Ethnography

We’ve been running ethnographic projects at Idea Couture since go. Almost three years ago, when I first joined what was then a five-person team on the fifth floor of our building, I was jettisoned into the field on a CPG project designed to examine the role of the kitchen in people’s lives. Since then – dozens of hires and a second floor later – I’ve led the research side of business challenges in banking, insurance, health, investing, mobile phones, travel, alcohol, retail, education and more.

From the front-end of boardroom to pitches clients to the back-end (TW) of the research findings & recommendations presentations and Noodleplay workshops, one of the key learnings I’ve taken away is how valuable good research can be to addressing and solving these challenges once they are put into the shared hands of designers, experience architects, strategists and technologists. And I’m not just talking about good ethnographic research but also good usability, human factors, social psychology, quantitative and design research. Putting a different lens on an issue or, even better, multiple lenses from different disciplines, is the only way to conduct research for innovation.

But how do you – the client – know when you’re paying for a good quality lens? With every consultancy and its uncle parading their ethnographic method and its goofy, branded name online and in your boardroom, quality control is critical to your budget, your project, even your reputation. Dodgy ethnography can be a waste of time, money and resources. It can lead you astray with weak insights or no insights. And it can deliver little or no more than what you’d get from traditional market research.

So how do you know when you’re getting the good goods? In researching firms, tapping colleagues working in other organizations for recommendations or asking questions during the first meet & greet, these give tips should get you started on separating what Steve Martin in The Jerk referred to as the difference between shit and shine-ola.

DISCIPLINE, DISCIPLINE, DISCIPLINE
Ethnographic research emerged from cultural anthropology circa 100 years ago. Anthropologists have done it, taught it, built it up, torn it down, debated it, evolved it, revised it, anguished over it and written about it more than anyone. Since then, sociology, social psychology, education, nursing, human computer interaction and other disciplines have adopted and adapted it to enrich their encounter with and understanding of humans.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, ask about discipline. What were the people who are going to conduct the research trained in? What school of thought are they coming from? How will they draw on their discipline’s method and theory to make their work and findings more than just same-old, same-old market research?

DEGREES OF SEPARATION
One of the simpler ways to discuss discipline is to get your potential research providers to divulge their degrees. While there are a number of institutions that include ethnographic methods as part of programs in design research, there are few, if any, people with undergraduate degrees out there who have been trained in and conducted rigorous ethnographic fieldwork. The methods, theories, politics and pains of conducting ethnography – and there are many – aren’t even taught to undergrads in most university programs.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, ask about the qualifications of the people who will be going into the field. A Masters or Doctoral degree in one of the social sciences, like anthropology, can be a first sign of the researcher’s qualifications and experience as well as an indication of the kind of rigor and/or insights you might be paying for. Then again, it might not. As someone recently pointed out to me, there are a lot of PhDs who couldn’t consult their way out of a wet paper bag in the business world.

DIFFERENT QUESTIONS, ODD QUESTIONS
Anthropologists are fascinated by what inspires, motivates, structures, influences and inhibits people and social systems. They want to understand performances, rituals, mythologies, genders, codes, interactions, spaces, places, systems and more. Believe it or not, in the context of your new soda, your frozen food, your car insurance or your consumer segmentation algorithm, these areas of inquiry can be critical to your business and its future growth. Exploring big, human, cultural, social, enduring and evolving issues is key to innovation. Otherwise, you’re just doing market research.
When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, consider the topics its team wants to explore and the questions it wants to ask. If they plan to ask consumers what they think of a test flavor, chances are you’ve been bilked. That’s for focus groups, not the field. Some of the issues and questions you will be familiar with, but there should be an original or unfamiliar spin on them. Some you might be unfamiliar with, but the ethnographer should be able to explain why investigating them are critical. And some might seem just plain strange. That’s okay. Strange is good. It creates room to explore and, sometimes, discover valuable surprises.

FIELD FLEXIBILITY
Business anthropologists know when they’re beat: sometimes a client doesn’t have the budget or time to go into the field, sometimes the field is inaccessible because the subject is too fleeting, private or otherwise unobservable to justify designing an ethnographic project around it. And so we have to find another way to deliver the “actionable” insights every client needs. Enter the anti-focus group. Idea Couture offers a variety of less on-the-fly research approaches. Depending on the method, the setting or the purpose, we call them Customer Context Labs or Co-Creation Sessions. Part participative design (getting consumers to join in on the ideation process for nuggets of inspiration), part informal chat sessions (getting consumers to open up about their lives and the topic at hand), a room or a skate park or a bar or a restaurant or a mechanic’s garage becomes the setting for gathering the raw materials of innovation.

When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, understand and appreciate what they’re saying when they tell you they can’t. Sometimes there’s a better way. I’m constantly astounded by the quality of insights and information that I get every time I sit down with groups of six boomers, Millennials, tweens and so on. Sometimes I even break those market research rules on ‘group think’ by inviting a group of friends to join me. Often, I combine this approach with more traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Either way, if designed and conducted properly, sessions like these can be invaluable to answering critical business challenges. The one caveat to guaranteeing more successful sessions is the Bob Marley approach: who feels it, knows it. Clients who join the ethnographer in these sessions will be better able to understand, appreciate, own and socialize the findings in their organization.

TEAMWORK
The classical model of ethnography is romantic: lone anthropologist struggles to get funding to traipse into the wild, arrives in the wild, embeds herself in the lives of her informants, does her work, and madly scribbles notes between bouts of dysentery that will one day get published as a monograph. The business model of good ethnographic research is anything but solo – and there’s not that much dysentery. One anthropologist can conduct the fieldwork, but I prefer bringing designers, experience architects and strategists into the field when it’s feasible and fiscally sound. That way, when it comes to synthesizing, presenting and socializing findings and recommendations, the whole spectrum of a client’s needs are accounted for. 


When hiring a firm to conduct ethnographic research, look for the team. Bad ethnographic work is bad ethnographic work. You paid for it. It’s too late. But reams of paper deliverables have been delivered to clients as a result of solid ethnographic research that are gathering dust under all those Mintel reports simply because they were written up by someone who didn’t appreciate the scope of the business challenge, didn’t have the support to bring their work to life in tangible product, service or platform ideas, or didn’t have the management consultancy types to successfully socialize work with the C-suite.

That socializing – of the work, the insights, the recommendations, the ways forward – is critical to the people who conduct ethnography. We don’t do this just for the fun, the money, the endless nights in hotels away from our families, the thrill of understanding humans or the glasses of Pinot Noir with dinner before clubbing with Millennials into the wee hours of the morning. We do it because we want to make businesses better, products more powerful, services more smooth and experiences richer than ever before. Do you?