Editor's note: Sally Ringo is president of Ringo Research Associates, Atlanta.

What, exactly. is ethnography, other than a term that more qualitative researchers are beginning to notice and consider as a tool? Ethnography is the research arm of cultural anthropology - "the study of man." Since anthropologists have been studying man for several centuries - compared with the several decades for today's researchers - it then makes perfect sense for market researchers to borrow from the vast and brilliant body of literature used by .anthropologists over the years.Can we benefit from ethnography by increasing our knowledge of this somewhat esoteric and extremely rigorous methodology? Is it worth the discipline, cost, and effort that it would require to become fluent in the subject? Why should market researchers listen to and learn from what could be the latest fad in research methodology?

One, because if it is respectfully used, ethnography can enable us to study consumers - and delve with much greater depth - into the meaning of their behavior. And two, we can do this with a heightened degree of our own objectivity. As qualitative researchers we constantly strive to achieve the greatest honesty in these two very important factors - meaning and objectivity. Ethnography gives us the chance to step outside our own narrow viewpoints - our unique world views that we have created and inherited, as individual as snowflakes - and see our subjects with fresh vision

Plus, ask yourself, how often are we able to take the full, "big picture" of the environment where our products are supposed to fit. to fill a need and to add some value to the life experience of our target consumers'? How often are we able to look at our markets as if we were seeing them for the first time? Ethnography - which is as applicable in business-to-business scenarios as it is in consumer research - offers a structure for doing this. How can we as researchers benefit and improve our work by using ethnographic techniques?

First, learn a few of the fundamentals about the subject and then begin your own search through the vast body of literature on the topic. For those of us not fortunate to have taken anthropology courses in college, one must begin a rigorous self-taught course in the basics. Begin here.

Three key aspects

Essentially, ethnography studies three key aspects of humans - what people do (behavior), what people know (knowledge) and what people use (products). Note the similarity to what we do in market research. By observing these aspects in great detail ethnographic studies can last for decades - the ethnographer successfully captures the elusive meaning of 'meaning'' in the complex culture of consumers' lives.

"Meaning" assumes cultural inferences that researchers rarely notice due to their own lack of understanding about the word "meaning." There are two crucially important levels of our consciousness that describe the meaning of an event: explicit meaning and tacit meaning. Explicit meaning is easy, it is everything we see and hear. A man in a haberdashery tries on four hats and chooses one to buy. Explicitly, he liked that hat. Explicitness can be seen as the "what" of a purchase experience and is more easily captured using qualitative research.

Tacit meaning is somewhat more slip-pery and falls into the realm of qualita-tive research. Tacit meaning relies upon inference and intuition. Great tacit ex-plorers are those who appreciate the unspoken modes of communication as well as those who successfully tie bits and pieces of general knowledge to-gether in synthesis. To explore tacitness is to expose the answer to "why" a behavior is performed in all its glorious ramifications. Tacitness, too, conveys some of the complexities of human behavior.

Dick Tracy

The gentleman above chose the hat because he thought he looked like Dick Tracy in it - not the Dick Tracy those of us on the dark side of forty recall, but the new Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty. And what meaning does the symbol "Warren Beatty" carry in our culture? (This is tacit cultural knowledge). The stud of Hollywood, who our dapper shopper would like to emulate when he logs off his computer (he's a newly coined CPA in a moderately- sized firm in a moderately- unsophisticated Southern city) on Friday night to hit the streets for romance and adventure.

To understand the real meaning of the man's hat purchase, the ethnographer would examine the words: like, hat, Dick Tracy, Warren Beatty, romance, clothes, symbol, and so on. A technique called domain analysis would be the next step in this inquiry into the meaning of the hat purchase.

Tacit can also be explained by saying it is behavior that a newcomer to a culture would not quickly understand. Ethnography is, then, essential for international market research and any studies that examine new markets.

Here is another example of tacit knowledge. Body language is used a great deal by respondents in group and one-on-one interviews, hence the one-way mirror. When a group of people who share a similar culture - say, supermarket deli managers - issue a group-wide but silent message by rolling their eyes and scrunching up their faces, great tacit knowledge as been shared. This body language appeared in a focus group after the moderator asked respondents if their customers had ever dispensed soup from self-serve containers, a seemingly straightforward question. This reaction occurred across the entire set of six groups but was explained in the first. The rolled eyes meant "What a stupid question, everyone knows that consumers are too unsanitary to let near an open vat of soup in a grocery store." And, as in so many subcultures, persistent, culture-wide rumors add life to established tacit knowledge, such as the one about false teeth that were found in a vat of self serve soup in some legendary, never named supermarket. Whether it was true or not didn't matter. A strong tribal belief was shared by super deli employees across the country that would eventually impact soup vat manufacturers.

The scrunched up faces - expressing tacit knowledge - portended the doom one might suffer if she caught something unsavory from those unsanitary grocery store customers. The behavior expressed a tacit understanding shared by the deli employees and possibly not understood by members of the general public, including clients and researchers.

Enhance skills

Another excellent reason for learning and using the principles of ethnography is so that qualified researchers can continue to enhance their skills and reinforce their own professionalism in the midst of the unqualified. The explosive growth in the use of focus groups has been both good and bad for the research industry. On the good side, clients have gained an intimacy with their customers that surveys just cannot provide. Such insights arrive when groups are skillfully moderated by someone who appreciates tacitness, even if they are not familiar with the term or the concept. Sometimes these people are referred to as "non-linear thinkers" and their hallmark is a deep curiosity about most things and their ability to synthesize seemingly unconnected ideas.

On the bad side, too many groups are moderated by dreadfully unqualified people who lack training, interviewing experience, objectivity, sensitivity, vision, communication skills, and marketing knowledge. Horrifically, these people claim to be moderators. For example, a poor moderator might refuse to admit that he did not know the reason for the extreme reaction to a simple question about self-served soup. The skillful tactician is driven more by the need to understand, the deep curiosity great inquisitors have. A major failing of unskilled or untalented moderators is their lack of appreciation for tacit understanding of the distinct cultures studied in focus groups and depth interviews.

Cultural domains

Besides illustrating the effect that tacit knowledge has on cultural norms or behavior, ethnography also studies social situations and the behavior that occurs in them. Social situations can be any place where people come together for any reasons - shopping, transportation, work, worship, whatever. Every social situation has nine things in common, or nine major dimensions. They are: space, actors, activities, objects, acts, events, time, goals, and feelings. The relationships within these dimensions coalesce to form "domains" which can best be described as "a category of cultural meaning that includes other smaller categories."