« Ringtone Marketer Must Turn Down Volume | Main | Lawsuit Over Prison Slavery »
September 22, 2005
Researching Everyday Food Culture
A marketing company called The Hartman Group (which has trademarked the term reality marketing so don't get any ideas, buster) plans to bring home the bacon by watching you, or people like you, fry it up in a pan. What the hell am I nattering on about? The Household Immersion Lab. For some reason the description below makes me think of pith-helmeted scientists going into the jungle for field work, when I know it won't be like that at all.
This fall, The Hartman Group's team of ethnographers begins the initial phase of the Household Immersion Lab. This pioneering effort opens up an entire new window onto understanding the consumption behavior of mainstream America. The initial 6-9 month Household Immersion Lab research effort is focused on eating patterns and will reveal the messy dynamics of Everyday Food Culture in America in surprising detail. While this first immersion centers on food, the Household Immersion Lab is perfectly suited to marketing and branding initiatives across a broad industry spectrum: apparel, technology, travel and leisure, hospitality, restaurant, consumer packaged goods, home improvement, telecommunications, retailing, etc.The Household Immersion Lab is about having close encounters with consumers on their own turf. It is about reconciling the differences between what consumers say and what they do. For example, while this initial phase is built around two families (one empty nester Boomer and one family of four with children), companies can sponsor their own families and interact with them on any number of marketing initiatives, such as putting products into the family to see how they are adopted, accepted, consumed, used, shopped for, etc. Other applications may be to test messaging, labeling, packaging or if we know the families are going to stores, observe specific behaviors or look for certain shopping/buying cues, etc.
Is the Household Immersion Lab as pioneering as it claims to be? Lemme know. Yo, Hartman folks, holler the second you're able to reconcil the differences between what family members say and what they do. Now that would be a true service. Not as lucrative but darn compelling.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at September 22, 2005 11:52 AM
Comments
This phrase "reconciling the differences between what consumers say and what they do" piqued my interest. Is that when Joe Sixpack tells the computer sales droid that he wants a new computer to run Quicken but then buys a souped-up video card nearly as expensive as the rest of the computer whose only conceivable use is Doom III?
Posted by: Pete at September 27, 2005 05:01 AM