Let us do our thing

Editor's note: Cathleen Waters is an anthropologist with New World Medium, a New York global language services firm specializing in marketing research. 

Last June, I attended my first MRA event and I was delighted to observe my colleagues in their own environment, to meet other research professionals from all over the world and to catch up on what’s going on in the industry.

I had been looking forward to it for a while but I was also a little scared. I’ll tell you why.

On the first day, in the morning, we were awed by innovative social media analytics and in the afternoon we considered Survey Monkey CEO Dave Goldberg’s plea to be our friend. We also learned more about what sort of information new mobile research technology could lend us.

Personally, I had a lot riding on day two. I was on the edge of my seat during a talk on the evolution of qualitative research and let out a sigh of relief when a seasoned head of research from a major television network said that traditional qualitative methodologies weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. She recounted how, in researching the comeback of the American television favorite Dallas, the show’s writers collected fodder from ethnographies of current Texas oil families and garnered incredible insight into what their world is like – things that those at the network “could have never invented.”

My heart soared because throughout the MRA conference, I was keeping a secret.

Despite my embrace of tools like Survey Monkey and my belief that taking a look around Facebook and Twitter can provide great inspiration for a serious exploratory study, I was closely guarding the belief that traditional ethnography remains the deepest, most intimate, most vibrant practice of qualitative research that we know of.

And while the conference was abuzz with talk of methodologies old versus new, while we were all there to learn about what could be new and exciting for our clients, what was strikingly absent at a conference dedicated to the business of studying people was talk about anthropology.

For me, anthropology is a lot like French cooking: It’s delicious and sexy and always will be. It can speak for itself – and not because of constant enhancements. Rather, because it’s a discipline comprised of practices improved upon over time by trial and error, within a set of high standards and with strong respect for the traditions of our academic forefathers and mothers. All of this is set against the backdrop of an integrated study of culture, geography, religion, language and linguistics and psychology.

This is why I was so delighted to hear the head of research of a major TV network say that traditional qualitative methodologies, such as ethnography, were still viable. And so, just to make sure, having just been validated by the network’s development work on Dallas, I rose and asked a question. I acknowledged the speaker’s holding of ethnography in high regard, but asked whether their ethnography was conducted by anthropologists. I was met with a vague affirmative response that seemed to indicate that no, it wasn’t. My heart sank.

Very confusing

You see, the words anthropologist and ethnography, in market research, have become equated with someone who employs observational techniques in proximity, such as shop-alongs, intercepts, focus groups and in-home visits. Some people may even consider telephone interviewing a form of ethnography.

But ethnography is not just a method of data collection: The term also implies an analysis that is concurrent, evolving and in real time. Thus it’s very confusing for an anthropologist to get a call from a client requiring “ethnography,” after which he sends you into the field with a questionnaire and wonders why your anthropological powers have not produced marvelous never-before-seen insights.

Rather than solely a data-gatherer, the anthropologist is, and should be, a sort of project lead, recruiter, moderator and analyst. We begin our research by delimiting the epistemological questions (determining information needs and limitations and then key questions with the client), selecting our informants (recruitment), then conducting in-depth interviews (moderating). We synthesize our insights by means of ethnographic analysis throughout the process and then we make our ethnography known to the world (presenting findings). Anthropologists almost always conduct their research in the native language of their informants and so you’ll find that many anthropologists are multilingual. We consider an understanding of the native language to be a sine qua non to understanding our informants.

Did you know that there are valuable insights to be learned from the recruitment process? Why do we ask how many televisions and rooms a home has in Mexico, instead of household income? Why does the incentive feel, even when handsome, like it’s not really an incentive in Brazil? Why might it be so hard to recruit people suffering from HIV in China? Why can’t you get anyone (including your client) to answer the phone in Italy in August? The answers lie in deep cultural information and should shape your research, not be an obstacle to it.

Interwoven tools

So, what is ethnographic analysis? Apart from its horizontal scope – if I may use that phrase, since it spans the entire timeline of your project – ethnographic analysis also comes from the breadth of interwoven tools that the anthropologist uses to consider the world of his informants. What sets our work apart is that the first lens through which the anthropologist looks is his informant’s eyes. What does he consider his place to be within the cosmological world? Does he believe there is a god? Does he think of himself first in terms of an individual and secondarily as a collective being such as friend, son, Californian, Northerner, Southerner, Muslim, homosexual? What language or dialect does he speak at home and in his social and professional interactions? What sort of subjects does he consider taboo?

Thus, the anthropologist’s viewpoint is singular at times – when trying to gauge each particular informant’s outlook on his world with a portfolio of tools that includes religion, history, geography, language and gender, to name a few – and then plural when determining that person’s particular inclinations and the relationship to others who similarly associate.

Why does this seem problematic? One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand anthropology in the market research field and in the U.S. is because of an emphasis on psychology. Psychology is certainly a fascinating field and it plays a very important role in social science and in market research. But its development as a discipline rests strongly upon its focus on the individual.

How exactly does this affect market research? In market research, especially in consumer goods, we use the psychographic as a starting point when drawing up an image of our consumer or patient and therefore the means by which we recruit. So, the entire study is already set up to examine, analyze, create findings and later segment based on psychology. (There are certainly differences in segmentation based on biology and payer systems, for example, that are interesting to look at in health care. I find the most clear-cut use of psychographics to be in consumer goods.) What psychology does a great job of is capturing important visceral emotions valuable to us, like “I chew gum when I’m worried and it makes me feel confident,” or “I buy dubious knockoff erectile dysfunction drugs on the Internet because I’m too embarrassed to talk about ED with my doctor.” (These are paraphrased from two studies I’ve worked on.)

But what it doesn’t take into account is the language, dialect or register of the conversation or the larger cultural beliefs involved. For example, conventional market researchers most often try to conduct the same qualitative and quantitative studies across all of the countries in their global studies but the person who writes the questionnaires and who does the analysis is, in the majority of my experience, monolingual and U.S.-focused.

Further, the research is disjointed because each step is conducted by a series of different people along the way: The executive consults with the client, the large recruiting house may write and translate the screener, someone along the way writes the questionnaire and another person may translate it, probably using different language than the person who translated the screener. Then an unknowing moderator asks a series of questions with no real stake in the game, no larger idea of what happened before or what are really the burning questions the client is asking and then she sends an Excel data dump or a bunch or transcripts to someone for analysis. This process, to me, is like keeping a window open during the winter and watching all of the heat – and your money – fly away!

Keeps me up at night

This is the way we do market research today and to be honest with you, it keeps me up at night. Two years ago, a vice-president from a pretty well-known market research house in New York City called me up. She was planning a project with a long-time client and wanted to bring an anthropologist into the mix in order to show the client that the company was keeping it real with their brand. She flew me to Dallas to conduct in-store ethnography with plus-sized women from the working poor who shopped for cute clothes at low-priced retail clothing chains.

“Could I take a look at past work you’ve done with the client?” “Could I take a look at the RFP?” “Who wrote this questionnaire?” were some of the questions I asked my new client. She denied the first two requests for information because of confidentiality and just plain dismissed the third one. When I presented the meat of my interviews and offered possible trains of thought as a result, she considered them as being out-of-scope with what the client was going for. Of course, my observations and analysis could not have been in line with the client’s thinking if I had no access to the client. It’s very hard to come up with an aha moment in isolation.

So can you see why anthropologists see a holistic approach to research as important? Yes, we are all, of course, academics, which is sometimes a dirty word, I know. It often means that there is a strong ability (and probably desire) to work alone but not because of a grouchy temperament. Whether it’s nature or nurture is a different debate but anthropologists are perhaps drawn to the field because of the desire to solve their own specific burning questions about people, culture and language using their strong talents for planning, problem-solving and analysis.

It’s not that we like to work unattended for the majority of the project or that we can’t work well with others; it’s because of our vision of the larger scope of your project that we work best near the beginning or at the top, however you prefer to view it. We’d rather not be considered just one of the researchers hired to go out and collect data after the entire study has been planned, as it were.

My earlier mention of the television executive and her appreciation for the cultural insights garnered by the focus groups of the Texas oil families is a wonderful example of how the spirit of ethnography can thrive in contemporary market research. Because in this case, the writers of Dallas were specifically interested in the culture of the Texas oil families, its evolution, and, I assume, as writers they were poised to catch every nuance in that particular dialect of American English. This is where we see how language is important not just in global studies but in domestic market research studies as well.

New ways of thinking

I think I speak for a lot of my colleagues when I say that we get pressure from our clients to provide new, cutting-edge methodologies. I believe, not surprisingly, that offering a credentialed anthropologist on your roster of employees or consultants will add a lot to your brand if you are a market research provider and also if you’re in-house as the department head. Because an anthropologist will surprise you with new ways of thinking about your research and therefore new ways of doing it. I don’t mean with mobile devices and Internet programs. I mean simple things like asking different questions to different people. Not even using a questionnaire. I go back to my example about erectile dysfunction. It’s funny, you can do market research on ED in the U.K. via telephone and a Brit will tell you very honestly, from the isolation of his den and in a whispered voice, all about his ED and how he gets his meds and how he doesn’t want his wife to know. But did you know that no man in Italy suffers from ED (insert laugh)? Or that perhaps certain men would have alternative uses of ED drugs when it comes to their wives versus their mistresses? In the U.K. and the U.S. you can buy cheap ED drugs online that come to your house in an unmarked box. In some Middle Eastern countries, the knockoffs are suited up in brazen little boxes bearing the image of a tiger, because it’s common for a man to gift prowess to another. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world sent me into the field to study erectile dysfunction across five countries and had me use the same formulaic questionnaire for each. I wished they had called me sooner because the information I obtained ended up being as lifeless and sterile as the category.

Insight is lost

We anthropologists who have been trained to conduct traditional ethnography are sad to see so many occasions on which vibrant, beautiful human insight is lost by using different companies, people and parts for each of the above processes. Another casualty? Your valuable research dollars.

Picture a cup: We fill it with rice but there’s a little hole in the bottom. The cup is our ethnography; the rice is the people, their outlook, their words. If we take the key questions and pass it to another person to write the screener, in that passing, we lose a couple of grains of rice. If we then recruit and receive nothing but a list of names and phone numbers, passing the cup now to the moderator, we’ve lost a lot of rice by the time it gets to her. We have just spent thousands of dollars to stare at a list of names and e-mail addresses on a spreadsheet and only then do we begin the hard work of trying to make them come to life. If the anthropologist had had a hand in determining key questions with the client and screening and recruiting her informants, the ethnographic processes would have begun in those earlier stages. Multilingual anthropologists have stunning initial insights into your respondents, just by knowing their names and the region and country in which they live (I swear, it’s true).

So give one of us a call next time you want to wow your client with something “new and exciting.” Just make sure that you’re willing to do things a bit different and we’ll make sure that they are.