Tag Archives: notes

Taking Clients Along for the Ride

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In the last few years, ethnography has shifted from a novel and often misunderstood methodology to a do-it-or-die necessity in many marketers’ and product designers’ tool kits. The idea of ethnography has a logical appeal for business clients; market intelligence born from the homes and hearts of customers. It’s an ethnographer’s job to talk to and observe people, as they go about their daily routines, using sociology and anthropology methods for data collection and analysis – giving clients true-to-life, informed insights and a firsthand understanding of their customers.

Perhaps naively, many ethnographers assumed that we would work in a vacuum when they learned their trade. We’d go into the field – people’s homes, workplaces, and leisure areas – and then report to clients what we learned. However, we soon realize that some clients take us literally when we state ethnography will bring them into their customers’ homes. They aren’t always satisfied with just overseeing the project or telling us what they want to learn and why. This is a great opportunity for clients to see customers using their products in real situations and a chance to get to know the customers personally. But it presents ethnographers with certain challenges. 

Involvement Risks

Ethnographers tread delicately. Every time we perform fieldwork we need to become instant friends with participants. We need them comfortable enough to behave “normally” while we point a camera at them, and to feel that they can tell us anything – even if they’re just talking about peanut butter. The field is spontaneous and sensitive, and anything can happen. That means making sure we and our clients do all we can to ensure that the field remains as natural as possible.

Clients have varying levels of fieldwork experience. Some are qualitative market researchers with a little in-context interviewing under their belts, and others don’t have much first-hand knowledge of qualitative research or the human sciences. Consequently, clients might interfere with the interview process, misinterpret the data, or overlook important but subtle information. However, ethnographers can take steps to mitigate these concerns.

1. Explore Motives

Understand why clients need to go into the field and what their expectations are of the project. DO they want direct exposure to generate ideas, ease issues of trust/competency/legality, train their in-house ethnographer, or simply be more engaged in the process? For the sake of both the research and the client-ethnographer relationship, articulating these issues is essential.

It’s paramount that clients communicate goals for a smooth operation. On one occasion, a busy client of ours wanted to see his products used in context, so he attended two field visits early in the project. Knowing his reason and planned number of outings, we ensured they’d include use of his products. Everything went well, and his observations were eye-opening. Because he didn’t have time to invest in more fieldwork, we sent him a video document every time someone used his products during the project.

2. Establish Boundaries

Before fieldwork, ethnographers must communicate the research boundaries and client role. Clients should recognize that ethnographers’ expertise consists of more than an ability to build rapport with strangers; their skills are rooted in a keen understanding of social theory and methodological rigor, and entail years of training.

Ethnographers have a process and particular mindset that directs the interview, interaction, and interpretation, so guiding client input before starting a project will help prevent everyone from asking leading questions or biasing conversations. Limits ensure quality work and allow clients to make the most of a field visit.

It also permits them to function within a frame of hierarchical authority, lessening their need to be project leader. In other words, clients understand that the context reduces or removes a layer of authority. It lets them focus on learning and executing predetermined tasks, instead of feeling compelled to handle everything. They can filter information through a training perspective while taking a holistic approach.

3. Allocate Responsibilities

Providing clients an indispensable role in the projects, such as videotaping an interview, helps them feel more like team members and less like visitors. It also raises comfort levels of everyone involved. Assigning tasks s also a practical necessity: Clients can replace research assistants in the field. Two researchers plus a client can threaten and crowd a participant, who just wants to demonstrate the best way to clean a bathroom countertop.

4. Encourage Reciprocation

It’s important to know clients well and be thoughtful about their flexibility, political realities, and character traits. Unfortunately, there often isn’t enough time to do so in-depth. Clients might arrive a half-hour earl for an afternoon interview and leave that evening, never to go into the field again. In this case, an ethnographer can only outline some expectations and techniques – through phone and e-mail conversations beforehand, and on the spot (frequently while sitting on cushy hotel-lobby chairs).

When clients have more time to invest in the ethnography, there are two parts to building a solid team and guaranteeing productive fieldwork (despite their lack of experience.) Clients must be willing to adapt to new or unfamiliar methodologies – techniques for data gathering and interpretation – regardless of their backgrounds (e.g. design, business strategy, engineering). And ethnographers must appreciate and incorporate clients’ theoretical and practical contributions. Success requires devoting time and energy to discovering the capabilities of all the team members – ethnographer and client alike.

Each team member can learn to apply findings across a range of activities. After all, a key to business achievement is using seemingly disconnected information to build new products, brands, and business models. Learning how best to conduct research and understanding individual roles in the field ultimately helps the client use the gathered information most effectively.

Protection and Collaboration

As ethnography becomes a staple of market research, we just might see marketers and product designers make an exodus to the field – with or without us. Ethnographers need to prepare for the possible outcomes. They should do so by not only preventing research from being disturbed, but also by harnessing clients’ intelligence and know-how – using their involvement as a springboard for more effective and actionable ethnography. In the future, most marketing decisions and product innovations will be based on real-world experiences with ordinary people.

Notes About Observation

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It’s Friday and I’m headed to the zoo with my daughters.  At the risk of being deemed a bad parent, I will say that I will no doubt be engaged in observation of the people and the activities with an anthropological perspective in mind – a hazard of the trade, no doubt.  But it has me thinking that there are elements of observation that we often forget and it can be harder than we think.

When I’m sent to a setting, be it a country I’ve never visited before, a dinner party with a group I’ve never met, or even the zoo, one of the first things I do is some informal observation.  It is grounding and primes the mind for the fieldwork to come. In this sense, observation means watching and listening to people and trying to form some ideas about their beliefs, behavior, knowledge, and interactions.

This requires an attitude of openness to experience.  It means not taking anything for granted, no matter how seemingly mundane. It sounds trite, but it’s often useful to imagine that you are a visitor from another planet, and that you are visiting Earth for the first time. What do you notice about the humans? The buildings? The structure of a setting? Even the most trivial details are revealing if you forget, or try to forget, some of what you know. Of course, this isn’t entirely possible, so keep in mind that what you think and feel are as much part of the data set as the observations themselves – self-reflexivity is a marvelous tool.

With informal observation, you are always looking for something that might make a community different from others. Perhaps the difference is in products they can buy, not only what they have and how they use them.  Perhaps it is the way they talk to their children or spouses.  Perhaps it is their structuring of power. Remember that nothing is certain and notice anything that makes a community unusual to your own worldview.

But observation means nothing if you don’t recall what you experience. It’s not enough simply to observe people.  Recording is essential. I have found that the best way to do informal observation is to always carry a small notebook and pen. Yes, the camcorder and the camera are important, but writing things down and mapping an environment have a way of helping organize what is important as well as having the benefit of making you think about what you have missed. When you see or hear something interesting, I write it down.

It is also at this stage that models and theories begin to take shape. As I form theories, I write these down too, in the same notebook – usually in the form of questions. Whenever you start to form a theory about some possibility, look for evidence that will either confirm or oppose the theory. This will in turn lead to more questions and better observation.

That being said, there is a fine balance that must be struck. It’s very important not to jump to conclusions straight away, and to look for evidence on both sides of the question. Many people will form a theory without searching for opposing evidence, or they will head down a path that substantiates what they want to believe. The main difference between observation in normal life, and informal observation for research is that the researcher is always trying to seek the truth, such as it is, and to find out how far that truth can be extended.  Remember, this is the first stage in the research, not the end. This is exploration.

With that in mind, remember that for observation to be successful and useful, you have to go beyond observation, and ask people “Why do you do that?” You are not observing purely for the sake of observing, but to find out why people act as they do. It’s certainly something I’ll keep in mind at the zoo as I watch all the critters – human and nonhuman alike.