Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector
Good explanations provide general principles that can then be applied to other design problems.
Classic anthropological approach: long-term, embedded observation within the community, interviewing, the methodical collection of data, and most importantly, the constant attempt to explain what life means to these people.
The participants’ viewpoint— Businessweek calls it the “new core competence.”
Ethnography is conducted in context, providing new insights into the other objects, people, and products that consumers are currently using.
Ethnography puts consumer needs first, which means a product based on ethnographic research will solve real consumer problems.
Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, [says] that the company does not sell coffee so much as the experience of coffee.
Ethnographic truth” is a distinct kind of truth that differs from traditional market research.
Facts and prediction are not the only value research can bring. Renouncing that school of thought leads to a whole new world of insight and a different kind of truth—truth about understanding, unriddling, decoding, and deciphering.
Accurate prediction is so rare that it virtually never happens. So forget prediction. Go for deep understanding.
An interpretivist is interested in understanding what the world means to people.
The private-sector ethnographer’s task, then, is not to find the “truth” about products and services, but the meanings consumers ascribe to them.
Most marketers, business strategists, and product managers don’t understand the interpretivist point of view, not because it is incorrect, but because it has an unfamiliar conception of truth.
A product’s meaning is a function of a consumer’s perception of two broad concepts: ) his own identity; and ) the system of meaning in which he finds himself.
ethnographic research begins with questions such as, how does a consumer see himself? In which context does he use this product? How do identity and context interact to affect this sensemaking process?
Fixed identities such as “women” or “Latinos” are not categories that determine behavior so much as they are roles that individuals must interpret, find meaning in, and grapple with.
So we must unriddle how the consumer’s identity shapes his interpretation of a particular product, and the social context in which this meaning is negotiated.
The Urban Hipster is the contemporary personification of cultural capital. She has very little money but exercises her knowledge of cool to exert her class dominance. Her capital is her knowledge of art shows, vintage clothing stores, little-known Italian bike designers, and, of course, “bands you haven’t even heard of.” The Hipster’s “wealth” is not in her bank account; it is in her superior knowledge. She will use this knowledge to dominate others by restricting access to exclusive knowledge. She will not tell just anybody where she bought her vintage cowboy boots. She will nod at you knowingly if you somehow find your way to her favorite bar. She will sneer at those who do not have this knowledge. It is her way of exerting dominance, not with mere money, but with cultural know-how.
Luxury goods are not simply a function of how much they cost, but the meanings that consumers ascribe to them.
The psychologist (particularly the social psychologist) focuses on the individual and his interactions with others, but it is the ethnographer that provides insight into the influences culture has on that individual.
We can operationalize culture as values, beliefs, and behaviors.
The product’s design and marketing must match the ways in which consumers think about that product.
Alternatives are behaviors that are considered outside the norm, but within the realm of personal taste.
Your job as a practical ethnographer is to discover that which appears true. What do consumers believe about this product?
discover how people interpret that perception and how this product may—or may not—fit into their lives.
Today’s corporate touchstone is the “project.” A project is the temporary organization of people marshaled around a shared goal (Lundin and Soderholm, ).
[When it comes to ethnoraphic research,] recruiting participants is by far the most labor-intensive stage of the research project.
The goal is never to achieve “the numbers,” but to achieve the explanation of your participants’ cultural practices.
You may find there are stakeholders in the wider organization that are hoping for the project to fail because they subscribe to another form of truth or validity.
Consider some of the typical successes an ethnography can have: transformed client mindset, an overarching mental model for the product, deep insight into customers’ mind sets, metaphors for design, and so forth.
Ethnography failures: poor recruiting, not enough participants, shallow insight, findings that aren’t actionable, client dissatisfaction, lack of impact in the client organization, misunderstanding of the project goals by clients.
Add the post mortem to your initial project plan.
As Hubert Dreyfus and his brother Stuart tell us elsewhere () the difference between competence and mastery is that masters are able to quickly discern the nature of the problem at hand and swiftly bring to mind several potential solutions to that problem. Just as quickly, the master then selects the right solution for the problem. The leap from competence to mastery is not a function of faster brain processing, but of faster pattern recognition; the higher order thinking of a master ethnographer relies on his ability to consider—and dismiss—potential paths without
The Livescribe recording pen is a tool uniquely suited to the private-sector ethnographer.
Private-sector ethnographers rarely have the time or budget to transcribe interviews in their entirety. [What] private-sector ethnographers need is the ability to pluck out quotes quickly. Health research has shown that computer use can lessen rapport, so laptops should be used with care. Audio can produce rich and illuminating stories, particularly when you hear participants’ voices or the sounds of their environments.
Understanding what you’re doing in the field is one thing; understanding what your client thinks you’re doing is a completely different thing. [You] must constantly consider what can be improved in the current state of affairs, and specifically how to improve it.
Ethnography is a research project designed to uncover contextual insights for use in design and marketing. Ethnography is essentially an epistemological shift, forcing its practitioners to empathize with participants and adopt their standpoint. Asking what consumers truly believe about a company’s product is a bold act because it begs a self-examination of what the company believes about that same product. Standing in a room and looking at things is not ethnography. Ethnographers must do two things: describe the data and interpret the data. Ethnographers do not study products; they study how products fit (or do not fit) into people’s lives. Ethnographers answer questions about people, while business people expect answers about products.
Ethnographic projects represent a fundamental threat to identity if they focus on the gap between the customer’s experience and the organization’s own identity pillars.
the first priority is to create rapport, which essentially boils down to trust. A good interview is like a dance—with the interviewee leading.
In academic ethnography, informed consent involves telling participants what data will be collected, how it will be stored, and what ultimate outputs will be created (which usually means articles and books).
Sampling, at its heart, is a shortcut. If you had time to ask everyone in the country the same questions, you would actually be conducting a census. That’s what “census” means— asking absolutely everybody.
Large samples are not always necessary, and good samples aren’t always random.
Certainly, there is value in predicting patterns. Unfortunately, it has become the only thing that most people expect from social research.
your job as an ethnographer is to find participants who offer the greatest potential for understanding the phenomenon at hand.
qualitative researchers don’t care about comparing their results to random results. As a result, they don’t tend to care about probability sampling.
Qualitative researchers tend to select their participants based on the needs of the study.
create a set of recruitment criteria that are relevant to the research question.
In a typical private-sector study, an ethnographer is seeking what Anselem Strauss and Barney Glaser call “saturation,” or the point at which you begin to hear the same information repeated.
The sample is typically drawn from a list called the sampling frame. Finding the sampling frame is by far the most challenging part of sampling for either qualitative or quantitative research.
Consider offering a “comfort call” to the participants the day before the field visit, telling them what to expect
Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all offer great opportunities to recruit qualified participants.
). The key to using social media for recruiting, therefore, is maintaining your network through direct engagement with other users.
The primary concern in ethnographic sampling is to gain access to participants’ contexts, and from there, derive insight about their attitudes, values, and beliefs and more deeply understand a particular product space.
The average and the extreme are wonderful examples to have in your sample.
find often in the private sector is that commissioners of research frequently decline to interview people of lower socio-economic status under the mistaken belief that their opinions are not relevant.
Ethnographers cannot offer what their quantitative colleagues can: prediction of what will happen.
your job is to show your clients and stakeholders that prediction is a poor substitute for deep understanding.
Unlike survey researchers, ethnographers find themselves physically in the middle of all sorts of situations. It’s impossible for them to escape squirm-worthy moments because that is precisely what ethnography is made up of.
Observation is indeed an ethnographic method, but in ethnography it is complemented by clarifying questions and sit-down interviews.
Ethnographic techniques discovered that what people say they want contrasts directly with what they actually need.
Budget sufficient time: There is nothing more forced, more contrived than an ethnographer arriving and expecting an immediate display of “normal” behavior.
Robust competitive analysis is best done through comprehensive surveys with large sample sizes.
Diagramming the “customer journey” (aka the “time-ordered display”) provides a quick way of showing your clients the consumption act and where it might be unpleasant for consumers.
The gap between what people say and what they do is a rich ground for finding contradictions.
Qualitative researchers actually use outliers as a tool to understand everyone else that does fit the pattern.
The “so what” question is the most important aspect to ethnography. It is what differentiates ethnography from journalism.