The Rules of the (Retail-) Game are Changing

In an overly crowded commercial world, where diverse products are more in abundance than ever before, big retailers are setting a new trend which is bottom-up and basically consumer driven. The relationship between retailers and manufacturers is taking a new turn, as retailers no longer want to only negotiate prices with manufacturers and choose from an existing range of finished products, but rather to have a say in what manufacturers are to produce for them.

“Big retailers want to be more in control”, says Frank Tyneski in an interview with BusinessWeek Innovation chief Bruce Nussbaum. Retailers want to differentiate products for their retail channels in order to address their customers’ unique needs. To achieve that, they are setting up their own research and design departments to gain better understanding of their customers’ needs based on observations, ethnography and other qualitative research techniques.

This acquired knowledge of consumers’ needs is then used to put pressure on manufacturers to create unique products especially for them. The rules of the game are surely changing!

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EPIC 2008 – Copenhagen

The fourth annual international Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference 2008 will take place at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark from October 25 – 18, 2008.

Praticipants will explore the paradoxes and practices of (In)Visibility and bring to life the concepts, theories, plans, worries, approaches and ideas that can expand and advance the practices of ethnographic work in and of industry.

EPIC is the premier international forum bringing together artists, computer scientists, designers, social scientists, marketers, academics and advertisers to discuss recent developments and future advances around ethnographic praxis. It aims to promote the integration of social and cultural perspectives, theories and method into business practice.

Questions that will be explored during this year’s conference:

• What important issues can ethnograpy in industry shed light on?
• Are some ideas and things better left invisible?
• How do we work with things which are themselves essentially invisible?
• In what ways are we (in)visible as ethnographic practitioners in industry? In sites of scholarly production? What are ways of making the value of ethnographic work more visible to organizations, participants and stakeholders, and academic and other intellectual communities?
• Is the invisibility of theory in much ethnographic work in industry a problem, a virtue, or both?
• What invisible traces do we leave in industry?
• What do different representational practices make visible, what do they obscure, and how do other senses come into play?
• Does, and how does, ethnography’s bias for observation work to balance other forms of understanding in the context of industry?

Conference Programme