Rita Denny, Ph.D

For the past 15 years, Ms. Denny has applied an anthropological framework to consumer behavior, calling on linguistic, semiotic and symbolic traditions for interpreting consumer attitudes, perceptions and behavior. Rita's projects have focused on dogs and their owners, book and music lovers, the integration of hi-tech into home life, the metaphors of computing, the culture of drugs, meanings of health and the culture of corporate giving.

Rita's clients have included Anglogold Mining, Apple Computers, AT&T Broadband, The Boeing Company, Borders Books & Music, Daimler-Chrysler Corporation, Darden Restaurants, e-Pods, FCB Worldwide, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Miss America Pageant, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Perich + Partners, Quaker Oats Company, S.C. Johnson, The Texas Coffee Company, Verizon and Whirlpool Corporation.

Ms. Denny holds Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her publications on ethnographic applications in business include, "Inspiring details" (Qualitative Research in a Kaleidoscope Age, ESOMAR, Amsterdam), "Consuming values: The culture of clients, researchers and consumers" (The Race for Innovation, ESOMAR, Paris), "Communicating with clients: Issues of intelligibility" (Creating Breakthrough Ideas, B.Byrne and S.Squires, eds.). She was an invited speaker at the Marketing Science Institute's conference on new product innovation (1999) and, with Patti Sunderland, was organizer and chair of an invited session at the American Anthropological Association, "Facing a Hi-tech Consuming World" (2000). More recently she, with Patti Sunderland, have published "Performers and partners: Video documentaries in ethnographic research" (ESOMAR, 2002), a cover story on semiotics in Research Magazine (2002), "Researching cultural metaphors in action: Metaphors of computing technology in contemporary U.S. life" (J.Bus.Research, in press), "Being Mexican and American: Negotiating ethnicity in the practice of market research" (Human Organization, 2004), "Finding ourselves in images: A cultural reading of Trans-Tasman identities" (www.jrconsumers.com) 2005, "Connections among people, things, images and ideas: La Habana to Pina and back (Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2005). She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago and University of California, Irvine business schools.