The itinerary method

. It consists of following an "object." We study its use, its exchange, the discussions or negociations to obtain it, between some concrete social actors; this follows the different stages of the itinerary through the object and the different actors concerned.
For example, in food, it is necessary to distinguish the following stages : the situation before the purchase, then the moment of purchase, then of the food preparation, then of the meal and table manners, then the scraps or the left-overs

. At each stage, we search for the concerned actors, their practical experience, their perception, their opinion, the sense, and the imaginary  which is invested or not, in a transaction or an object.

. The itinerary method is mainly a micro-social and qualitative method, which favors observation and face-to-face interviews, which places the accent on social practices, and which seeks to understand what socially organizes the individual and collective phenomena, that is to say it is rather a structural approach.

. It is a complementary method to quantatitative approaches, the goal of which is weighing the qualitative results and observing the appearance of new social phenomenons.

Two main principles

.  Begin with domestic practices and not with opinions or attitudes and describe:
their contents
those practices which are recommended, allowed or forbidden

Examples :

n In  domestic daily life, the areas of the house and tasks are divided into unconscious gender or generational divisions, such as cooking or using a washing machine for women or doing odd jobs for men, but cleaning the house could be sometimes for men.

n In the garden, men plant vegetables and women  plant flowers

n Some housing areas are mainly for women, such as the kitchen, and others for men such as the garage where they traditionally have their work shops.

n Some areas are more of a source of conflicts, such as the bathroom, which fathers often think are occupied too much  by their daugthers

n Some rooms mix generations and genders, such as the living room where TV is watched or video games are played.

After having reconstructed the pratices, it is possible to describe the meaning of the social actors, and the calculations and intentions they mobilise in social interactions

. Explain the social conditions of producing actors' intentions  in terms of level of observation :

n  On the macro- social level  : what are the socio-demographic variables that aid in understanding behavioral regularities (as opposed to individual originality) ?

n  On the micro-social level : what are the concrete interactions between actors that aid in reconstructing processes of influence ?

Example : how do the children influence their parents in front of store displays

n   On the micro-individual level : what are the mechanisms of trade off that indicate the order of preferences in decision making ?
 

Four new social phenomena that organize consumer behavior at a macro level in France

. An ethnic market including 4 to 6 million people.

n This is a quite new market, because of a new phenomenon that is to say the social integration of immigrants and their permanent family settlements in France

Examples :

the Moslem lamb market in France

the specific gold jewellery market for North African people, more than 1.5 million people

(800 000 Portuguese, 100 000 Asians, 200 000 Africans...)

 A market of separation and recombining, including:

n increasing divorces ( 1960 : 40 000; 1990 : 110 000)

n increasing shorter periods of living together and common law marriage and, consequently, increasing couple separations

Examples : these two phenemena provoke the increase of a new demand of apartments (not of houses, because an important part of the French population is living in rented apartment). A man who is divorced and who has two children must house them in his new apartment, that is why he needs the same number of rooms, and that increases the demand for housing.

We discovered with Argonautes in one of our studies that separations increased the demand of electronic house appliances, such as fridges, microwaves or TV

The alchool behavior of youth is shifting from one alchool to another one at the same time one youth changes partners or social groups. For instance, a young student  drank rum with his friends in a Northern French University, and  had to change his habits when he went to a southern University where his new friends drank beer

n increasing blended families (600 000, i.e. 2 million people)

the most important is the changing of food habits between the two families, for both parents and children, but also leisure or spending money habits. It could be a cause of family conflicts. But most often it is very unconcious because all these behaviors are unconsciuously incorporated by individuals during the childhood or during the first time of the family.

. A market of insecurity, nearly 12 million people are in fragile economic situation

n that increases the struggle between supermarket and food companies opposing the lowest prices for generic, low-quality products, and higher prices, brand names, and, in principle, better quality
20% of the market is now taken by the "hard discounters"

. Passage or generational market

n the passage from adolescence to adulthood, that is to say an increasing time period of transition from 20 to 30 years old, roughly speaking. This population includes 8.5 million people, born between 1974 and 1983 (boomlet)

n the passage from employment to retirement, with the arrival of babyboomers in ten or fifteen years

Techniques of collecting information

. Interviews and observations are made by taking non-selective notes, then reconstructing and fully classifying by theme.

.The final draft is done in the form of an interpretative  description of 100 to 200 pages synthesized into 30 pages, then summarized by a modeling of observed social mechanisms from 3 to  5 pages

. Depending on the client's demand, the summary  is followed by recommandations about several matters :

n Targeting of consummers : deduced from the cycles of life, of demographics, and practices

n Centers of communication : deduced from the imaginary

n Placing of product : deduced from occasion of use

n Help of collective decision making processes : it is the tie between ethnology applied to marketing, sociology of organisation and management

n Evaluating the implementation within the company and the results outside the firm.

e-mail: d.desjeux@argonautes.fr

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