Consumer culture poetry: insightful data and methodological approaches

ABSTRACT

This article makes a case for greater inclusion of poetry as distinctive data within interpretive consumer research. It considers that alternative means of representation provide insight into difficult to access consumption fields. The poetic voice allows the emergence of an emic language of experience as the subject engages in self-reflexivity expressed in ways unconstrained by typical research norms. The article also considers some of the methodological choices inherent in engaging with poetic data and illustrates the research value by considering poems that unpack hidden and mundane consumption and consumer resistance. It shows how intimate experiences can be accessed and interrogated using poetic analysis, how poetry can capture the minutia of mundane consumption while laying bare the poet’s reflexivity about its meaning, and how the reclamation of a dead art-form can become an active form of rejection and consumer resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• Sherry and Schouten
• hidden consumption
• mundane consumption
• consumer resistance
• literary criticism
• textual analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Canon Publishing and Andrew George for permission to reproduce “Meeting the Surrogate”, Harry Giles for permission to reproduce exerts from his poetry project “Everything I bought and how it made me feel”, and Bram E Gieben for permission to reproduce “Burn”. I would also like to thank Andrew, Harry, and Bram for participating in interviews and agreeing to be identified in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrea Tonner is a lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the University of Strathclyde. Her work is focused on forms of consumer wellbeing and how these can be understood. Her previous work has been published in Marketing Theory, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management and Consumption, Markets and Culture.

ORCID

Andrea Tonner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8436-3946