ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH

This empirical paper presents an ethnographic marketing research project that utilizes videography to address the problem of how to represent a sense of place. Using an ethnographic methodology combined with film making, the researchers established a collaborative visual ethnography that we believe has the potential to more genuinely represent what a place means to those who live in it. This paper offers two important contributions for using visual ethnography in marketing research. The first is to demonstrate a method of representation that can lead to a greater sense of empowerment and ownership for participants and to new ways of co-creating for researchers. The second is the development of a Video Analysis Protocol that provides a systematic and cumulative approach to analysing video. INtRoduCtIoN Visual methodologies adopting photography and filmmaking techniques are widely used in social sciences. Visual methodologies produce and use images to understand underlying meanings, attitudes and beliefs by making explicit the processes, interactions and connections that people experience in relation to significant meanings, moments or situations in their lives. Associated with ethnography, the use of visual methodologies can be an effective research technique that involves the research participants in more autonomous and creative ways than is possible with many conventional methods. The decision to adopt a videographic method, therefore, was based on two major advantages of the technique: first, videography is able to capture processes and reveal hidden meanings that can generate new understanding or insights to existent knowledge about how people perceive their world and the relationship that they have to it. Second, it is a collaborative and co-creational method which is appropriate to the ontological and epistemological nature of the present inquiry. Researchers encouraged and empowered participants to represent their own sense of meaning and reality by giving them digital video cameras and a single question to explore. The following literature review aims to answer these important questions: What is visual ethnography? Why utilize visual ethnography? What are the issues and challenges involved when analysing the data? How to achieve reflexivity? The context of this research is presented to provide the reader with an overview of the field where it was conducted, and also to present the epistemological stance that the research adopts. It also provides a brief introduction to the previous stages of this study. Addressing How and Why We Empowered the Participants, we explain the process of creating and collecting the data and how we challenged the participants by asking them to produce a video about their sense of place and how they challenged us to make sense and analyse their films. In the third part of this paper we explain how we developed the Constructivist Film Analysis protocol and provide an example. We also discuss the importance of videography as a data collection technique that can reveal the unconscious habitus and encourage a reflective research process. We suggest that the Constructivist Film Analysis protocol is a useful way to analyse video data that can help to establish rigour, reliability and consistency. Finally, we advocate film making as a means to accommodate or moderate conventional dilemmas related to the emic and etic nature of data collection, analysis and representation. The nature of the co-creational relationship involved in producing film can dissolve the boundaries between culturally-bounded perceptions and externally mediated interpretations. For example, the iterative nature of the post-production process, informed by an understanding of the original ideas and meanings, can enhance the reflexivity of the production to create a more authentic narrative. Thus, in the process of moving from raw footage to edited production it is possible to preserve the authenticity of the original, emic perceptions and to complement them with the etic interpretations of the researchers.