Discriminating against things

Life is quite unimaginable without things. Mundane objects often go unnoticed (thereby making them 'difficult' research subjects) but they also work to structure our daily lives. Yet while they have a dramatic impact on our lives, things appear as somewhat separate from the social world. This separation is further entrenched through the practices of qualitative research and can be illustrated as follows:

Brands, though material (your BMW sits on your drive), are thoroughly social (a BMW has a brand personality, values, etc). The distinction between material and social is not absolute. Common sense suggests that brands do not necessarily exist merely in the social world of consumers. The weighty tangibility of a Nikon camera and the design and finish of Apple's products implies that a brand experience can reside in the 'thing'. This is hardly contentious.

The market research industry's obsession with the consumer, or what we've come to call consumercentrism, is largely explained through its academic heritage in the social sciences, (psychology, sociology, philosophy and anthropology) rather than the material ones. Likewise, the qualitative market research industry, through its practice of focusing on people, continues to deepen the distinction between the material and the social:

• People buy the 'stuff' that clients make. We are interested in their relationship with, attitudes to, experience of and opinions about this stuff

• But the 'stuff' is the client's job and they know more about 'stuff' than us

• Insights on 'stuff' can only come through talking to or observing people.

Or that's the official story. In everyday conversation we mix our metaphors, swap categories and merge common distinctions between humans and non-humans: we curse the temperamental computer or stubborn printer. In our research practices the same blurring is evident. Qualitative researchers regularly ask consumers to anthropomorphise objects, to instil and animate them with human qualities and characteristics (eg brand personality exercises). So, in talking about inanimate entities, such as brands or products, we ask consumers to 'socialise' them first.

This tendency to socialise things in order to make them comprehensible leads us to three conclusions. First, socialising things makes them comprehensible and knowable. Second, it is not hard to do. Thirdly, something might be gained from an approach to objects that goes beyond asking "do they function correctly?" Objects are not as objective (outside the realm of the social) as we might like to think.

Socialising things is step one in restoring the missing masses to qualitative research. But it still continues to construct people, consumers, as active agents, and objects as inanimate things to be acted upon. It's now time to end such blatant discrimination against things.
 

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