Natasha Schleich, MA | Plunkett Communications Inc. | www.plunkettinc.com
Natasha holds a Master’s Degree in Business & Organizational Anthropology from Wayne State University and manages ethnographic marketing research projects – called On-site Insights™ – at Plunkett Communications Inc.

This article first appeared in the February 2006 issue of “VUE”, the monthly magazine of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association

“There is no better way to get closer to the consumer . . .
than by using ethnography as a bridge.”
~ John F. Sherry, Jr., Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior, 1995: 15

Introduction

Ethnography is not new to marketing research. Since the early 1990s, researchers working for and with companies as diverse as Xerox, Kimberly-Clark, Patagonia, Whirlpool, and Ford Motor Company have been using ethnography as part of their research toolkits. Today, most product and service providers who invest in marketing research have had some experience with ethnography and many have fully incorporated the approach into their ongoing research programs.

Many marketing research companies who have a qualitative research arm offer some version of Ethnographic Marketing Research (EMR). However, the quality of this offering varies because it is easy to use the label “ethnography” for something less rigorous. Research design, execution, and, in particular, analysis differentiate good from substandard quality EMR. This article explores both the art and science of EMR. The “science” of EMR includes the specific set of methods that are utilized and their proper execution. The “art” of EMR lies in how a particular suite of ethnographic methods is selected as part of a customized research design and how the data, once collected, are interpreted through the lens of culture and society

What is EMR?

Anthropology is the study of people and culture. An anthropologist’s job is to make sense of and systematically describe a single, contemporary culture; ethnography is the methodology and perspective they use. Ethnography includes simple observation, participant-observation, contextual inquiry, in-depth, open-ended interviews, objectology and the writing of detailed field notes – with the goal being to understand another culture from the point of view of members of that culture.

In the marketing industry, ethnography was appropriated as an approach that could deal with and make sense of the complexity and segmentation of contemporary life as it plays out in patterns of consumption and consumption activities.

EMR is a vehicle for gaining insight into what, how, and why people consume and the sociality of consumer behaviour. It allows marketing researchers to put themselves in a position where they can observe a consumer demonstrating a relationship with a brand in cultural context.

When EMR makes sense and when not

Key to the art and science of EMR is determining when and why to pull it out of the research toolkit. EMR is an ideal approach to use:

• For new product development
• For brand positioning,
• For up-front exploratory work (when the objective to is renovate, revive, or reposition a brand);
• when the objective is to understand how a consumer uses a product or service in the context of his or her daily life;
• when observing consumer behaviour first-hand is critical versus asking for recall after-the-fact ;
• when the audience is hard-to-reach (e.g. teenagers, moms with babies, the affluent); or
• as a complement to more traditional qualitative (focus groups) or quantitative (usage and attitude studies) approaches.

EMR may not be the most appropriate tool to use:

• when the objective is to explore consumer response to specific stimulus (e.g. positioning statements, creative) that can be easily introduced in more traditional forms of marketing research;
• if the focus is on opinions about or attitudes towards a product or service as opposed to how the brand relationship is demonstrated through behaviour;
• when a very quick (less than a week) turn-around from brief to debrief is required; or
• if the budget is very small (EMR is generally more costly than other forms of qualitative research).

In EMR, the ultimate quest is for insights into the sociality of consumer behaviour. That is, during the analysis of EMR data (both an art and a specific skill), a researcher will look for things like: the hierarchy of cultural values consumers subscribe to; how the brand acts as a marker of social relationships; consumption as an expression of consumer taste and style; and how brands help consumers construct concepts of themselves and of the cultural world they live in. Often, this interpretive process feels like a bit of a fishing expedition because the researcher isn’t always sure what he or she will catch in the net of data and there is an inherent openness to unanticipated needles of insight in the proverbial haystack.

Who conducts EMR?

Anyone can systematically execute a specific set of ethnographic methods (e.g. direct observation, depth interviewing), and, in practice many people do. EMR can offer the opportunity for advertising agencies and clients working with research suppliers to get directly involved in data collection. In an in-home housecleaning study we conducted, for example, we worked in pairs with advertising agency and client team members.

A maximum of two researchers is recommended so as not to overwhelm the participant; having two is also valuable in that two pairs of eyes and ears are better than one. It is important that agency/client researchers are well briefed on EMR and its methods prior to going into the field. For example, some marketing ethnographers spend a half day training agency/team members to ensure appropriate behaviour on site. Students can also be a valuable resource. We initiated developing a network of graduate students living in different markets to conduct the research for a study of corporate banking clients.

What is “the field”?

EMR is conducted in the field, which means anywhere brand decisions are actually made and/or consumer behaviour occurs, not a focus group facility, which is a quasi-controlled environment. The field can be almost anywhere consumers are: home, car dealership, shopping mall, nightclub, vehicle, campground, movie theatre, workplace, and so on.

Traditionally, ethnographic fieldwork is intense, long-term research conducted among a community of people. However, marketing researchers rarely have more than a few weeks or a couple of months from brief to debrief. It is entirely possible to do useful EMR with a short period of time in the field, but one must already be familiar with the culture or community being studied (Bernard, 2002:329). Since ethnographic marketing researchers often work with participants who share a similar culture (e.g. middle-class, suburban housewives, young, urban hipsters), a cultural knowledge-base is already in place and it is easier to “get in and get out”.

For research buyers accustomed to one or two hour focus groups, a research design that proposes spending three or more hours or even a half or whole day or longer (!) with participants is a bit of a leap. Generally, though, the more time spent in the field, the better – because it takes some time to develop rapport with participants and even longer to fade into the background enough that naturalistic consumer behaviour will emerge and the acute consciousness of being observed recedes. For example, shadowing participants in their workplace for an entire work week helped us understand how they actually used and interacted with a particular software application that included an online component on a day-to-day basis. If the research objective is to understand daily usage behaviours, spending two hours observing is not going to provide the answers.

When the research objective is to understand change in consumer behaviour or experience with a product or service over time, conducting fieldwork (e.g. half day home visits) over a longer period of time (e.g. every three months for a year) with the same participants can prove to be incredibly fruitful. For example, Sachs Insights (2005) conducted a longitudinal ethnography with college-bound teens wherein the objective was to see changes in brand choices and the role of media during participants’ transition from high school to college in the U.S.

Who participates in EMR and how are they recruited?

The best EMR participants are creative and articulate members of the target audience who are willing to welcome researchers into their lives in a more personal way (i.e. they are okay with researchers looking through the cupboards in their home, hanging out with them during Sunday football on TV, driving with them, etc.)

Participants can often be found through traditional recruiting methods. However, it is imperative that recruiters understand what EMR is and how it differs from other forms of qualitative research. Per recruit costs will be higher for EMR because of its more intrusive nature (i.e. it’s easier to get a participant to come to a focus group for two hours than to let a researcher join him or her on a grocery shopping trip and help them prepare a meal afterwards at home).

Snowball sampling is a common ethnographic recruiting method that involves one participant leading a researcher to others from his or her social network who may share similar brand or category usage. It has also proven fruitful to recruit participants from a researcher’s own social network (or “tribe”). Since rapport has already been developed, more can be asked of participants (e.g. attending a dinner party, spending a weekend observing media consumption in the home, probing deeply about their affluent lifestyle, etc.).

Due to the intrusive nature of the research, EMR participants are generally paid more for their time than focus group respondents. As mentioned above, higher per hour incentive rates in combination with higher per recruit costs means that, on a per participant basis, EMR is significantly more expensive than traditional focus groups.

What is an appropriate sample size?

For research buyers accustomed to quantitative survey completions in the hundreds or thousands and more traditional qualitative sessions where 30 or 40 respondents might be interviewed, an EMR proposal that recommends a sample size of between six and 25-30 may seem a bit thin. The “mile wide/inch deep versus inch wide/mile deep” analogy works well here.

In traditional focus groups, Moderators spend about two hours with upwards of eight respondents. Divided evenly, each respondent might get about 10-15 minutes of airtime. In EMR, researchers speak to, observe, and hang out with one, two, or maybe three participants in-situ for part of or even a whole day (or longer). Each participant gets a significant amount of air time and they are observed in-context in a great amount of detail. Assuming that participants are well-recruited, even a sample size of six can provide a surprising wealth of relevant and new information.

Welcome to the digital age: recording what happens in the field

One could argue that a symbol for EMR is the handheld digital video camera. Unlike data collection methods in the past that relied on the taking of copious field notes and having more structured interviews transcribed, the digital age has revolutionized the data collection process – making it more efficient and the deliverables more interesting. Digital technology has effectively brought participants and insights to life in the presentation boardroom.

The technological tools of EMR data collection include digital video cameras, digital voice recorders, and digital picture cameras. All are getting smaller and more unobtrusive all the time. Video cameras do an excellent job of capturing consumer behaviour and demonstrations of dynamics of the brand relationship. They can be used in almost any environment where they are allowed. We have used digital video in homes, vehicles, retail locations (with permission), bars, and on the street.

Digital voice recorders are useful in situations where the researcher wants to capture verbatim what is happening in-situ, but is not able to use a video camera (e.g. in a retail location or when he or she wants to be an anonymous fly on the wall – i.e. indirect observation). Digital picture cameras can be a primary or secondary data collection tool. A U.S. colleague takes hundreds of digital pictures in-situ and then sorts them and builds her analysis around the categories created. Participant photo diaries are also interesting because they allow the researcher a glimpse of things through the participant’s eyes. Nevertheless, digital technology will never eliminate taking old fashioned field notes. Sometimes, it is not possible to record anything digitally, or time in the field spans more hours than what is practical to capture on video or audio.

What are the deliverables?

Generally, videos, images, or audio collected during EMR are not intended to be of broadcast or publication quality. However, some ethnographic marketing researchers offer a polished documentary-style research video in lieu of a PowerPoint presentation or written report. The advantage of offering this sort of deliverable is that it offers a differentiated way of presenting findings, is visually engaging, can be used to brief creative teams, and can be “passed around the office” – or around the world!

The disadvantage is that it may take longer to analyze and edit an ethnographic film than to pull clips from digital video footage to insert into a PowerPoint presentation deck. Video clips selected for insertion in a presentation deck act as visual illustrations of key insights (visual verbatims if you will) or can be grouped into short vignettes around a particular theme or finding.

Digital photos, photo diaries, and other activities provide the materials for collages – collections of images sorted by emergent theme or insight. These can be inserted into presentation decks or assembled on separate presentation boards allowing for a multi-media presentation experience for the client.

Finally, because in EMR, sample sizes tend to be smaller (6 – 30), another way to deliver findings is by developing participant profiles – each profile representing a category of behavior, a distinct expression of the brand relationship, or some other relevant cultural tendency. One advertising agency conducing EMR for a new business pitch created life size, full-colour stand-up people to represent different participant profiles. Stories were told about each of these people.

The art and science of EMR analysis

The true art of EMR is found in the analysis of data. Research conducted with scientific rigour and forethought followed by interpretation that is not culturally grounded will lack depth and have less impact. Decoding of the cultural embeddedness of consumer behaviour is the linchpin of EMR. The kinds of “anthropological” questions asked during fieldwork – about social networks, values, identity, ritual, objects, community, etc. – and the direct observation of behaviour that illustrates these cultural concepts – will affect the nature of the data that is collected and the quality of insights that can be drawn from it. This is why the design stage of EMR is so critical.

The questions a researcher asks of the data after-the-fact can result in potentially different outcomes. For example, we conducted an EMR study with affluent owners of different luxury vehicles, the objective being to gain a deeper understanding of who these people are, their culture and values, the way they expressed their social identity through their brand choices and how they experienced their vehicles – as owners and drivers.

To get at this, we spent time with them in their homes, observed their interaction with owners of competitive brands of luxury vehicles, asked about possessions of significance, observed their driving rituals, and discussed how their brand choice acted as a marker of social identity and values. We framed the interpretation of the data with these same sorts of anthropological concepts.

This particular process led us to insights around definitions of luxury and social identity that differentiated one brand from another that we would not have uncovered otherwise. We were then able to translate these culturally situated findings into conclusions and recommendations that are relevant and actionable in informing marketing strategy and communications.

In EMR, the analysis stage can take from one week to upwards of a month depending on the amount and depth of data collected and the amount of video or other digital editing required. As a result, sometimes presentations are made in two or more stages. This is an incredibly swift turn-around considering that, traditionally, an ethnographic data set was often analyzed over a number of months or years. Because research objectives in EMR tend to be quite focused in scope, analysis can be completed more rapidly.

In the luxury vehicle study mentioned above, 45 hours of digital video footage from 28 participants was analyzed, and the first stage of a multi-stage presentation schedule developed in about three weeks from completion of the data collection.

Conclusion

Clearly, there is no single “correct” way to conduct quality EMR and no two EMR projects are the same. The research design, the kinds of information sought during fieldwork, the questions asked of the data during analysis, and the final deliverables all influence the outcome, which is also concomitantly determined by the client’s specific research objectives, budget, time, and needs for application/action.

The one thing EMR cannot and should not be is a pre-packaged, cookie cutter solution; it should be managed by marketing research professionals who are trained in its science and art. Considering the unique value it offers product and services providers, EMR will continue to evolve, becoming a more commonly used tool in the marketing research toolkit.

References Cited

Bernard, H. R. 2002. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, 3rd edition. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.

Sachs, T. 2005. “Marketing to a Moving Target: Longitudinal Ethnography with College-Bound Teens”. QRCA Conference, Beverly Hills, CA.