To Market They Won’t Go

Kay, a marketing researcher, arranges a focus group to examine the grocery brand preferences of 10 women. She chooses an attractive store in a popular strip mall for the meeting and orders a van to provide transportation. However, when the van delivers the women to the mall, they refuse to leave the vehicle.

When the driver goes inside the building to notify Kay, the women flee.

What went wrong?

When Kay selected the strip mall, she only looked at it from the front, which was attractive. However, the van parked on the side which looked sterile, like a government office. The women were limited English-speaking Latinas and suspected that instead of being paid for information about their shopping habits, they were going to be interrogated by the INS. Even though their papers were in order, they feared that the INS might question them about others whose status was disputable.

Kay, a native Spanish-speaking Latina herself, realized too late how she had set up a losing situation. In addition to the unfriendly appearance of the site, she hadn’t realized that the women had never participated in market research before. Furthermore, they didn’t know one another and weren.t familiar with the concept of focus groups. All of these uncertainties scuttled the interview.

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Folklorist Norine Dresser is the author of “Multicultural Manners” (Wiley, 1996). E-mail: norined@earthlink.net