What's all the fuss about?

Editor’s note: Clynton Taylor is president and founder of Gestalt, a Burlingame, Calif., research firm.

With ethnography showing up all over the place as a “new” market research tool, you have to wonder about its merits. While anthropologists have practiced ethnography to study the natives of foreign lands for the better part of the last century, can it successfully be applied locally, to the world of consumers and revenue? The answer is yes, and no. When ethnography is applied well, the results are incredible.

Ethnography has recently been spotlighted in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, and pretty much every other business newspaper, journal and magazine as a new and better market research method. This article looks at where ethnography came from, what exactly it is, and what it might be able to do for your branding and marketing efforts.

Where it came from

Ethnography has its roots in anthropology and is the study of people and their culture. It was ethnography that took anthropologists out of their armchairs in England to the locales where the people they were studying actually lived. There, anthropologists often lived with the native people for over a year at a time. They would participate with, observe and talk with people to get a complete understanding of the social intricacies that were woven throughout the unique culture. They recorded field notes about everything they saw, heard and experienced and at the end of their stay would attempt to describe the lives of these people through the subjects’ view in what is also called an ethnography.

In the 1960s, market researchers realized that they had to get beyond statistics and needed to delve deeper into the psyches of people to understand why purchase decisions were made. The focus group became popular as a way to get face-to-face with consumers and try and uncover the psychology of purchase behavior. Many market researchers, though, grew dissatisfied with the technique and began to use projective techniques, such as collages and card sorting, to delve further into the unconscious of consumer behavior.

While these and other forms of qualitative research represented vast improvements over traditional market research, they sometimes painted a misleading picture of consumers and only provided part of the story.

In the mid-’80s market researchers turned to anthropology for better methods. They discovered and began to apply the practice of ethnography to study consumers. They liked how it took a holistic approach - providing the whole story of what was going on. Whereas focus groups often worked in artificial settings for short periods, ethnography showed how to study people in the larger context of their everyday lives. This not only exposed what people actually did, but also why - how social groups, cultures and environments influenced attitudes and behaviors.

Over the last five years, the use of ethnography to assist marketing and branding strategy has exploded. Why have companies turned to ethnography?

See the world through their eyes

Reality is subjective in that everyone’s view of reality is different. Until you are able to see the world through the eyes of your consumers you don’t actually know what value your brand holds and how to get the attention of and communicate with consumers. And the only way to see the world through your consumers’ eyes is by studying them in the context of their daily lives (see sidebar). This is when ethnography works well; ethnography uncovers the whole story.

The premise for the need to do ethnographic research is that brands and marketing communications are meaningless until consumers place meaning in them. For example, a company trying to express cleanliness through its products loses market share because many consumers see the products as dangerous chemicals not fit for their household.

In learning what is meaningful to consumers, why people do what they do, and what their unmet needs and desires are, you are able to target your marketing and branding efforts in a way that they are successful in the marketplace.

How it works

In order to see consumers’ realities and get the whole story, ethnography employs several methods: immersion, participant observation, and informal and ongoing in-depth interviewing. Careful attention is paid to the words, metaphors, symbols and stories people use to explain their lives and communicate with one another. Ethnographers also help people reflect upon why they do what they do and help them realize their underlying motivations.

Ethnography is capable of delivering powerful insights that can transform a business. Traditional research, working deductively, often only results in incremental change - bigger, better, faster. In contrast, ethnography is inductive, facilitating pure innovation. Instead of testing a particular mindset or idea of the company, a deductive approach, ethnography is the reverse in that it sets out to discover what the issues are prior to making any conclusions.

Ethnography helps to uncover the meaningful categories, delineate consumer wants and needs, and provide an all-encompassing understanding of your brand’s potential to resonate with a consumer’s daily life.

The actionable findings can lead to impactful, long-lasting results. Ethnography takes you beyond what you know you don’t know, to the area where you discover what you weren’t even aware that you didn’t know. This is where great brands and marketing programs are born.

What it looks like

The general process of an ethnographic study is to plan, research, analyze, and then create the report. Although ethnography lets the research influence the direction of the study, it must begin with a plan that outlines the research questions that need to be answered and what groups of people the study should start with. It is also important for researchers to understand their biases prior to entering the field.

The fist step of the research is to find an informant. An informant is a participant who can introduce the researchers to a particular group of people and explain the meaning behind the rituals, language and general goings on. After entering a social group, ethnographers keenly observe activities, listen to conversation, conduct ongoing informal interviews and participate in meaningful activities. Interactions are also observed to ascertain the effects of social influence.

Data is recorded in the form of field notes - jotted down in a notebook whenever researchers get a chance - photographs, audio, video, and the collection of artifacts - items that represent particular meaning to the people being studied.

A researcher’s own experiences - reactions, feelings, thoughts - are also important data. There are some things researchers can’t fully understand until they experience them themselves.

The next step is to analyze and interpret all of the data collected to find themes and patterns of meaning. This is no simple task. Hours and hours of audio and video must be transcribed and re-studied. Even for the well-trained and experienced ethnographer, the amount of data can at times be overwhelming. But through careful and thorough analysis of the data, themes and categories emerge and applicable findings become clear. Ethnographers usually create frameworks to help companies think about their consumers and understand what it all means.

Triangulation, the process of checking findings against what other people say and against similar research already conducted, is a way to verify the accuracy of collected data.

While traditional ethnography stops with the description of the group studied, this is not sufficient for businesses. They need actionable guidelines, recommendations and an outline of strategy. The findings must be presented in a fashion to enable companies and their agencies to create innovative and successful solutions.

Reservations about using it

When thinking about using ethnography you might be hesitant. This is understandable since it’s always difficult to break away from tradition. Since ethnography is not the norm, with it comes a certain amount of uncertainty. Here are some answers to the most common concerns.

It’s not quantifiable: The real issue is often whether the findings are reliable and representative - does the data actually resemble the lives of the target audience? Since ethnography focuses on people’s real lives, reliability is inherent - you can’t argue with what people themselves say and do. Multiple locations and skilled professionals ensure that the findings are representative.

It costs too much: You can’t afford not to do ethnographic research because of the opportunities it uncovers and solutions it finds. The return on investment is extremely high.

It takes too long: The length of the project is relatively short compared to how long the findings will directly impact success. And it’s far better to spend time gathering information that guarantees results than to spend time collecting information that could be inaccurate and misleading.

It’s too revealing: Ethnography can sometimes disturb the relief that managers seek. By introducing ideas about human choice, emotionality and context, studies can sometimes replace simplification with complexity. If a company can promise actionable findings and an easy to understand report, it’s worth it. The sooner you get the whole story, the sooner you can make things right.

Applying ethnography to marketing and branding strategy

Ethnography has almost reached a fad status in market research. The problem is that not all that is proclaimed to be ethnography is. Numerous firms without any experience studying or practicing ethnography are adding it to their list of services.

You may have read recently about retail ethnography, where companies track every move a consumer makes in a store through computer surveillance. While plenty can be said about the merits and ethics of such research, be aware that it is not ethnography in any sense of the word. Observation alone is not good enough to base your company’s strategy upon.

While there is some value in simply observing consumers, conducting one-hour interviews, or stopping and asking consumers a few questions while they are shopping, these methods alone do not provide the whole story and can not be substituted for ethnography.

When you decide you want to get the whole story and want to hire a firm to conduct ethnographic research for you, check to make sure they received graduate-school training in ethnography and have helped similar companies apply the findings to increase the bottom line. If they say they can do an ethnography in a week and deliver results, be very skeptical - even very well-trained and experienced ethnographers need at a minimum of a few weeks to get more than very shallow findings.