To be seen or not to be seen - that is the question

Editor’s note: Cara Woodland is director, discovery and innovation at Innovation Focus Inc., a Lancaster, Pa., research firm.

Which produces a better account of a situation, an eyewitness to the event or a factual third-party objective report? This is a common debate in market research and has become a prominent subject in the study of customer behavior in the customer’s natural or “home” environment. This method, called ethnography, is the branch of anthropology that deals with the comparative study of contemporary cultures, acculturation and human ecology. When applied to business research, ethnography involves entering into customers’ natural environments to better understand a realistic perspective of their attitudes, behaviors and needs with regards to the product usage.

Ethnographic research has been an accepted method of the social sciences for decades, but more recently, it has made headway as a business research method. Although, it does not replace other parts of the research continuum, it is an excellent tool to better understand the deeper needs of customers and their environmental context. It is used to build beginning hypotheses and is a proven means to develop insight into the customer. Ethnography enables the research team to discover actionable, unarticulated customer needs, understand the emotional side of a product, create hypothetical customer requirements, develop new products, brand extensions and improvements on current products and determine the “real” problems in a complex or multi-system structure.

In the ethnographic research process, a sponsoring company can chose between many forms of involvement. Those forms are:

  • Distant participation: Sponsor representatives are involved in the planning of the research process, but do not participate in the remainder of the process until the analysis has been conducted. At this point, the sponsor becomes involved in the implementation of the results.
  • Removed participation: Sponsor representatives participate throughout the process, but during the fieldwork are abstract observers of the site visit. The sponsor representative’s responsibility is to observe the customer, collect data and possibly ask a question or two of the customer, but a trained ethnographer leads the site visit. The sponsor representative may or may not be involved in the analysis of the research but would be involved in the implementation of the results.
  • Evolving participation: Sponsor representatives share equal responsibility with a professional to design, manage, conduct and analyze the research. The professional party acts as a coach for the sponsor’s team to conduct the research and is partially involved in the analysis of the field data. Again, the sponsor would be involved in the implementation of the results of the research.
  • Full participation: Sponsor representatives conduct the entire research process themselves. A professional may only be involved to train and coach the team through the process. If this method is used, it is important that teams are adequately prepared to enter into their customer’s world and get the most from their experience.

The question at hand is, what level of sponsor involvement is best in ethnographic research? This is a great debate among anthropologists and market researchers and is where anthropology and market research diverge. In most market research studies, the sponsoring organization is removed from the process in order to help the research maintain an objective perspective. In qualitative research, sponsoring organization representatives sit behind a one-way mirror. In quantitative research, a third-party administers the survey or research tool. Within anthropology, those who implement the outcomes of the research are the ones who conduct the research. Which method is best? There are advantages and disadvantages to all sides.

Advantages of sponsor involvement

There are plenty of good reasons sponsors would want to be involved in the ethnographic research process. Involvement provides more ownership and control in the outcomes. It allows sponsors to hear firsthand the voice of their customers and feel more confident when asked to make decisions based on their customer intuition. It is also an effective way to align an organization and cross-functional team on customer needs. By participating in the research, organizations gain skills that they may not have had before, such as those of observation, intuition and relating to the customer. Last and most importantly, the results of the study are more likely to be implemented if the organization participates. As one researcher has said, “The further a person is away from the research, the more likely they are to discount the results.”

Sponsor involvement case study: Rubbermaid office products

Rubbermaid manufactures office products such as pencil holders, stackable letter trays and plastic file folder sorters. The product development team decided to explore the use and expansion of their products through ethnographic research.

In order to gain the most value, Rubbermaid decided, during the research design phase, that they needed to conduct the research themselves. Since ethnography was a new research method for the team, extensive time was spent coaching and training the team. Coaching included classroom work, practice site visits and support during the actual fieldwork. “Being involved in the research allowed me to experience the customer firsthand, to see how our products are used and determine if the behavior described is how it actually plays out in real life. A report about the fieldwork would not have done the research justice,” says Danyelle Cash, former Rubbermaid product manager and team member.

Disadvantages of sponsor involvement

On the other hand, there are valid reasons for not having the sponsor participate in the research. As with any inexperienced team using a new research method, it will make mistakes during the research that could be an embarrassment to their organization, the industry and hurt the integrity of the research. One example from experience includes the sponsor representative who commented on a customer’s weight loss program. In other instances, clients have phrased questions in order to lead the customer to a specific response, tried to sell their products while with the customer or made very broad assumptions and conclusions about a customer from a limited perspective during the debrief. These kinds of occurrences alienate the customer, damage the research and reflect poorly on other team members.

An advantage of using outside ethnographers is that they have been trained in the skills needed to conduct and analyze the research. These skills of observation, association and knowledge of the field take years of practice, study and experience to acquire. An outside professional brings less departmental and organizational bias into the research. With this experience and objective perspective, the professional provides a higher level of insight and the reported results are less likely to be skewed.

A compromise

If the sponsoring organization does participate in the research, it is important to spend a large amount of time identifying individual and organizational biases before participating in the research. Team participants in ethnography from one sponsor said, “I like the fact that it was explained how biases will affect all of our insights and methods to distinguish between insight and observation…We’d be crazy if we didn’t keep an open mind when talking with customers, thinking about what they are saying and doing versus how we are used to thinking of things.” The common biases sponsoring organization representatives face tend to be a self-projection on the customer, gravitation towards people like themselves, a natural tendency to want to change the customer, assumption that the sponsor representatives are not biased and the common comment of, “But that isn’t my customer...” Unfortunately, the majority of biases do not become apparent to team members until they are in the field. For this reason, many organizations choose to have an outside ethnographer conduct the research with sponsor representatives participating as observers. Abstract involvement allows sponsoring organizations to have firsthand experience with their customers but also provides the distance necessary to manage their biases effectively.

How to decide what type of involvement is best

As long as sponsoring parties are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of all perspectives, they have the ability to make an informed decision about their involvement. To determine the best involvement level, sponsoring organizations should ask themselves a number of questions.

  • What is the purpose of the research? What level of quality or caliber should the research have? What level of buy-in to the outcomes does the sponsoring organization need to have? Who needs to buy in to the outcomes?
  • What kind of budget does the sponsoring organization have? How much experience with direct customer interaction does the sponsor’s internal team have? What amount of time and money does the organization have to invest in internal skills versus bringing in expert knowledge?
  • How will the research be used after it has been conducted? Will it be used to make a decision, for developing new products or advertising themes, or as a reference for the customer market? How important is an archival record of the research?
  • How will the results be communicated? Who will communicate them? How will the results be implemented? Who will implement them?

Appropriate level

The answers to these important questions should help direct the organization toward the appropriate involvement level. Whether the sponsoring organization is involved in the research or not, ethnography provides great insight into the customer’s world and is a great method to add to the toolbox of customer behavior analysis techniques.