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Interpretive Consumer Research
Edited by Cova, B. and Elliott, R.
The rise of experiential approaches to marketing during the last decade ([22] Pine and Gilmore, 1999; [23], [24] Schmitt, 1999, 2003) has turned the understanding of consumption experiences into a hot topic for qualitative market researchers ([7] Carù and Cova, 2007; [12] Holbrook, 1995). In the meantime, the ethnography of consumption has, in just a few years, become a major qualitative research strategy, given the limitations of questionnaire-driven verbatims and other kinds of interviews ([18], [19] Mariampolski, 1999, 2005) when it came to understand the deep feelings and emotions lived by consumers. Actually, ethnography and verbatim are not incompatible: no truly ethnographic approach can exist without some analysis of verbatims ([3] Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994; [17] Leigh et al. , 2006), especially when the focus is on consumers' subjective experiences and not on their quasi-objective use of products and services.
As such, the present paper tries to go beyond the current approaches to the ethnography of consumption ([28] Whitehill, 2007) and suggests an integrated ethnography of consumption methodology which combines observation and introspection that is small stories with big stories ([4] Bamberg, 2006). The paper starts discussing why it is important today to understand the consumption experience. After that, it goes through the dilemma-like relationship between the consumer and his experience and the way to solve it by relying on the so-called "reflexive consumer". All that leads to the development of a complete ethnographic approach to consumption experiences that takes advantage of previous research carried out in different contexts, e.g. music concerts and internet-based services ([6] Carù and Cova, 2006; [8] Carù et al. , 2007).
Marketing and the subjective consumption experience
Understanding a consumption experience is a prime goal of today's marketers, especially with the rise of experiential marketing approaches that seek to re-enchant people through consumption ([23], [24] Schmitt, 1999, 2003). Service businesses, in particular, are being urged to have a global view on what types of experiences to organize for consumers and how they should be provided. In an experiential perspective, consumers are less interested in maximising their benefits and more focused on hedonistic gratification within a given social context. Here, consumption provokes sensations and emotions that do much more than merely...