Consumer Culture Response - Question 3

Surely, there are parallels between ad agencies and anthropologists. An anthropologist is one who bases his findings on the study of people's languages, traditions and beliefs in different parts of the world. Meanwhile, ad agencies require knowledge about their clients and their interests, as their main goal is to attract them to their products. Since anthropology deals with understanding people's traits, needs and wants (based on their culture, nationality and beliefs) and because ad agencies are in the business of capturing people's interests (in the form of an ad), there should somewhat be an overlap of interests between cultural anthropologists and ad agencies. Hence, marketing professionals employ anthropologists to help them determine suitable places for advertisements or to aid them in the necessary communications that a marketer might use in the market place (promotion).
On the other hand, ethnographers are anthropologists whose main focus (other than data collection) is to clarify how culture affects people’s behaviors and experiences. Similarly market researchers, gather information related to markets and their customers. For instance, after conducting an ethnographic study on two-way pagers in rural China (shortage of telephones), Motorola started marketing its pagers for the rural China market. Jean Canavan, an anthropologist for Motorola said, "If we want to develop technologies that really fit into the way people live their day-to-day lives, then we have to understand how people really live." This shows the relationship between both jobs but although they are similar, require more depth in their work as well as more developed analytical skills, where as market researchers only require basic details about their customers' interests (in order to satisfy their wants).
Change is an inevitable and a continuous element of life, and so is time (aging). The views and ideas of people in the past have considerably changed nowadays, which is why the older generation would require researchers to enlighten them about the views of the younger generation. Also, in the past people were not as isolated as children are nowadays (sitting behind their computers rather than being social), therefore their lives were not as enclosed. Furthermore, children would not be able to provide adults with complete answers to what they are looking for "I just like doing that ok!" as their answers will not be comprehensive enough... This is when researchers step in.