Advancing Qualitative Consumer Research Through Pronoun-Poetry

This paper develops a vision for the purposive use of pronoun-poetry as an innovative qualitative method for generating original consumer insights. While poetic inquiry has gained traction within interpretive social research, it remains underexplored, undertheorized, and often misunderstood within consumer research. Responding to ongoing debates surrounding knowledge hierarchies, methodological experimentation, and the need for evocative modes of representation, this work demonstrates how pronoun-poetry can enrich the analysis and communication of consumers’ socio-affective experiences.

Our contribution is a systematic elaboration of pronoun-poetry; a family of poetic inquiry approaches grounded in interview transcript sentences and structured around the intentional selection of pronouns, e.g., I, we, they, she, he. Building on I-poems, which were established from Voice-Centred Relational Method (VCRM), we show how pronoun-poetry reorients attention toward participants’ inner dialogues, relational dynamics, and the socio-cultural contexts that shape marketplace experiences. We develop this approach by clarifying the construction of full and sparse I-poems; demonstrating how additional pronouns can illuminate relational tensions, agency struggles, and interpersonal meaning-making; and introducing pronoun-emotion poetry, in which pronouns are intersected with affective concepts to foreground emotionality within consumption narratives.

Drawing on previously published qualitative research on consumer financial indebtedness, we illustrate how the crafting and analysis of pronoun-poetry reveals aspects of consumer vulnerability, self-blame, social expectation, and the emotional oscillations surrounding indebtedness that could remain unheard through thematic analysis alone. Pronoun-poetry brings the researcher close to the participant’s voice, amplifying subtle emotional, relational, and structural dimensions embedded within lived experiences. This method allows researchers to detect associative flows, hidden meanings, and internal negotiations that are not easily captured through conventional coding procedures.
Beyond method development, we introduce Voice-Centred Relational Poetry (VCR Poetry) as a vision for applying pronoun-poetry intentionally across all stages of VCRM. Whereas I-poems traditionally address only the second VCRM reading (the voice of I), VCR Poetry expands poetic engagement to the analysis of plot, relationships, and socio-cultural positioning. This extension allows researchers to craft poems that foreground particular layers of voice while backgrounding others, enabling creative yet rigorous interpretive possibilities for representing participants’ stories.

Our contributions are threefold. First, we extend methodological clarity around I-poems and explicate diverse ways in which they can be constructed and analysed. Second, we develop pronoun-poetry as a broader methodological family, including pronoun-emotion poems that highlight socio-affective intensities often elided in interpretive consumer research. Third, we reinvigorate VCRM by proposing VCR Poetry as a way to integrate poetic inquiry throughout the relational and contextual analytic process.

Overall, this work argues that pronoun-poetry provides an accessible, rigorous, and evocative means of analysing and representing qualitative data. It counterbalances dominant knowledge hierarchies, supports pro-consumer insights, and offers researcher-poets a creative yet methodologically rigorous way to engage with complexity, vulnerability, and emotion in consumer culture. We encourage scholars to experiment with pronoun-poetry as a powerful analytical and representational tool capable of expanding the imaginative and interpretive capacities of qualitative consumer research.