GRAO INTELIGENCIA, INC
MIAMI, FLORIDA

We work with a beginner’s passion, but with an experienced eye. With that in mind, we hope to exceed in meeting expectations, predict demands, spot new opportunities, and deliver revolutionary results. With flexibility, we are ready to face changes and the unpredictable. Mission Our mission is to support companies with high quality projects, focused on intelligence and strategy, aiming to increase revenue and productivity, through a multidisciplinary team that always seeks innovative models and excellence in form and results. • Integrity: we seek truth and transparency in everything we do. We want our jobs to be aligned with who we are, to transmit security and trust to our partners to generate real and effective results. • We are good people: we believe that before good professionals, it is more important In the last decades, consumer goods companies have shown great interest in Anthropology professionals and in research with an Ethnographic approach. Among the various technological innovations that can help consumer behavior research, such as eye tracking features and others, the market has increasingly turned to classical anthropological research which is based on Ethnography. But why is that? What is the relationship between Anthropology and Marketing professionals? Marketing has understood for quite some time now that they must know consumers in order to communicate with them, offer them the right products at the right time, in the right place and in the right manner. To do so, marketing managers deal constantly with questions that might clarify what type of consumers they are: why do they buy? How do they buy? How do they make their choices? What are their buying decision factors? Market research attempts to address these issues with different approaches, which, when in combination, can explain and map the profile of the target groups. However, among the so many quantitative and qualitative methodologies, one cannot always find the expected answers. Qualitative research can provide a deeper understanding of consumers and attempts to answer the reasons why, as in-depth interviews that consider consumers’ discourse to explain why they prefer one product to another, for example, or how their process for choosing food is. An anthropological view, on the other hand, may reveal that although the head of the household may explain that he or she chooses a food item for its “quality”, “quality” is referential and therefore a relative concept, it depends on who considers it (hence the use of quotation marks). In Anthropology, this is called the native category, and one must use analytical categories to understand its meanings that can only make sense in a given context. “Quality” may be, for example, related to 2 health, modes of production, beauty, prices, and some brand. It can mean vegetables without pesticides or a perfectly round and red apple. What lies underneath these choices and concepts are symbolic logics that are different in each culture. Thus, when eating a sandwich while walking on the street between one meeting and another, after arriving home in the evening, a Frenchman may claim that he did not have lunch, while an American may say the opposite, both versions being true. This is because the French and the Americans have quite a distinct understanding of what lunch or a meal is. Roughly, for a Frenchman, eating a sandwich on the street is eating, but not lunch. On the other hand, Consumer Anthropology which focuses on the interpretation of modern consumption as one of the main cultural phenomena of our time has only gained relevance in the academic world more recently, which also explains its late presence in connection with the market. In our modern, industrial-capitalist society, consumption takes up a central place, no one disagrees with it, but has occupied a depreciated, negative place, being considered by many as the evil of our time, the representation of degradation and social inequality. Consuming has become a problem. What is valued in our society is labor, the world of production and reason. The world of consumption is that of damnation, waste, and for that reason it has long been rejected as a field of study by social scientists who failed to be relativistic, falling into a “modern ethnocentrism”. Since the 1970s, several Anthropologists have been trying to remove consumption from this forgotten and condemned place, demonstrating that it is a fundamental phenomenon of our society, a classificatory and meaningful system that articulates our social dynamics and deserves to be studied and comprehended. By understanding 3 production and consumption as parts of the same sphere of symbolic exchanges, the act of exchanging products and objects – no matter if it is through the buying and selling formula or barter is an act of alliance between people, connections, and formation of social bonds. The world of consumption, where objects gain purposes, uses and meanings, allows people to communicate and connect. By studying and understanding the circulation of objects as the basis of social relations, Anthropologists have laid, over a few decades, the foundations of the field of Consumer Anthropology as an essential line of research in Social Sciences. The English Anthropologist Daniel Miller, who studies material culture, presents in his book “Theory of Shopping” an ethnography of supermarkets in north London that reveals how the act of buying can be interpreted as an act of affection, of love. Buying can reaffirm affective relationships, either by the choice of products in an attempt to satisfy family tastes or by the acquisition of something special as a gift at the time of purchase, or even by the economic strategy to save money. Choosing a product that is cheaper than another may be related to the goal of saving money for family vacations at the end of the year, for example. Miller’s argument buries the idea that some utilitarian logic prevails in the act of buying, related to needs and desires, but he shed light on the socio-cultural logic behind the phenomenon that consumption says more about the social rather than the individual.