Constructing Consumer Knowledge in Market Research : An Ethnography of Epistemics

Abstract: Market research pervades society. It is an endeavour that connects marketing practice with methods similar to social science. Further, market research results appear as knowledge produced to inform recipients towards making productive business decisions and as a commodity sold to commissioning clients. I suggest that such commissioned knowledge production must be approached taking into account both the making and the marketing of such material. The position of market research between concerns to know through research and to market goods and services, including its own, has been approached differently in academic scholarship. Examples range from criticism against surveillance and manipulation, to calls to defining the benefits of market research techniques for organising markets and societies. Researchers have tried to explain this knowledge making for market research as a construction of objects of knowledge or as a performative phenomenon. This thesis takes an ethnographic and cultural approach to market research work and the researchers that undertake it. Based on fieldwork with Swedish firm Norna (pseudonym) and handbooks from industry organisation ESOMAR, the thesis inquires into the epistemic practices and epistemology of market research, how market researchers consider their work influenced by the relations that they maintain and how ideas and practices in market research inform understanding of commissioned knowledge production.The thesis consists of four articles dealing with the ideas, actors and processes that engage market researchers. The first article assesses market research industry handbooks and discusses the contribution of performativity approaches in light of this local epistemology. The second article studies how market researchers shape their respondents as part of producing consumer knowledge. The third article assesses how the work processes of market research knowledge production rely on the production and distribution of ignorance to successfully keep respondents and clients at the right certainty interval. The fourth article examines client relations and how market researchers produce materials to satisfy clients as well as shape clients’ preferences and understanding.The findings of the thesis point to how market research features its own local epistemics and reflexivity on the part of researchers, but also the tensions and ambiguities involved. Market researchers handle commercial pressures and epistemic quandaries in parallel and overlapping relational practice through the production and deployment of both knowledge and ignorance. Dealing with clients and respondents transcends the distinction between the commercial and the informative. The text informs a further understanding of market research, its techniques by means of engaging with how its researchers view this activity. Further it challenges the social study of knowledge production by showing how in this case it includes concerns that are not simplistically commercial or epistemic.