Anthropology's Contributions to Marketing

Of the social sciences which deal with man and society, only economics, psychology, and sociology have been widely used in marketing. Economics is at the core of much of the content of marketing; psychology has yielded a variety of interviewing and projective testing procedures; sociology has contributed concepts like social class. Marketers have been relatively slow in using anthropological insights and approaches, even though anthropology is also concerned with man and society. This article considers why anthropology has been used relatively seldom, and how it has been and might be employed.