I drew on the work of many unseen anthropological hands, from Marcel Mauss through Anette Weiner, Nancy Munn, and Daniel Miller, to connect le don to the greeting card. The Mother's Day research was team ethnography. Kemp Strickler and Lori Givan, in the Business Research Division, and a group of writers, designers, editors, and managers in the Seasonal Cards business unit helped set the research agenda. Then, research teams, including a UMKC graduate student, Kazuyo Masuda, spent several days working the kinks out of video ethnography with consumers. We shopped with people and talked with them about the relationships for which the cards were being selected.
People are quite comfortable talking about uncomfortable things in the card shop.
Our shoppers talked about the often ambivalent and always complex cultural patterns surrounding motherhood. And we learned how these patterns come to be embodied and activated in greeting cards. We explored the meaning transmormations that cards go through. They begin as a material product that depends upon a set of social and organizational relationships at Hallmark. At purchase, they transform into icons that participate in the human relationships activated by giving or sending a card.