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Viewpoint: Ethnography and market research Philly Desai Ethnography is now well established as a commercial research technique. Ten years ago you might have found only a few agencies or clients interested in this relatively new approach, but now there are few agencies that don’t offer ethnography alongside more conventional research approaches. But what are they doing? And what are the clients buying? While most researchers and marketers know what they’re getting if they commission eight groups or twenty interviews, ethnography is still a bit like the Wild West. There’s no standardisation, no common language to describe the range of methods, and you’ve really not much idea what you’re going to get. While flexibility is a good thing, I argue here that it may be time for ethnography to grow up if it’s really going to join the mainstream. One of the main problems for buyers commissioning ethnographic research is that everyone does it differently. There’s very little common ground in approach between the main practitioners or, if there is, they haven’t made it obvious. Anything from hanging around a skateboard park, interviewing teenagers in their bedrooms, asking respondents to make video diaries, to interviewing their family and friends, or videoing them going shopping – it’s all ethnography. And all these methods are indeed useful in their place. But if we use the same word to describe all these approaches, are we really helping our clients understand what we’re doing? Wouldn’t it be better to develop a common language – as exists for different sorts of interviews, such as paired depths, family interviews, life history interviews – so we all know what we’re talking about? And is all this stuff really ethnographic research? The basis of ethnography is to understand human cultures by observing people’s behaviour. And that observation needs to be conducted in context – at the time and place where the activity really takes place, and with the people who are really there. Only this can provide the depth of understanding that is the unique benefit of ethnographic approaches. But if we are just tagging a few accompanied shops or in-home visits onto a conventional focus group-based project, can we call that ethnography? Have we really gained a deep insight into human behaviour? More often than not, the purpose of these tag-ons is merely to generate some funky videos to show at the presentation, or to provide a more direct experience of the respondents for our client. That’s a perfectly reasonable goal, but it’s not ethnography – it’s entertainment. Any method is valuable only if it helps us find new ways to look at product categories, social behaviours or media consumption, which allows our clients to make a closer connection with the consumer or citizen. This is certainly an area in which detailed ethnographic research can provide
insights that more conventional approaches cannot. But this relies on structured, detailed and insightful analysis of the ethnographic data gained. You need to ask the right questions of the data, preferably with client and agency working together, to create these insights. And this, I believe, is another area where a little more standardisation might benefit everyone involved. If you’re reviewing hours of video or pages of fieldwork notes, what are you actually looking for? And how can you ensure that the approach you take delivers real insight for your clients? As an example, I have developed an analytical framework that divides the data into content – which I define as cultural meanings and material artefacts (‘stuff’) – and context – the importance of time, space and social environment. Perhaps if we could be clearer with our clients about how we are going to analyse the data, they might be happier to pay the premium that ethnographic approaches Finally, how can you make the leap from ethnographic data to marketing strategy or new product opportunities? These insights don’t come out of the air; they emerge from applying intelligent questions to the data in order to identify these new opportunities. Hy Mariampolski, the noted US ethnographer, has developed a series of questions that can be applied to ethnographic data to help generate such insights (for example, dividing a process into steps to identify new product opportunities; observing problems with packaging; noting where products are stored). Perhaps these could be adopted as standard ethnographic analysis tools, so we can explain to our clients how we extract real marketing insights from the mass of video, photos, maps and notes that ethnography often produces. To sum up, ethnography includes some of the most interesting and innovative approaches in commercial market research. However, if ethnography is to achieve the acceptance of the focus group, we need to develop a common language and at least a degree of commonality in approach, so that buyers know what they’re getting and how we’re going to deliver it. It’s time for ethnography to grow up. International Journal of Market Research 49(6), 2007
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