How advertisements during Christmastime interact with the cultural characteristics of  a certain society

Methods

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Within the methods presented in Ehn, Löfgren and Wilk's book ‘Exploring everyday life: strategies for ethnography and cultural analysis’ (2016), emotions constitute a key theme for analysis. When respondents to our survey expressed strong emotional charge regarding a habit or custom, it was a signal: for example, a reaction of boredom to an advert would indicate a respondent didn’t identify with the cultural norms it tried to embody. With that in mind, our primary data collection (survey) looked to harness as much emotional data as possible.  

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                      When designing the survey, we were conscious to begin with open questions that would provide us with ‘thick data’ - qualitative responses that would give us a greater understanding of the ‘big data’ that we had observed online and in other questions later on in the survey. We put these open questions first to get people’s initial, instinctive and emotional response to the idea of a Christmas archive. All questions on advertising were purposefully left to the end of the survey so responses were about Christmas values and culture not biased by advertising. Furthermore, we followed quantitative questions with open responses where people could describe ‘how’ and ‘why’ they feel in such a way, thus the big data of trends and averages was supported by thicker data involving emotive language which we could later use for analysis.

 

                    We designed 3 surveys, each with a different advert. We chose adverts from 3 major retailers in the UK, each focussed on different values, with different aesthetic styles and set to different tempos/tones of music, from orchestral to pop. We asked people to respond to a short audio clip from the advert before watching it in full to see how much of an impact music makes on an advert’s emotional impact.

 

                   Originally we planned to conduct face-to-face interviews informed by the survey responses but after receiving over 50 in-depth responses we decided we had more than enough detail to construct our research project.

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                   Survey questions were of varied styles. In some, we looked to get initial responses and instinctual thoughts about different aspects of Christmas; in others we provided a list of answers for the respondents to choose from, allowing for us to directly compare the responses. We often asked people to rate concepts on a scale from 1-5 (for example, asking 'How much do you associate 'family' with Christmas? '). Examples of survey questions and the responses we received are given below - hover over the questions to see our rationale for including them. 

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