人類学者をマーケティングのリサーチに投入することは1980年ごろからはじまったが、企業が本格的に「民族誌的方法」を具体的かつ組織的に活 用するようになるのは1998年ごろから、だと言われている。

１：When I interviewed her, Mary Prescott was a vice president at a youth division of a major advertising agency. She began her career at a more traditional children's research firm, when the field was far more staid. Now she's one of its leading ethnographic researchers, well respected by her peers and at the cutting edge of consumer insights. Prescott attributes her success to the unique qualities of ethnographic research. Unlike more traditional methods, her observations are child directed and proceed at a slow pace. Part of the process is simple persistence. She often spends her time in previously unresearched spaces, such as homes, and their most private areas-bedrooms and bathrooms-where kids can be themselves. Prescott has learned that a one-shot approach doesn't work. She needs three visits before she is confident that she's getting the real deal. "Before that the children are performing. By the third time they're used to you." Multiple visits also allow a second component of this research, which is creating enough trust that the children are willing to open up. Prescott "establishes a friendship" and "builds a rapport." Her preference is to have a one-onone session with the child, unlike in the past, when mothers were much more likely to be present when children were interviewed. Once they trust her, she can gain valuable information about them to pass on to her clients. This method avoids some of the pitfalls of focus groups, such as the fact that the dynamics of the group affect the answers and one influential person can skew responses or that people can be reluctant to be honest in front of others. It also bypasses the problem of kids who show off, or perform, during focus groups, thereby undermining true insights. (Schor 2004:100-101)

２：For these reasons, Prescott and scores of other researchers are now engaged in painstaking, face-to-face scrutiny of children's daily lives. They sit and film kids doing what they do and then try to use that information to figure out how to sell them more stuff They watch them -playing with their dolls and games, eating yogurt and cereal, and brushing their teeth. Contending that traditional interviews and surveys do not get at how consumers live or interact with products, practitioners of this daily . life research aim to uncover insights that we consumers cannot articulate because we are unaware of them. They are also searching for consumer habits ‾hat kids are unwilling to talk about because they do not jibe with a child's self-:-image, such as the fact that tween girls still love to play with their Barbies and tween boys do the same with their action figures. Actually being in the places where consumers live lets researchers see many things that would never even surface in standard interviews. Emma Gilding, the researcher behind AT&T's mlife campaign, which focuses on the everyday realities oflife and how cell phones have been woven into ordinary moments, explains that the method is about "trying to find moments of truth," especially during the times when language breaks down. Gilding, a senior partner at Ogilvy and Mather's Discovery Group and one of New York's hottest practitioners of this type of work, contends that what she's doing goes beyond standard practice: "It's not research, we live with them ... not anthropology, we're in the frame." She's trying to get at deep intangibles that cannot be accessed by interviews or surveys. (Schor 2004:101)

３：If the product Prescott had been researching were a toy, or apparel, or food, she would have taped Caitlin using it. And although she didn't observe kids actually bathing in this project, I did find researchers who have done bath and shower observation. One woman I interviewed described how she'd have the child pull the curtain closed while she sat on the toilet, taking notes. She explained that after a few minutes, the kids forget she's in the room. That's when they perform the private behaviors it's her job to discover, such as grabbing the shampoo container and pretending it's a microphone, singing the latest Britney Spears tune, and exiting the tub with a towel wrapped around the neck, play-acting a superhero. (Schor 2004:101)

４：In market research, the ethnographic tum dates to the 1980s. One of the first companies to use these methods was Levi Strauss, the jeans company, which started sending researchers into homes to look into kids' closets as a way of finding out what they were into and what the newest trends n:light be. Ethnography got a big boost in 1998 with an influential Saatchi and Saatchi study called "Digital Kids." Saatchi stationed anthropologists inside homes and had them watch what kids did while they were online. The company has even hired an archaeologist to unearth consumer insights. Saatchi likes to take credit for the ethnographic turn, but a number of factors were at work, including the fact that such methods had already taken root with adults. (Schor 2004:101-102)

５：One reason researchers turned to the naturalistic was that traditional methods were yielding fewer insights. As one marketer explained: "I would say that the reason Procter stopped asking women about laundry every minute was because there's only so much you can ask about laundry. There's only so much you can know. It stopped getting useful and newsworthy. I mean: 'What's your favorite cereal?' 'Lucky Charms.' 'Why do you like it?' 'It's good.' 'Why is it good?' 'It's got the marshmallows.' 'Why do you like the marshmallows?' 'They're sweet.' 'Is there anything else you like about it?' 'The milk turns gray.' " Others think that cost factors have been decisive. A top executive from one agency recounted the history behind today's methods. Forty years ago, the major advertisers, such as Procter & Gamble, surveyed thousands of consumers annually. Then they figured out they could reduce those samples to the hundreds and achieve success at a lower cost. As budgets grew tighter, the hundreds dwindled down to tens, and now ethnographers have seized the moment, arguing that insights gained from intensive studies of even a few people can supplant all that expensive research. (Schor 2004:102)

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文献

• Born to buy : the commercialized child and the new consumer culture / Juliet B. Schor, Scribner (2004)
• 子どもを狙え! : キッズ・マーケットの危険な罠 / ジュリエット・B・ショア著 ; 中谷和男訳，アスペクト (2005)
  

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