How Did You Get That Job?
ANALYZING CULTURE
FOR CORPORATIONS
Patricia Sunderland conducts consumer research to help
companies develop new products and ad campaigns
BY REBECCA A. CLAY
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What do you do and who do
you work with?
I’m the founder of Cultural Research and Analysis Inc., based in New York City and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. My job is basi- cally conducting research for commercial clients, either corporations or advertising agencies. Often it’s
foundational research for new products,
advertising or brand strategy. Or they
may just want to understand the world
of customers—how people actually
use their products, how they clean, for
example. Some of the clients I’ve worked
for include Citibank, Sharpie, PepsiCo,
Target and Nissan. I’ve also worked for
a number of advertising agencies in New
Zealand, which was really fun.
How did you learn how to do your job?
I went to graduate school in social psychology at the University of Vermont,
where I got my PhD in 1992. While
I was there, I became interested in
anthropology and started taking classes.
I got more and more interested in the
cultural and societal level rather than the
individual focus of psychology. When I
was all-but-dissertation in psychology, I
took a leave of absence to study cultural
anthropology at New York University. I
got an MPhil, including taking exams
for the PhD, and finished up with an
ethnographic study of women in New
York’s jazz community. I then went back
and finished in psychology, framing it as
cultural psychology.
How did you get into this work?
When I was in grad school at NYU,
there were some anthropologists working
in a firm that was bringing anthropological or ethnographic research to the
commercial and advertising worlds. They
needed freelance researchers. My first
foray into the field was hanging out in
luxury car dealerships on the Upper East
Side and looking at how luxury cars were
sold. I really enjoyed the work and learning about different things in different
areas.
When I finished my PhD, I first
worked for a research institute focused
on social issues, in a program for social
evaluation. But I was still doing consumer research freelancing. It had never
seemed like a viable career choice, then
one day I thought, “Why not?” I worked
for a number of different firms. Among
the people I worked with was Rita
Denny, an anthropologist at the BRS
Group. I joined their Chicago office
as their first “virtual” partner. Then the
Chicago office created Practica Group;
I was a founding partner. Just this year,
I went out on my own and founded
Cultural Research and Analysis.
How do you use your
psychology training?
Even if I’m working as an anthropologist
and bringing anthropology, culture and
social ways of analyzing into consumer
research and marketing research, it’s
really psychologists and the psychological
world view that dominate those realms.
Understanding the qualitative approach
and experimental methods in psychology,
plus all those courses in statistics and
quantitative methods and so on, have
helped me understand where people are
coming from and the quantitative frame-
work. The interviewing—the interacting
Dr. Patricia Sunderland
has worked with such
multinationals as Citibank,
PepsiCo and Nissan.
