Posting and sharing photos is considered one of the most popular online activities. In Britain, Dutton et al., characterized this activity as the most frequent and engaging Internet activity. In the US, 62% of the adult Internet users stated that they post or share pictures on the Internet (PewResearch, 2013). Despite its relevance, no research has been done exploring the use of sharing photos to answer survey questions. Since most of the mobile devices nowadays have a camera, and most of the mobile users are used to upload photos to the Internet (Ibid), there is a clear opportunity to test the possibilities and limitations of answering questions by taking and sharing photos.
In this paper we describe the experiment we conducted using solely pictures, including key learnings from such a methodology, and its implications for future market research projects. We also discuss the need for market research to adapt to new real-life communications methods, such as augmenting pictures using social media apps.
Our training and our professional culture leads us to think of the world through a rational, linguistic filter. We cling on to the idea that there is an objective reality 'out there' and that we have an impartial, objective standpoint. Of course, this account of how research works is now being challenged and we decided to take this challenge to an extreme. What if we abandoned our obsession with words and followed a visual narrative instead? What if a research project looked at the world through participants' eyes and embraced inter-subjectivity, visual narratives and associations rather than linguistics and deduction? What if we did research as photographers, not as researchers? Would it work? We shall undertake a real research study, for a real client, to find out.
We used Stockography to study the changes in Indian weddings in the last two decades. We juxtaposed available stock of past and present weddings and identified the deltas. The data were collected through respondents, professional wedding photographers and videos and photographs shared on social media and YouTube.