July 3, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

In 1998, I was a junior member of the marketing faculty at the Kellogg School of Management. I was fortunate to have had a chance to meet Russ Winer, who was then the editor of the Journal of Marketing Research, during a visit he made to the school. He made an interesting presentation, and we had a chance to sit down and talk about research. I told Russ the work I was doing on netnography, which at that time was merely three conference presentations and three papers in the ACR Proceedings. I was ambitious to do more with the work.

Russ suggested that I get it ready and submit it to JMR. I was happy to do so. It took me a while to get it ready.

This series of blog entries will take you from that initial submission, through each of the rounds of review, to the final printed article. This was a key article in my career, and in the development of the method of Internet ethnography that is called “netnography.”

I will offer my comments, observations, and some recollections about the process as I present this material. I want it all to be available. It is rare that students and other scholars get a detailed, uncensored look inside the review process. I think this example is a very illustrative one, because I was trying, as a young, new faculty member interested in events that are happening right now, in the present, to forge my own way and do something that I thought was innovative and pretty ground-breaking. I was taking risks. I was also very junior, with no accepted articles at that point. No reputation, no track record.

The response that the paper got is instructive.

Here is the first round.

This is the abstract for the paper I submitted to JMR in late 1999, a paper titled “The Field Behind the Screen: Using the Method of Netnography To Research Market-Oriented Virtual Communities.”

ABSTRACT

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has fostered cybercultures and virtual communities, many of which are market-oriented in their focus. This article develops netnography as an online ethnographic technique for market research. Netnographic techniques are adapted to the social technomediation, open participation in social groups and accessibility of social information that characterize CMC. Netnography presents flexible guidelines for conducting online fieldwork that adaptively address central ethnographic concerns of cultural entrée, fieldnotes, trust and rapport, interviews, ethics, member checks and cultural exit as well as the representation of research.

You can find a full, complete copy of that initial submission here: Field_Behind_Initial_Submission.

In the next posting, I will share the reviews and editor’s letter with you.

Posted in Academic Life, Qualitative Research Methods, Netnography, Technology, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | No Comments »

July 2, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

A few days ago, I received a very interesting email about the relative impact of different marketing journals. As an Associate Editor of the Journal of Retailing (marketing’s oldest journal), it told me about the relative citation counts of different marketing journals. The measure, by ISI Web of Science, signifies the amount of impression or impact that the journal makes, by measuring how much articles from the journal are cited in other scientific journals. The letter was accompanied by a flyer attachment, which I present above for your to read.

Amazingly, the Journal of Retailing finished first of all marketing journals, and 4th of all business journals. It finished second in its 5-year impact factor measure, which indicates to me that this is not a fluke or an anomalous good year.

The Journal of Marketing finished second, but its 5-year impact factor is far above any of the other journals, even JR.

The Journal of Retailing and its editors deserve a huge round of congratulations. The journal has been open to, and even encouraging of, high-quality qualitative, consumption studies, or consumer culture-based research. Eric Arnould, John Sherry, Janeen Costa, and I have all published recently in the journal (or are about to), along with many interesting new authors like Candice Hollenbeck, Cara Peters, and Rohit Varman.

I know that, in many schools, JR is considered to be an A- or B+ journal. I think these recent ratings should give pause to committees to reconsider this rating. The journal should move up in school ratings, and enter the Financial Times list of recongized publications. This would make good sense.

I know that, when I went up for tenure at Kellogg, my two JR articles were not even considered (at least, not considered in any positive way). All that counted were my 6 articles in the big 3: JM, JMR, and JCR. The EMJ article I wrote, which now has been cited over 250 times, was not even worth mentioning. But those two JR articles were very important work, one on retail brand ideology, and another on the mythic elements of themed retail brand stores. I now believe that the latter work (on ESPN Zone) could well have been published in the Journal of Marketing. But it is a great fit for JR and I am glad it is in there.

Take a closer look at the table above of these ratings.

The other remarkable thing about these ratings is the position of the Journal of Consumer Research, the flagship journal of the consumer research field. It places in 12th position, well below such journals as JCP, JPIM (both of which have done extremely well), JSR, JIM, and IJRM. In terms of the 5-year factor, JCR is still doing okay (it is in 6th place). But in terms of overall business journals it is in a dismal 60th place. Something seems to be happening to the journal in terms of its impact.

What is going on with JCR? Perhaps it is too insular. JCR authors are only citing other JCR authors. Perhaps it is too derivate, with JCR authors drawing on source fields like social and cognitive psychology for most of their references, with those field rarely drawing back on JCR for references. Perhaps it is publishing too many articles. Perhaps it is just publishing a lot of irrelevant research that no one cites.

Now that is not always trues. Of my four highest-cited articles, two of them are in JCR (Burning Man and Star Trek). JCR still seems to have make-or-break status for people’s careers. It certainly has been critical to my own career. People read the journal, and they seem to cite the articles. But comparatively, something must be happening to result in these worrisome ratings for JCR. As time goes on, how can JCR maintain its elite status and its prestigious position on important evaluative lists such as the Financial Times ratings of relevant business school publications?

What can be done to help JCR? First, we need to get to the bottom of the problem. That is going to require some deep investigation and some honest soul-searching. The first step to solving a problem is often admitting that there is one.

In the meantime, a big woo-hoo for JR and JM, two very strong journals that keep on getting stronger. They are both more open than ever to quality work that uses qualitative, netnographic, ethnographic or other cultural approaches and theories. And people are reading those articles, and using them. Dhruv, Mike, Jim, and Rajiv—great job, and mission almost accomplished.

Fellow scholars, we need to get behind this successful, established, impactful journal. Let’s not only elevate the Journal of Retailing to A, or top-tier, status in our evaluations. Let’s give it an A+. And CCT people–flood the airwaves, JR is open to you.

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June 30, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

It has already been a couple of weeks since the Consumer Culture Theory conference in Ann Arbor Michigan, but I’ve been meaning to write a little bit about it, and just haven’t had the chance until now.

The conference was held at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and was preceded by a Qualitative Data Analysis workshop that was organized a team led by Eric Arnould of the University of Wyoming (Eric has put on every one of these QDA Workshops).

The workshop gives students and other scholars who are still learning qualitative research techniques a chance to run their research projects by more senior scholars and also to hear the scholars speak about techniques, theories, and their own research. It is an intense experience because there’s a lot of one-on-one contact between new researchers and more established ones. I greatly enjoyed meeting students from around the world and hearing about the fantastic variety of projects that they are investigating.

My presentation concerned the specifics of qualitative data analysis when using a netnographic approach.I talked a bit about the fundamentals of qualitative data analysis, coding, categorization, abstraction, and theorization, and then bridged that into a discussion of computer-assisted data analysis software programs. finally, I finished with a discussion of the particularities and peculiarities of the kinds of qualitative data that one encounters when researching online communities and cultures, providing strategies for dealing with these important idiosyncrasies. All of this material was adapted from the data analysis chapter in my upcoming book from Sage, Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research in the Age of the Internet.

What struck me about the qualitative data analysis workshop this year was that there is still room for us to teach actual, hands-on qualitative data analysis, rather than hear scholars talk about ‘doing it’ in the abstract.

I am very interested in hearing whether there is interest among marketing research practitioners, academics, and students in a workshop where we would bring in significant amounts of text (netnographic text would be perfect, but so would fieldnotes, journals, or transcribed interviews) and then we would walk together through the process of coding, categorizing, abstracting, and building relevant theory or implications from our analyzed data sets. As well, I think scholars and practitioners might benefit from some practical guidance and mentorship around conducting interviews and doing observational work. Increasingly, I am finding that this is an area of great interest to practitioners and managers as well as to students and academics.

Are any of you interested in this idea?

Now, on to the conference. The Ann Arbor-based Consumer Culture Theory conference was the fourth one ever held. Originally, the CCT conference was conceived as an event that would be held every other year, but due to popular demand it seems to be on track as an annual conference. It gives scholars who are working in areas related to anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies theories a chance to get together an share their orientation on consumer culture.

One of the refreshing things about this year’s conference was we had a wide variety of methodologies being used to investigate consumer culture kinds of questions. For example, there were several presentations that used experimental methodologies, some that the causal equation modeling, and even one (by Andrew Feldstein) that brought in structural network analysis. I found the diversity refreshing and the discussions between the different scholars to be stimulating.

There were some terrific sessions. I greatly enjoyed the continuing voyages of Diego Rinallo, Pauline Maclaran, Linda Scott, and Derek Turley as they investigated mythical places of origin, pilgrimage destinations, notions of promised lands bringing a consumer research lands to the way that sacred places such as Glastonbury and Avalon in England and St. Brigid’s holy well in Ireland are consumed. As I wrote last year, I think this is fascinating work, and I was pleased to be a discussant in the session (even though I only had a few minutes to gush on about the research).

The two keynote addresses were also stimulating. The first, by Ulf Hannerz of Stockholm University in Sweden, talked about global punditry and futuristic prediction, analyzing the market for “big thinking/big picture” books such as Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” or Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” and how these books and their ideas relate to politics, academia, and the marketplace.

The next day we heard from Eva Illouz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Prof. Illouz spoke eloquently about the ramifications drawing from some of the ideas about emotional commodification in her influential book “Consuming the Romantic Utopia.” It was kind of shocking to see both professors read their presentations. In marketing and consumer research, we are so driven byPowerPoint, we just throw our slides up there and discuss them in our academese banter. Seeing these two profs present like that is a reminder that conventions outside our field are very different: some fields have conferences where entire papers are written beforehand, then read to the waiting audience.

Unfortunately, Donna Haraway didn’t show. As the sort of “Elvis” (maybe the Lady Gaga would be more timely and apropos) of cultural theorists, she had been touted as the academic headliner of the conference this year. My friend and colleague Markus Giesler, who co-chaired this conference so ably with his equally-able and devoted co-chairs David Wooten and John Branch (these three, along with their U of M admin assistants, did a stellar job with the conference), did his utmost to set up the conditions for Donna to appear. He is a master conjurer and exerted himself mightily. But, as the saying goes, ‘You never can tell with cyborgs.’ Professor Haraway was MIA and her Keynote had to be filled with a panel discussion.

Aside from Prof. Haraway’s missing face (and the conference’s saved face), there were a lot of new, young faces this year doing exciting, fresh work. Maybe it was because the Qualitative Data Analysis workshop was held right before the conference, drawing in a younger crowd.

I’ll talk about some of the presentations, but I can’t cover all of them. CCT is already getting to be a pretty major conference with lots of content. I enjoyed Joonas Rookas and Joel Hietanen’s ethnographic presentation of the tribes of paintballers (they are from the Helsinki School of Economics, and are undertaking the research with Kristine de Valck of HEC, Paris, France). Tonya Williams and John Sherry of the University of Notre Dame presented some very interesting work on wedding registries that sought to integrated expand some of the current thinking about gifts and gift giving.

In the same session, Northeastern University’s Fleura Bardhi presented some very interesting research she did with the United States Army about how family relationships interact with consumption needs to create family situations that either foster or discourage continued involvement in the US military. Rita Denny and Patty Sunderland of the Practica Group (a marketing research and strategic consulting agency) then made a delightful and informative about some work that they did for the Detroit Institute of Arts. Their presentation was multimedia and multimodal, and also presented an inside look at the applied use of ethnography to solve a non-profit’s strategic marketing problems. Their work really generated insight into the kinds of experiences that people (particularly mothers of younger children) were seeking from Art Museum, which weren’t lofty aesthetic experiences so much as momentary escapes for chances to exercise their imaginations and creativity-themes that were picked up on and realized beautifully by the advertising agency they were working with in its “Let yourself go” campaign.

Wow, there was so much good stuff. I have to mention Ekant Veer’s horrifying, stimulating, fascinating netnographic study of YouTube vloggers with anorexia nervosa (undertaken with Mai Barakat, who is also at the University of Bath with Ekant). These video bloggers share their weight loss obsessions with eager audiences, many of whom encourage them to continue losing weight and video blogging about it.

Leeds University’s Caterina Presi did a great job of presenting netnographic research that she is doing with Ingeborg Kleppe (from NHH in Bergen Norway) and myself on the visual community of Flickr and its implications for our understanding of community and communication online.

I also liked Toni Eagar’s work (Toni is from Australian National University in Canberra) on brand heros, where she used the community of fans and followers of Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld works as her ethnographic fieldsite. Her work starts to sort out some interesting conceptual differences between heroes, myths, and legends as it looks to the community for insights about the mythic underpinnings of collective brand loyalty.

There was a ton of great stuff at the conference–I wish I could have seen and could mention all of it. Next year’s conference is apparently planned for Madison, Wisconsin, a city very near and dear to my heart (as I once lived, worked, and taught there), and will be hosted by consumer research superstar Craig Thompson (who is also, apparently, a very successful cartoonist and graphic novel author).

If you are interested, please stay tuned to web and email list postings on the conference and consider attending it next year. I think you will find it to be an excellent, inspirational gathering of a community of scholars doing relevant, high quality work.

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