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METHOD
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INTRODUCTION
This paper explores four perspectives on marketing or consumer research so as to illustrate their combined applicability to probing the depths of the consumption experience. Specifically, we integrate four relatively well-established facets of consumer research in what we believe is a new way that potentially sheds light on the meaning of consumption among the members of a particular group or subculture. Toward this end, we focus on (1) the nature of the consumption experience; (2) self-photography as a means of gathering data; (3) the collective photo essay as an approach to presenting findings; and (4) stereography as a technique for enhancing the vividness, clarity, realism, and depth of the visual images used in marketing or consumer research.
(1) The Consumption Experience
Consumer researchers have increasingly accepted the premise that our field of inquiry extends well beyond the more conventional boundaries of buyer behavior. Specifically, as originally implied by Kotler and Levy's broadened concept of marketing (Kotler 1972; Kotler and Levy 1969), consumer research embraces not only the acquisition or patronage of traditional goods and services but also that of various events (rock concerts, sports spectacles), ideas (religious faith, philosophical systems), people (movie stars, political candidates), or places (travel destinations, business communities). Further, consumption entails not only the acquisition of such products via purchasing or receiving as a gift but also their usage and disposition (Jacoby 1975, 1978; Sheth 1979, 1982). And all three facets of consumption satisfy customer needs, wants, desires, or wishes through a process wherein the product performs services that create experiences to provide customer value (Holbrook 1993). Hence, it makes sense to emphasize these value-conferring consumption experiences as one major theme or even as the key focal point of consumer research (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982).
To illustrate this consumption-oriented perspective in the context of a nontraditional product-usage situation, we shall focus on the consumption experiences derived from the place in which one lives in general and, as a specific example, from life in New York City in particular. As noted in an introspective essay by Holbrook (1994), living in New York produces both positive and negative reactions from most of its citizens. In the present study, we shall explore common themes from the collective responses of students who dwell in the area and who come together to participate in graduate classes at Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Though we happen to think that this subject matter holds considerable interest for many people concerned with the modern urban malaise, we emphasize that we intend our project less as a definitive sociological or anthropological statement than as an illustration of how the approach proposed here can be applied to an analysis of the consumption experiences shared by a particular group or subculture composed of those who consume the services of a particular product category -- in this case, a geographical location and its social milieu.
(2) Self-Photographic Data
Consumer researchers have increasingly found uses for photography in their work. Specifically, drawing on the approaches developed in visual sociology (Becker 1986, 1995; Chaplin 1994; Wagner ed. 1979) and in cultural anthropology (Ball and Smith 1992; Bateson and Mead 1942; Collier 1967; Collier and Collier 1986), consumer researchers have begun to use photographs as one form of data collected from informants (Belk ed. 1991; Belk, Sherry, and Wallendorf 1988; Heisley, McGrath, and Sherry 1991; Wallendorf and Belk 1987) or from other sources (Hudson and Wadkins 1988) such as advertising (Bachand 1988; Bertrand 1988; Kaushik and Sen 1990; Stern 1990) and analyzed as part of the research design. In this direction, one worthwhile approach pursued in the social sciences has encouraged informants to take their own photographs of meaningful objects or events in their daily lives (van der Does et al. 1992; Ziller 1990). In consumer research, Zaltman and his colleagues (Zaltman and Higie 1993) have pursued this self-photographic method by supplying their informants with disposable cameras and asking them to capture key aspects of their consumption experiences pictorially on film. The present study borrows and extends this approach to collecting self-photographic data in a way that capitalizes on the ease and cheapness of photography via the use of inexpensive disposable cameras.
(3) The Photo Essay
Photography contributes not only as a type of data but also as a potential mode for presenting findings from a consumer-research study (e.g., Hill and Stamey 1990; Holbrook 1987, 1988; Joy and Venkatesh 1994; O'Guinn 1991; Peñaloza 1994a, 1994b; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). Often, an intermediate stage involves the use of photographs as stimuli in an experimental design (Bell, Holbrook, and Solomon 1991; Loosschilder et al. 1995; McCracken and Roth 1989) or the "auto-driving" of informants wherein they are shown self- or researcher-generated photos and are asked to comment on the meaning and significance of these pictorial representations (Collier and Collier 1986; Harper 1987, 1989; Heisley and Levy 1991). Also, the presentation of findings may extend beyond the mode of exemplification (e.g., Langholz-Leymore 1988; Mytten 1996; Solomon 1988), documentation (e.g., Bachand 1988; Heisley et al. 1991; Hudson and Wadkins 1988; Stern 1994), or corroboration (e.g., Bertrand 1988; Holbrook 1988; Joy and Venkatesh 1994; Kaushik and Sen 1990) to encompass the mode of self-expression via the illustrated introspective essay (e.g., Holbrook 1987, 1996b; Mead 1994; Pe¤aloza 1994b; Rook 1991). The present study combines aspects of both auto-driving and self-expression in the sense that our informants provided discursive self-interpretations of their photographic intentions after taking but before seeing their own photos designed to represent "What New York Means To Me." These brief verbal vignettes served to indicate their pictorial intentions more or less unbiased by their relative degrees of photographic success. When analyzed for key themes and interwoven as textual evidence in what follows, they combine to provide a sort of collective essay on the meaning of life in the Big City. This collective essay is, in turn, illustrated by those pictures that developed with especially telling visual effect. In other words, quite understandably, not all of our self-photographic informants possessed the technical skills to take good pictures of complex subjects with cheap disposable cameras. Hence, we auto-drive their photographic intentions, use their self-reflective verbal vignettes to construct a collective essay, and illustrate this essay with the photos that appear to achieve the greatest degree of self-expressive visual impact. The result produces what we believe is a rather powerful and well-integrated collective photo essay on the consumption experiences associated with life in New York.
(4) Stereographic Photos in Consumer Research
A final refinement in our use of photographs for purposes of marketing or consumer research concerns the presentation of stereographic three-dimensional visual images by means of stereo pairs or some other suitable 3-D technique (Holbrook 1996a, 1996c). As reviewed elsewhere, work in this direction has suggested that the presentation of three-dimensional displays to communicate the findings of marketing research in general (Holbrook 1996c) and the use of stereographic photos to depict consumption experiences relevant to consumer research in particular (Holbrook 1996a) hold promise as effective ways to enhance the vividness, clarity, realism, and depth of the visual representations that we employ in the derivation and dissemination of research findings. Such three-dimensional stereographic presentations via stereo pairs lend themselves to publication in the printed pages of our journals or books. Moreover, via stereo pairs or other formats such as red-and-blue/green anaglyphs (described later), they may also appear on electronic media like the World Wide Web. In the present study -- to capitalize on the enhancement of vividness, clarity, realism, and depth made possible by means of 3-D stereography -- we shall make use of stereo pairs in print along with both stereo pairs and red-blue anaglyphs on the Web in an effort to maximize the potential for communication with the members of our target audience of marketing and consumer researchers.
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