers deal with theses issues.