To begin the ethnographic account, let us take our first step into Super by exploring how the research team works together in a coordinated way. This not only illustrates how Super operates but, also, provides a general sense of the organization of marketing research. From talking to the research team, from ethnographic interviews and from subsequent conversations with marketing researchers about my experiences, it is clear that the action at Super is fairly representative of the ways that marketing research – indeed, marketing action – happens generally.

There is good reason for this level of standardized action. It means that marketing researchers can move between marketing organizations without having to learn new ways of working and, thus, supports seniority and a power structure in marketing organizations. It also reflects the account model discussed by Moeran (2005). Advertising agencies say that the conformity that Alvesson (1994) finds so curious is functional. It reduces the transactions costs for clients looking to move from one agency to another.

The same is true for marketing research organizations. In fact, it is common for key contacts in their clients to work towards bonuses tied to key brand performance indicators that are measured by their marketing research organization. These include standard measures such as brand awareness or brand recall. If a market research agency does not measure these indicators or measures them in a unique way, it creates a significant challenge when it is trying to win new business.

For now, though, we will consider what these standardized practices look like. I will describe the working day and the atmosphere in Super's head office. I will review the ways that the research team coordinates their work and highlight the importance of automation in their activity. I will also describe the human relations with the team.

Getting to work

As discussed in Chapter 4, Super's head office is located in an up- and- coming neighbourhood in a large European city. Like many similar areas, nearby accommodation is both in short supply and prohibitively expensive given the kinds of salaries paid to the research team. At the time of writing, new hires to the research team are offered a salary roughly equivalent to US$50– 60,000. This is around 30 per cent higher than the national median wage but in a similar range to the median wage for the city where Super's head office is located.

In the last chapter, I showed how the research team's initial engagements with the data they collect is influenced by their understandings and assumptions about a client. I argued that they work on the basis that their clients are bounded rational decision- makers who turn to marketing organizations to absorb uncertainty for them so they can make decisions. As we saw in our discussion of administrative theory, uncertainty absorption occurs when organizational decision- makers allow others to create simple models of their external environment for them. For this to be effective, organizational decision- makers must have confidence in the people absorbing uncertainty for them. Uncertainty absorption works through the modeller more than their models.

In this chapter, I want to explore how marketing research is organized to absorb uncertainty. Here, we will see that the discourse of Marketing Science plays an important role. Market researchers at Super integrate scientific discourses, images, and artefacts, not to mention the very idea of ‘marketing science’ as it appears in academic and industry discussions, to encourage their clients to believe them. Science, in particular computational science, is materialized in the objects and built environment in Super's offices. The products and services Super sells to its clients are packaged through references to scientific ideas and Super uses computational scientific discourses to communicate with its clients. My claim is that, thanks to the social legitimacy of the ethos of science discussed in Chapter 1, this is a powerful mechanism of uncertainty absorption.

It is important to note at the start that this is not necessarily a false impression. As we will see in Chapter 8, where I document Super's research processes and practices in more detail, Super's research involves a great deal of data, computational analysis, and is supported by many academic ideas and Marketing Science conventions. The key point here, though, is that the way Super display its work to its clients is largely unrelated to these activities and is better explained through the lens of uncertainty absorption.

Scientism

To begin with, let us think about the ways that images of science have traditionally been used outside of the lab. As discussed in Chapter 1, scientific knowledge has a special value in many societies (Merton, 1973). Scientific facts can trump folk, spiritual, and other knowledge claims (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944).

Having described the general organizational culture at Super and the working practices in the research team, in this chapter we will look at the relationship between the research team and their clients. Specifically, I want to explore the ways that the research team talk about their clients in the course of their work and consider what this tells us about the service that the research team thinks it provides for their clients. In keeping with our earlier discussions of discourses of Marketing Art and Marketing Science in marketing action, we might expect that they either emphasize their creativity and imagination or their ability to produce truthful, objective, and robust information.

My argument is that the research team at Super act on a more sophisticated understanding of their clients as organizational decision- makers. Their action is based on the idea that their clients need help making decisions. This is not a matter of telling them what to do – whether that is justified through scientific methods or artistic innovation. Rather, the research team seek to increase their clients’ ability to make decisions. They do so by providing them with simple accounts of their markets and consumers that facilitate clients’ decisions by aligning their clients’ pre- existing assumptions and enrolling a wider network of symbolic and economic resources to support them.

I began to recognize this as I witnessed the research team describing their products to internal stakeholders. In a presentation to the sales team, for example, Dan explains why the research team have modified an element of their Virality product – the predictive algorithm for what is called the Virality EQ score – away from offering concrete predictions. Previously, Virality EQ predicted the ‘share rate’ for an online advert based on its performance in a test market. A Virality EQ of 2 per cent meant that the client could expect 2 per cent of viewers to share their advert among their social networks. The problem, Dan explains in the presentation, is that this number is taken too literally by clients. ‘We have been burned by predicting a share rate that did not occur. Clients can get hung up on achieving a number and we can get our fingers burnt’, Dan tells the audience. The new method ‘mitigates against this’, he continues. It does so by offering a number that is far less exact.

We have seen how Super uses space, material objects, talk, and symbolism to present its activities through general and specific scientism. It uses the social legitimacy of science to encourage its clients to trust it and, through this, facilitates uncertainty absorption. Yet, as we have also seen, when interpreting data, the research team at Super do not consider themselves engaging in scientific practices. Instead, they talk about themselves as ‘giving meaning to data’ and ‘telling stories’. This is because uncertainty absorption is not about the application of scientific methods. It involves artistic qualification, as illustrated in the last two chapters.

This more creative practice is not hidden from clients – but its appearance is managed. In this chapter, I will focus on a second use of space, material objects, talk, and symbolism that occurs at Super that connects its activities to the discourse of Marketing Art. Just as Super designs dedicated spaces to perform for clients through scientism and present its research using scientific references, Super displays its good taste, productive cultural consumption, norm of newness, fun, personal relations, and anti- bureaucratic nature through its spaces and talk.

Again, though, no one involved in these performances believes that marketing researchers are artists in the strict sense of the term. As Alvesson (1994) suggests, this would undermine their value. Following their engagement with scientism, they legitimize their activities by embedding them in the social legitimacy of art. I coin the term ‘artism’ to refer to this action. It is the mirror of scientism as it involves aping the language, methods, and ethos of art without being artistic.

To illustrate the nature of artism at Super, the chapter describes the ways that artistic imagery and objects appear in Super's head office. I then explore how artistic practices influence the ways that the research team present their work to their clients. Here, we have the opportunity to return to the Luxury Car Social Media Playbook discussed in Chapter 6. I was able to attend the final client presentation for this Big Picture Project. Exploring the staging and scripting of this presentation helps us to see uncertainty absorption in action. We have already seen how the design of this Big Picture Project was shaped by Super's understanding of the relationships between the two clients – Stormer, a luxury car brand, and Splash, its creative agency.

Having outlined the underlying theoretical perspective and set up the research focus of the book, in this chapter, I will discuss what it means to conduct an ethnography of a marketing organization. To do so, I first explore the methods used in existing ethnographic research and review some of the general methodological issues involved in studying contemporary marketing action ethnographically. I will then detail the ethnographic methods that I used and describe the site of my research.

Studying marketing

As discussed in the last two chapters, there are different ways of studying marketing. Ethnography has some unique advantages. Ethnography is primarily about observing what happens – not relying on people's accounts of what they do. It involves a researcher spectating and, possibly, participating in marketing action. As such, it has the potential to open up more realistic accounts than methods that rely on predefined ideas about what marketing is or rely on marketers’ own reflections of their activities. Ethnographic research can allow the researcher to see things that everyday participants take for granted.

Ethnography also allows researchers to document specific incidents and events. Ethnographic studies offer us moment- to- moment commentaries that go into ‘incredible detail’ and, from this, to provide ‘the backdrop for a developing understanding of what is going on’ (Neyland, 2008: 17). Ethnographers call such accounts ‘thick description’. This is a key element of the ethnographic method. It is typically traced to Geertz's (1973) account of betting in Bali. Geertz's idea, as I understand it, is that by providing as much detail as possible about a specific incident one may uncover something inherent not only to that specific incident but to the action in general. In other words, an ethnography of a night of betting, a health organization, a theatrical performance, or an advertising agency should not only tell us about the action in that setting but, through the detail they offer, also tell us something more profound about the ways that societies, organizations, industries, and individuals work together (Becker, 2007).

According to Braverman (1974), a foundational theorist in work sociology, ethnographic methods are particularly powerful for understanding work relations. He argues that we simply cannot get to grips with productive activities unless we go to work ourselves. Braverman explains that ‘active and interested parties’ offer interpretations that ‘are enriched by their efforts at practise’ (1974: 21).

In the last chapter we explored three classic ethnographic studies that provide a starting point for developing a unique ethnographic theory of marketing. This theory starts with accounts of events from the frontline of marketing. It explains the action inside marketing organizations as consequences of the ambiguous nature of marketing, the translation between symbolic and economic resources, and structural tensions within marketing organizations and between marketing organizations and their clients. Based on this, I suggested that the ethnographic theory of marketing is a structural- functional theory. It explains the structure of marketing actions in terms of the functions they serve.

Having set out this theoretical foundation, in this chapter I want to review more of the ethnographic observations of marketing action. My aim is to expand the discussion beyond advertising, as the three classic studies we have looked at so far focus on advertising agencies. On this point, I will argue that we need to study marketing research ethnographically. Here, reviewing the existing literature in more depth also helps to put some meat on the bones of the ethnographic theory of marketing. Finally, I will use this review to set up the questions that I want to explore as the book progresses. To this end, this chapter highlights two key themes in the existing literature: the discourses of Marketing Science and Marketing Art. These interpretative repertoires have been developed to explain marketing action and the ways marketing workers think about their activities.

Before beginning, though, let me offer some disclaimers. I acknowledge there are many other incredibly interesting accounts of marketing that do not rely on ethnographic methods but show us, in their own ways, marketing in its natural environment. These include historical (Schwarzkopf, 2015a; 2015b; Tadajewski, 2016), interview- based (Cluley et al, 2020), even experimental studies (Piercy et al, 1997). But, I will limit the discussion to ethnographic work and will leave these other traditions to one side.

I also acknowledge that many ethnographic studies include other methods, such as formal interviews with key contacts, and that many studies based on other methods often include some form of broadly ethnographic observation. When conducting interviews, for example, a researcher might spend a prolonged period of time in a marketing organization and observe the action around them (for example, Cronin, 2004a).