Don’t blame Kim, Khloe and Kourtney. When it comes to the current state of TV, the Kardashians and others of their narrative ilk are neither the culmination nor the cause. Like Gigolos, Coal, Jail, Cops, Real Housewives, The Ultimate Fighter and Pawn Stars, their second generation of so-called reality TV provides a portal into human experience and alternative identification that no amount of Boston Rob can ever compete with.

Don’t blame the platforms. With high subscriber satisfaction paving the way for intelligent advertising and a migration of the Internet’s targeting, tracking and recommendation functions, PVR is just discovering its potential to generate revenue. And with the likes of Netflix drooling over the $800 million valuation of streaming TV, watching online isn’t the culprit either. Both will put money into the production coffers for years to come.

No, TV isn’t broken because it’s going broke. TV is broken because so much TV sucks. Case in point: Game of Thrones. Don’t know the show? Here’s how HBO describes it:

Based on the bestselling fantasy book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author), this sprawling new HBO drama series is set in a grounded fantasy world inhabited by ambitious men and women of both honor and ill-repute, much like our own real world. In the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, whoever controls the Iron Throne holds unbelievable power, and the series centers on the rise and fall of several families that covet that power at all costs.

Forget metaphor or allegory – the only intrigue in Game of Thrones is how this show got made. A clear, present and dangerous signal that the organization responsible for giving the TV show a new set of legs over the past decade is slipping in a big way, HBO’s latest begs the question: If these guys are slipping, what does that mean for the overall state of serial or episodic small screen fiction?

That HBO is slipping with Game of Thrones is a point of personal assessment and concern rather than an alarm bell sounding in the TV business. Because of its sheer content scale – as well as ideas generated out of creative shops like HBO, Showtime, AMC and some of NBC – the past few years have seen a surge in the quality of ‘the show’.

A recent quick poll of Idea Couture employees reveals the scope of what viewers connect with and some of the reasons for those connections:

- The Killing (“honest characters”)

- Weeds (“subversive, challenges gender stereotypes and makes me think about the concepts of right and wrong”)

-The Walking Dead (“human frailties, political commentary and survival fantasy”)

- Fringe (“I miss X-Files and it’s the closest, next best thing”)

- Law and Order SVU (“a long journey that’s never disappointed”)

- 30 Rock (“fucking hilarious”)

- Love It or List It (“where my fantasies play out come true, and make me feel like I’m living what they’re going through”)

- The Mentalist (“quirky and psychological”)

- America’s Next Top Model (“creative ideas coming up almost every time”)

- Archer (“funny and engaging stories that make cartoon characters look super attractive”)

To that list, I will add a disclosure of my current favorite TV shows: True Blood (for an exploration of our culture’s sexually charged romance with power, life, death, immortality and transformation) and River Monsters (for a fisherman’s ethnographic-like exploration of place, fear, mythology and the quest).

Some viewers have discovered something in Game of Thrones, too. The first two episodes scored a respectable 2.2 million U.S. viewers. That number climbed to 6.8 million via HBO’s OnDemand, and you can probably add another half million viewers who watched on the following Monday nights thanks to Ice Films, EzTV, TV Break, Megavideo and others grey market streaming sites.

And some viewers haven’t, like me. My issue with Game of Thrones is that its story just doesn’t seem relevant. To what extent that applies exclusively to me and others who watched episodes one and two with disappointment or applies to a wider demographic that never watched or will fall off the cliff before Episode 3 will only be revealed with time. I suspect I’m not alone though, and the reason is clear: zeitgeist.

TV, like Hollywood, has an odd relationship with zeitgeist. Sometimes it gets the prevailing mood or trope, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it drives that mood or trope, other times it reflects it. While doing one or the other, however, it always feeds on itself, following the Sneeze Rule where, every year or so, we get three law shows, three medical shows, three pawn shows, three junk buyer shows, three forensic science shows, three ghost shows shows and so on. Hopefully, two more Game of Thrones aren’t in development.

What ingredients of the zeitgeist might have inspired HBO to develop a teleplay of Game of Thrones? At first, the only signal I could locate to suggest there was a suitable scale of viewers who couldn’t wait for The Hobbit to provide them with majestic steeds, warrior’s garb and talk of valerian steel and dragon bone was Evony.

Then I thought longer. Lots of people are into combat, deflowering maidens and political maneuvering. But don’t the UFC, the Internet and the Birthers fulfill their desires? Maybe it has something to do with economic or other uncertainties over the future driving a desire among white Americans to live in simpler times? That could be it, given that the fiction of George Martin and others in his genre works as romantic fantasy for white men to reclaim an imagined, Euro-centric mythical past when we were all a little bit Celtic, when wenches didn’t complain about a good ravaging, and when the barbarian hordes who threatened to deflower them were suspiciously brown.

If that’s the inspiration for developing this into a show – and the zeitgeist is there among enough viewers to make it a financial success for HBO – go for it. Write off this and any ensuing criticism as the ramblings of a bitter old man frustrated with the fact that HBO has yet to develop a show around Weaveworld by Clive Barker, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill or Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear.

If Game of Thrones turns out to be a financial flop, however, consider investing in design thinking. The front end of the design thinking process – used by some of the world’s leading brands and businesses to generate, develop and validate ideas before they come to market – could be just the thing that battling channels like HBO, Showtime and AMC need to gain competitive advantage in this transformational time for TV.

So what happens at this front end?

At Idea Couture, we encourage our clients to conduct a comparative industry scan at the beginning of almost every job. Rather than leveraging ideas from within industries, we believe that more valuable signals for where to go come from outside your business. For example, if a client asks for help developing a cosmetics line we might suggest scanning new and emerging cooking or food cultures to understand the languages and ingredients of health, nourishment and inner beauty. Then, to more deeply assess if and how an idea is needed, wanted or might fulfill some latent, cultural or zeitgeist-y demand is to do exploratory (open to whomever, whatever) or more targeted (with a specific consumer, market or other focus) field research by an anthropologist or sociologist.

The aim is to beat the flu of ‘me too’ innovation where, like TV and Hollywood, brands and businesses continue to suffer from the Sneeze Rule. The result is always more than three ideas. And the process is longer, more detailed and more business oriented towards the middle and end. I’ll save that discussion for a later time. Until then, HBO, Showtime and AMC – please consider, or reconsider, Bear, Barker and/or Hill.

Is J. Jonah Jameson calling the shots on the theater scene, or what? An article in The New York Times reports that the producers of the Broadway musical, Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark, recently held focus groups to figure out why critics had largely panned the show.

I’m no fan of focus groups, but how anyone could expect to learn anything of value by letting participants only get to see Act I or Act II, fill out a questionnaire and then join a 15 minute discussion is beyond me.

What’s even more beyond me is that focus groups are, according to the Times article, not unheard of on Broadway. That’s sad. While I do have a populist streak to my view on culture, the idea that the collective expertise, experience and creativity brought to the stage by writers, producers, directors, actors and all could be tossed aside by the opinion of a sample of a supposed audience makes you wonder what’s next: Christian fundamentalists helping revise the next English translation of the Quran to make it more in-line with U.S. readership? Registered voters getting a first pass at the next Obama speech? Anime fans making over the Sistene Chapel? Movie goers getting to call the shots on the next Hollywood blockbuster?

Oh yeah, they already do that one.

In response to the news, Steve Portigal asks an interesting question on his blog: “Do we admire producers for being user-centered or do we decry them for being desperate?”

This isn’t a case of being user-centered. If the producers of the show were at all user-centered, they would have listened to the Spidey sense of Marvel fans and critics long before beginning production. That would have told them they were way off on the zeitgeist, that Broadway had already crossed the line on cannibalizing pop culture and that swing, not sing, is the leitmotif of Peter Parker.

Creativity by consensus kills the arts. Focus groups are little more than an abdication of responsibility and executional wisdom. The answer, Steve, is desperate. Forget Dr. Octopus – let’s hope the focus group participants pummeled this Spider Man senseless.

In a recent blog post, Grant McCracken suggests it is the job of designers to conduct provocation and innovation through pie.

He points to Project M as the source of this uniquely American metaphor with its Pie + Conversation = Ideas/Ideas + Design = Positive Change equation. As a first step towards ideas that better the world, Project M believes that “pie can bring people together.”

Notwithstanding Grant’s anthropological magicking of the subject matter with references to gift economies and turn takings, much of the gist of his post is on the value of bringing people together to mine their ideas and interactions through indulgent and interuptive moments that occur while eating pie. Of course, he advocates the need for social scientists familiar with Marcel Mauss and Charles Goodwin to manage the “social and cultural mechanics” of what is said and done during those moments.

In referring to gathering input with pie slices as part of the design process, he writes:

Some people who wish to make a social difference don’t really care to hear from the Pie recipient. They have a vision of the new world, and they mean to keep banging away at this vision until the pie recipient embraces it. But if we have learned anything about engaging the world it is that it can’t be about us. Our best efforts must begin with a study of them.  

I wonder about that, especially when it comes to innovation and design that occurs in the business world rather than the philanthropic world. Here, the issue isn’t about facilitating insightful conversations with consumers over tasty pie. For me, that’s never been an issue. The issue is implementation, adoption and the secret filling of innovation: innovation is only innovation if it offers a new or improved way for humans to do things that they already or will do. Otherwise, the big ideas is just another idea. And we all know what ideas are like. Grant addresses this issue when he writes:

Designers are very good at thinking about provocations. After all, they are in the imagination business. They are trained to look at existing systems, spot where stasis lives, and think of ways to make things new. What designers are not so good at, in my humble opinion, is figuring out what happens next, what comes after the provocation. Handing out pie…does have the potential for provocation. But something substantial happens if and only if new arrangements are made visible, thinkable and doable. Pie qua pie will not get this job done.

At Idea Couture, we’ve baked our share of pies. Some of them, like the Aviva Community Fund and the MIT Global Challenge, have had social change as their key ingredient. Thank designers for that, and a guy in Edmonton who provided a spark of an idea. Others that were not about generating ideas to better the world but designing new and innovative product or service revenue streams, have had a few teaspoons of transformation snuck into the recipe.

In almost every project, we begin our efforts with a study of them. Before that, there is always some kind of tacit knowledge about the sponsor of the project: the grapevine, stakeholder interviews, collaboratively refining project plans, and past experience. But maybe that knowledge shouldn’t be so tacit. Maybe it should be more provocative, purposeful and pursued to ensure that the “something substantial” and “new arrangements” actually get out of the oven and on to the table.

Why? Well, when you are a design movement, you are often the only baker. Yes, there can be a conversation with them over pie. But you buy the ingredients. The recipe is yours. You set the temperature on the oven. Maybe you cut the slices and serve them. But when you conduct design work for Fortune 500 companies, the kitchen can be a more complicated place.

Like pies, kitchens are bursting with the rich and tasty flavor of metaphor. One of my favorites is that the kitchen is a stage. As a place to remember, rehearse and perform who we are and who we want to be, every fridge and cupboard is filled with meaning, purpose, intent, function, dysfunction and history – even when they are empty. When that stage is crowded with multiple bakers (with their own ideas, their own ingredients, their own baking methods and their own meanings, purposes, intents, functions, dysfunctions and histories) actually getting pie on the table can be a challenge.

I agree that asking those sitting around the table what kind of pie they want can be a critical component of getting the bakers to do what they should be able to do best to serve the needs of the hungry. Extend the conversation to include smells of pies, memories of pies, places of pies, people of pies, attempts to bake pies. Bring in Human Factors to watch pie in the making. Throw open the doors of the kitchen to let loose a co-creation of pies. But if those hungry consumers are not going to own the pie, name the pie, manufacture the pie, bring the pie to grocery stores and market the pie, then I think it’s equally critical that the entire pie design process begin with a study of us.

I think it takes very little to provoke their ideas. It takes much more provocation to ensure that the bakers deliver something to the table that truly fulfills the pie eaters’ needs and wants. Rather than faulting designers for not being able to follow through on “what happens next,” I think they – along with strategists, anthropologists and others working within and for organizations – need to more effectively provoke their corporate sponsors. For the sake of the anthropologists, it would be nice if that could be done long before we consider provoking consumers for their ideas and interactions.

To begin, two questions that are always in the backs of our minds but, perhaps, need to come more to the front of our tongues:

1. Do Americans really need another pie?

Obesity is a major health crisis in the U.S. (and Canada, too), and some Fortune 500 companies are contributing to the crisis by encouraging consumers to stuff their faces with more pie. The shelves on grocery stores are bursting with them.

When considering innovation and design, everyone in the kitchen needs to ask, Is there a real appetite for this? Do Americans really need another pie? If the answer is no, then why are we even talking about ingredients?

To get to the answer, over pie or not, organizations need to talk about why they continue to create clutter and cultivate calories in an era when many of us want to simplify, even purify our lives. If it’s about feeling the buzz of being part of this innovation thing, maybe the C-suite should consider something like an extension move into the celery business. Designers need to talk about why they’re taking another pie gig. If it’s just for the money, they should remember that the best pie is made with love and what they ultimately pull out of the oven could be a total disaster.

2. Who wants a piece of the pie?

Everyone’s hungry. Me-Too Innovation afflicts enough large organizations it’s no wonder so many of the good and/or new ideas are being brought to market by small companies and start-ups. Examining institutional, processual and cultural barriers to innovation isn’t something most organizations are willing to fund, unless they are actually trying to build an innovation process rather than simply adopt job titles to reflect the dubious existence of one.

Cue the Tina Turner song: we don’t need another knock off. If an organization does engage in the copycat business to keep its sales scale tipping, fine. But at this stage in the game, there’s little to no reason in talking with consumers. Like Grant says, it’s just “banging away.” A more valuable use of conversational time, over a slice or not, would be to talk about some of the causes and symptoms of Me-Too Innovation and, perhaps, address that corporate cultural malaise with an institutional ethnography.

I’d be interested in any other pie-related questions and concerns you might have about designing projects that come to fruition – blueberry, strawberry, rhubarb, whatever.

In a business culture of innovation, there are some things you should never hear:

Seeing is believing. Who feels it knows it. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Humans love idioms, those catchy little phrases that make the world seem so much more simple than it really is. Like GPS systems programmed through tradition and by consensus rather than through position calculation and by engineers, they cling to sophistries that allow them to navigate their own social and cultural complexities with the confidence that, as long as they agree on having correctly arrived at a destination, the route taken was the correct one.

It wasn’t. Like husbands who refuse to accept the fact that they can’t follow maps while driving, idioms can lead us astray.

Because idioms are collocated words that, over time and like bits of garbage in a dump, stick together until they are fused into one sticky mess, we forget just how originally mismatched they might be. How can seeing be believing? Or feeling be knowing? Or the communicative value of words be subject to a higher currency exchange when trading up for a single picture? They aren’t and they can’t, except for the fact that the sheer span of time over which they have been used and the consensus that language groups amass over that time have made them so.

Idioms, like assumptions, can make an ass out of you and me, especially when they are of the type that require a sharing of an epistemological framework rather than an, arguably, more simple linguistic one. In using them, we run the risk of abdicating our critical faculties to become sociological simpletons.

Here, I’m not ignoring language as the progenitor of epistemology. It is; how we talk about the world helps us make and perceive the world we live in. Instead, I want to raise a contrast with the oldest idiom in the English language: kick the bucket. We all know what it means – die – because we are part of the language group that assembled the word ‘kick’ and ‘bucket’ together to express the end of life. Simple or harmless enough, right?

In combining ‘seeing’ and ‘believing’, however, we give birth to a phraseolexeme of more epic proportions, one that requires us to leap from a combination of things that have been put together to give us a quicker, easier and often more amusing or light-hearted way to capture an idea to a combination of actions, emotions and sensory inputs that, when combined, support certain mythologies of the world that help us ignore or, to conjure Roland Bathes, ex-nominate the complexities of the world around us.

Idioms are an anathema to innovation. They fuse organizations to assumptions, cultural mythologies and fossilized ways of seeing and talking about themselves, their business and, more importantly, their consumers.

Case in point: the consumer research game. Virtually every market research department in every major organization is founded on an idiomatic understanding of consumers. Psychographic caricatures of actual humans, like the Active Mom, have become business idioms used to simplify and, more importantly, agree on the polysemy of what are lived preferences, behaviors, opinions, attitudes and needs rather than PowerPoint descriptions such as, “Mary is a successful real estate agent who struggles to balance taking care of her three kids with her love of pilates and desire to eat healthier breakfast bars.”

Big organizations thrive on small ways of seeing and talking to themselves about the world of consumers. It seems necessary, considering the amount of work to be done, the short windows for socializing ideas internally and the efficiency that is required to transform ideas into products or services via multiple stakeholders, partners, agencies and channels. But it can lead to missed opportunities.

Don’t blame the market research department. They’re just following orders. But the oversimplification does seem to begin there. Whether it’s the result of a lack of fascination with human complexity, a lack of training or experience in decoding that complexity, or simply following age-old work processes, traditional research models, methods and modes of communicating findings from them are one of the reasons why internal innovation initiatives fall flat on their face.

So how can market research departments create better innovation opportunities?

RELY ON MORE THAN JUST SEEING TO BELIEVE
Observations are not insights. There is tactical value to observed behaviors, like watching a consumer have difficulty opening your package, but these can only be applied to refinements or extensions of your product or service. Insights are the result of observation, maybe conversation and an ability to frame data both in the context of the consumer’s experience as well as a theory or theme that helps to explain (and act upon) that experience. Given that believing typically needs to the claim of knowing, it is critical that researchers do more than observe to create their insights and find more creative ways to communicate those insights than show stakeholders what they have observed.

STOP JUSTYIFYING KNOWLEDGE BASED ON FEELINGS
Research personnel love to point out that they know they are not the consumer. They are consumers and they do feel it, but that still doesn’t mean that they know it. Good researchers understand that great research is the result of a calculated balance of subjectivity and objectivity. There is no formula to casting off your assumptions in and beyond the field. Instead, understanding and communicating consumer lives requires a phenomenological approach, some clinical analysis and team of sounding-board collaborators – all of which help you get to know and get you beyond what you think you know.

FIND BETTER WAYS TO SHARE YOUR FINDINGS
In this business, we love PowerPoint. But our love of it limits (for those whose presentations suck) and structures (for those who understand how to tell stories in it) our capabilities to communicate our findings and insights. Photos from the field are more subject to this rule than text or charts. A picture might be worth a thousand words to someone who took it and knows the context in which it was taken, but the amount of interpretation that can be read into that picture once it moves beyond the author leaves room for misinterpretation. Photos, like music, are not a universal language. Annotating them with the interpretations, insights, explanations and contexts that give meaning will safeguard them down the line. Incorporating them into scenarios or experience maps will help lock that meaning down even further and provide a more valuable tool for executives, brand managers, designers and other downstream audiences.

AIM BEYOND YOUR TARGET
Organizations that subscribe to developing products or services only for target consumers run the risk of missing social, behavioral or usage adjacencies that might exist elsewhere. Sure, your focus groups tell you (probably because that’s how you recruited participants in the first place) that so-called Active Moms are a fantastic target for breakfast bars. But if you haven’t had a real breakthrough in the breakfast bar category in years or, for that matter, ever, maybe it’s time to start learning elsewhere. Instead of Mary, consider Mike. “Mike likes to watch late-night UFC fights at home in his Tapout t-shirt and underpants while eating Oreos. He thinks breakfast bars are for sissies.” Trust me, you’ll learn something from Mike that you can use to understand him and maybe even apply to Mary.

I hate the word “consumer.” But I’m not sure what to do with it.

It drives me crazy when clients talk about “the consumer” like they’re some kind of other species out there foraging for nuts and berries in Wal-Mart, Rite Aid or the shopping malls of America. If only they could find the perfect combination of nuts and berries in their business offering they’d be able to lure “the consumer” to their section of the aisle.

It saddens me when clients profess an understanding of this other species based on some “quant-qual” they’ve done. Tossing around methodological pats-on-the-back like this bolsters their confidence that systems of knowing “the consumer” are (here comes another bad word) robust.

And it makes me scratch my head when members of the C-suite worry aloud that they’ve become too distanced from “the consumer” and that’s it’s time to roll up their sleeves, get on to the street and meet this other species.

Maybe it’s the cultural anthropologist in me. Anthropology long suffered from a similar disconnect from the humans it wondered and wrote about. It has wrestled with various ways of qualifying or quantifying the behavior of those humans. And one of the foundations of its ethnographic process is a meet and greet with the natives in the places and spaces where they live, breathe and experience the world.

The epistemological angst is much the same. The critical difference is that the scholars have acknowledged their obstacles, shortcomings, histories and such while the business world has not. One obvious reason for this is that most of the people populating the cubicles of the world’s big corporations are interested only in, capable of or too busy to digest little more than the PowerPoint version of the social universe. Another, related to this, is that many in the business world live by methodology alone. Theory, and a discussion of it, is – as they say – out of scope.

As a result, most of the big business world has never reaped the rewards of post-modern or post-structuralist thought – at least not on the level of public discourse. Certainly, strategists, consumer insights folks and others come home from a busy day at work, have a beer and reflect on their day, tasks, projects, challenges and such. But in the face of corporate silos, jockeying for jobs and the many tactical barriers to real innovation at any level, questioning the way organizations think, act and talk is bitching-based fodder for the water cooler rather than something that is perceived as possible to change. And so we have “the consumer,” the business world’s equivalent to anthropology’s primitive Other.

Where anthropology’s Other was exoticized as sexual, violent, magical, natural, primitive and savage, the business world’s Other is quite mundane. Consumers, or so I hear, aren’t that smart. They’re simple, not very sophisticated. They have fixed daily behaviors and preferences that can be tracked with surveys. They’re easily led to new, or refashioned old, nuts and berries with a spin or words, colors, stories or loyalty programs that will entrance their lesser minds. And they live in odd little communities called personae or segments.

If it sounds like we’re still living in the era of Mad Men, maybe a little Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can lead us into the present. For those living La Vida PowerPoint, the short version: how we talk about things influences the way we see those things and the world in general. Colors, numbers, spaces, people, relationships and the other ingredients of our world all appear to us to be what they are as fact based, in part, on the ways that we name and talk about them.

The application should be relatively clear. In always referring to the people who buy your products and services as “consumers,” you (the client) and you (the agency guy) have erected a first obstacle in your quest to understand and leverage your insights for competitive advantage. You have constructed a linguistic framing of “the consumer” as the Other in which they are not you and you are not them.

Put aside, for the moment, the fact that, unless you get your groceries and gas for free (and even then we’re in questionable territory because there’s the issue of where you choose to redeem your coupons), you, too, are a consumer. Then consider the following: this linguistic framing of “the consumer” as Other is an infection that courses through the blood of the C-suite, Strategy, Insights, Design and other organizational departments. It paralyzes action. It distorts vision. It leads to lethargy. And, in the worst of cases, it drives businesses to abdicate its role in work processes to the opinions, attitudes and ideas of this “consumer.”

How? It reinforces other barriers to knowing that previously existed (before the birth of the Consumer Insights department) between social categories of humans: if you live in New York City, the people living in Idaho might as well be in China; if you’re rich, the poor are another world; if you’re a man, women are a mystery; if you’re straight, the gays have all this disposable income.

Enter segmentation, psychographics and the persona. Engaging with the Other in tidy groups based on age, gender, race, economic status, education, geography, attitude, behavior and other, more brand or product related distinctions certainly makes some feel like as if they are getting closer to a more granular version of the consumer. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t.

Is the Active Mom, the Early Adopter or the Social Butterfly really a more accurate drilling down to the core of the “consumer”? Or are those terms just another way to make us feel like we’ve cracked the behavioral code of the species, another organization mythology we subscribe to in order to make our jobs more simple and efficient?

Some bullet points I know many who’ve made it this far wish had been put up front:

• Refer to “consumers” as “people (who buy our stuff or who might buy our stuff)” and you’ll be a hop, skip and jump closer to cultivating stronger insights

• Chill out the fantasy that methodology will answer your questions. It won’t.

• Ask yourself if you’ve even asked yourself the right questions.

• Stop pretending to be so objective. You’re not. It’s an illusion.

• Be more subjective. Ease up on the boundaries between “you” and “them.”

• Cast a wide net. Segmentation has its value, but so do warm bodies like yours.

• Explore first, validate much later. You’ll be surprised at what a little wondering can do.

• Co-creation is not asking the “consumer” what she wants. That’s a focus group.

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?

Product or service design to introduce new or tweak existing sales is one thing. Service-cum-experience design for the purpose of encouraging healing and transformation is another. A brief article on Fast Company details some inspiring ethnography+ methods that informed Astorino’s design of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. To get the full scoop, make sure you download the Research PDF.

Early adopters are typically described as curious, adventurous consumers who buy first, talk fast and spread the word to others about the pros and/or cons of what they have purchased. According to Everett M. Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations, the landmark 1962 textbook that popularized the study of how new ideas and technologies spread through societies, early adopters make up 13.5% of the consumers who will adopt an innovation.

If you’re facing the bell curve, they occupy the initial climb upwards, right after the 2.5% of those people who create an innovation. Following them is the early majority (34%), consumers who make their moves through the market more carefully, but tend to adopt a new product more quickly than most. At the hump of the bell curve is the late majority (34%), consumers who adopt a new product only after the majority has weighed in on its value. Finally, sloping downwards are laggards (16%), the critics, curmudgeons and haters who do their best to resist making the purchase but will eventually do so.

The problem with this bell curve is that it is a mathematical model, one that was never designed to represent the social context of innovation, the diffusion of innovation or early adopters. In looking to crack the code and harness the coveted word-of-mouth that can be generated by the approval of early adopters, designers, brand managers and researchers need to look beyond the numbers. Without a deep understanding of and appreciation for early adopters, they risk operating in a cultural void where assumptions can lead to product ideas that have no relationship to reality.

Those assumptions can be traps, particularly if chasing numbers on a bell curve leads to designing products that target only early adopters and, in the process, destabilizes brand identity or alienates core consumers. We’ve identified potential traps that brands and businesses often make when pursuing early adopters.

1. Early adopters are 13.5% of the general population.
This is a common misconception. Rogers’ curve isn’t saying that there are 880 million early adopters in the world; it’s a visualization of the13.5% of a population that – in the context of an innovation – adopts early. Early adopters are not a demographic, a cohort or a segment; they are a cultural phenomenon identifiable only by how they perform.

2. Early adopters are opinion leaders.
This is not always true. It’s only true if the early and late majorities actually follow the lead of early adopters who feel compelled to talk about a new product. If they don’t, the first-to-buy crowd is just that. Or they’re the suckers who bought HD DVD, Motorola’s ROKR E1 or Windows Millennium Edition.

3. Early adopter word-of-mouth is the goose that lays golden eggs.
It can be. But six months later – if they discover a flaw in your product, get bored with it or see everyone else jumping en masse on to it – early adopters often drop an innovation. The majority notices and they too might abandon ship.

4. Early adopters are fiends for the new and sexy.
This is true if new and sexy are part of a product category that fulfills their interests and/or needs. But new and sexy exist across categories, and early adopters drift through categories depending on what they need or are interest in. One consumer’s treasure could be another’s trash. Context determines if an early adopter of one category will consider a product in another category new and sexy enough to be relevant, and worthy of purchase.

5. Early adopters are cool.
Some are, some aren’t. Confusing early adopters with ‘cool’ and the fluid, contextual boundaries that define it – or any other litmus test used to define a market research cohort – is a strategic misstep. Rather than seeking to identify cool cohorts who might spread the word about a new product, it is more useful to identify the product categories that cohorts consider cool as well as the degrees to which their talk may or may not be generated in the context of a new Twinkie flavor vs. a new iPhone application.

To help interested parties get over the bell curve, avoid the pitfalls of false assumptions, and begin to appreciate the context and complexity that exists beyond the numbers, we have compiled a series key insights garnered from our team’s extensive research on early adopter culture in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

FUTURE VALUE AND POSSIBILITY

Early adopters have a greater degree of product prescience than most consumers. They look at something new and say to themselves, “This is going to…” or “I can use this for…” or “What if I?” They recognize the different or latent values and benefits of a product as it relates to functionality (How am I going to use this?), usability (How will this work?) and sociability (What’s this going to do for me in public?). Intrigued by possibility and familiar with the challenges in a product category through previous experience and research, they are more willing to absorb the risks that are associated with purchasing something in its 1.0 or beta phase. In fact, without the sense of a first frontier being designed into or lying dormant in a new product, many who would be early adopters are less apt to purchase something that is merely a tweak on an existing concept.

PLAY AND MASTERY

To forge into that final frontier, early adopters experiment with innovations. They engage in play to master a product. They go beyond instruction manuals to the guts of a product and engage in practices of deconstruction, alteration and customization. They collaborate with their trusted networks of like-minded alchemists to learn what others have done with and thought about the new product. And they go to their imagination where the possibilities await them through play. Their drive to push the boundaries of an innovation is driven by the personal and the public: early adopters tend to be curious and adventurous people; many derive great pleasure and personal satisfaction from displaying the knowledge and status that comes with mastering a new product.

INNOVATION AND THE BODY

As any wise brand sensei will tell you, the best brands often function as extensions of a consumer’s personality or as communicative symbols to express identity, social membership, cultural affiliation, prestige, desire, priorities and more. Brands help us perform and display ourselves as we walk through a world where the tiniest of symbolic flourishes can make all the difference in standing out and being counted. One way to attract early adopters through design is to consider the degree to which an innovation will engage consumers by making their performances more embodied and more physical. During the inspection and discovery of a new product, early adopters consider how visual and/or tactile features add value to products by helping them navigate realms of “How?” and “What If?” through physical play and performance. Products with new, sense-centric ways of ‘doing’ that challenge the interaction status quo will stand above and apart from others, but only if they tap into intuitive or latent ways of doing. Consider the thumb stroke on an iPhone, the physicality of the Wii and how their accelerometers connect hands and eyes so that users navigate and dominate the digital world through embodied, analog performances.

THE EXCLUSIVITY CYCLE

Experiences of exclusivity motivate many early adopters to take risks on a new product. There is a thrill (and status) to being the first to explore, adopt and adapt. Take the underground club DJ, the first adopter and ultimate tastemaker for an early majority that followed his product lead in music on the dance floor throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. Like most early adopters, his exclusivity cycle begins with attraction and anticipation: hearing through the DJ network about a new music genre or crazy track and imagining how it will fit into the context of his set. This is followed by pre-release research: digging deeper into the source, style and sound by hunting down details through niche media, word-of-mouth and social connections. Then comes ownership, play and mastery: purchasing a limited release 12” record, playing it and (hopefully) rocking it like nobody’s business. Finally, there is the possibility of rejection and release: somewhere between that track being released on CD (for the early majority), radio (for the late majority) or the soundtrack to a car ad (for the laggards), the cool factor is gone and the DJ moves on to pursuing the next exclusive sound. By that time, he has already told his followers on the dance floor that the track is dead and they too move on to the next new thing.

DISCOVERY CHANNELS

Believe it or not, you can learn a lot about early adopter retail behavior from Shark Week. What, you ask? Well, how about….

• the never-ending search for the richest source of product
• the subtle forms of communication that pass between members of a herd about where to find product and how best to consume it
• the confident knowledge that once they have arrived at their destination few (if any) other consumers can compete with them
• the constant and voracious appetite for new product.

In exploring the ocean of innovation, the channels most frequented by early adopters function, like Discovery, as destinations for learning. Like feeding grounds for sharks, they are social places to exchange knowledge and experience about what it means to be a member of the species and how to perform that membership. When seeking to decode the culture of early adopter retail, it is critical to understand three key and related areas.

• Interaction competency, the know-how required to socialize and communicate in a specific social context. By virtue of their interest, research and/or previous experience, early adopters are proficient in the rituals and decorum of retail behavior related to a product category.

• Language constituency, the subtle or seismic shifts in consumer vernacular that transcend traditional market research segmentation models to manifest within a specific product category. Talk is never cheap, and early adopters prove and earn the privileges of membership in retail spaces through the language of product knowledge.

• Cultural capital, the display of knowledge and status that comes from owning and using a product first. To cultivate and display their cultural capital, early adopters often gather in channels where staff and customers are equally adept in participating in a feeding frenzy over product knowledge.

BROADCASTING

In seeking to climb the bell curve, many brands and businesses limit their interest in and investigation of early adopters to their capacity for broadcasting – their ability to transmit viral-like information and excitement about a new product to a next wave of consumers. Whether through old media (e.g. hipster print), new media (e.g. Twitter) or even street level word-of-mouth, the cultural capital cultivated by early adopters and recognized by the early majority makes them trusted sources of information, opinion-formers and co-authors of new knowledge on what’s hot and what’s not.

In recognizing the potential value of early adopters in the launch of a new product, many brands and businesses want to bum rush the bell curve and get as quickly as possible to this feature of early adopter culture. But to focus on designing or leveraging word-of-mouth at the expense of not investing more resources and research in the other features of early adopter culture would be a major, if not fatal, flaw. Talk – especially good talk – isn’t cheap, and it doesn’t come freely. Nor does it come first.

A recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describing how consumer feedback (or lack of it) impacts the design of cars once again reinforces how ethnographic studies trump focus groups in concept development and testing. It points out that the 2010 Ford Taurus and Buick LaCrosse were designed with input from ethnographic studies. That’s a step in the right direction for Detroit. Problem is, the article unknowingly outs those who conducted this car ethnography as having only conducted one-on-one interviews and sat with owners in their garages talking about favorite features. Talk is great, but how about a test drive? Like a prospective buyer, a research firm might want to consider hitting the highway with consumers before claiming their insights represent any kind of heavy metal thunder.

Last year around this time they redesigned the cans. Millions of dollars in the making, the result, as many critics loudly announced when it first dropped, is a flop – little more than a played-out font from 2004. A while back they redesigned Tropicana. Also in the making range of millions of dollars, the result, as consumers railed, was such a flop it was recanted from the marketplace. And I noticed on Grant McCracken’s blog a while back that they followed those up in fine flopping fashion with a third misreading of the intersections between consumers and “design sensibility” by messing with Gatorade.

Sales numbers on the horizon suggest that a big G and a small lightning bolt have confused consumers once again. I would have noticed the change on store shelves, but my wife refuses to drink the stuff any more because it’s too sugary so I don’t look there anymore. Maybe it’s not even in Canada. When it comes to Gatorade or, for that matter, Tropicana, I don’t really care. But more on that later.

In discussing the Gatorade switch, Grant points to that maddening corporate drive to be “cool,” “hip” and “edgy,” rightly pointing out that this youthful cachet is worth about 2% of the culture. Arnell certainly seems to be a guy who has had much success in flexing his cool so, I guess, when the decision from the top down was to engage in some redesign he probably thought his ideas would “evolve the brand.”

Whether it was genetic drift (chance deciding a trait like a bad font will be passed on from designers who used it in ‘04) or random mutation (caused by an error during meiosis or DNA replication), PepsiCo’s evolution has been something of a Darwinian debacle of late. Perhaps the reason for its recent failures is that PepsiCo does not understand evolution or, at the very least, appreciate that the brand-as-being is about so much more than its phenotype.

Let’s begin with the most known of Darwin’s ideas, natural selection. For those of you who didn’t have to teach Intro to Anthropology over the course of too many years, this is when genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become more common in later generations of a population. Like innovation itself, successful changes in the traits of a population rely on the degree to which change is introduced and maintained in that population. PepsiCo’s redesigns are mutations of the kind that are introduced from outside the population and, because they don’t “work,” are rejected. In the world of cola, they’re no Rae Dawn Chong. The lesson here is that, in the quest for brand fire, make sure you hire a design consultancy that doesn’t just understand the brand but, when possible, has love for the brand.

PepsiCo’s failure to understand its own evolution is, ultimately, a failure to understand itself as part of an organism collective that consultants typically refer to as “consumers” but, for the sake of being an anthropologist who hates ascribing nouns to people that transform them into distant others who we are not, I will call the “population.” Were PepsiCo’s new brand traits to be found particularly robust, useful and pleasing to the population, they would have been selected. Instead, they’ve been rejected.

As a lifelong citizen of the Pepsi population, this saddens me. But I know why Pepsi failed. It failed because these redesign efforts behaved, with Arnell as the figurehead and fall guy, as if they were nomadic marauders from another population thinking they could roll up and shoot some of their sperm into what was a perfectly happy, peaceful population and turn our hair blonde and our eyes blue.

With Tropicana, as soon as we saw the smoke from your fire we got our spears, snuck up on you in the grocery aisle and killed your ass. To doubly punish PepsiCo for its transgressions, some of the population started spreading the word like wildfire about how Tropicana is made. So much for the fresh & natural branding, huh? Who knows what the state of the design intruder might be when the Gatorade numbers come in? Oh, and by the way, my population and I remain ready, willing and able to form a hunting party to kill the Pepsi redesign.

With Pepsi, PepsiCo made the mistake of the outsider. Pepsi isn’t Nooyi’s brand. It’s mine. I was there before her. I will be there after her. It isn’t Arnell’s brand either. His Newsweek ranting about washing his hands over the entire affair makes that very clear.

Who are these outsiders who think they can mess with my brand? Given the extent to which social media figures in our lives, how could they ignore evolution by population consent and put their hopes of introducing new traits into the hands of one man?

You’d think that there would have been some kind of co-creation exercise planned way in advance of Arnell getting his designer hands on Pepsi. Between “consumers” and “cool” something along the lines of an online Design Your Pepsi campaign might have fared better. I say might because, in terms of design, the Pepsi population was doing just fine, thank you very much. Those of old enough to remember had already survived and adapted to the evolution of the can and, within the existing ecosystem, continue to keep that DNA alive by ordering a bottle from nearby Central American restaurants.

It’s the DNA I’m worried about. Mess with it too much and you’ve got a sick and dying mutant. Don’t test its limits and you’ve got a weak and apathetic brand. The middle ground is not visual design – phenotype is an expression of change, not change itself. The middle ground is the DNA itself – code, culture and the memories of a population.

Memories rule. For a brand like Pepsi, memories are the DNA. In the cool consumer consultancy realm of brand heritage, they are the lifeblood. This is where PepsiCo should be investing – on and in the population itself. Through the narrative modes of words, pictures, songs, dances, whatever, populations tell their stories, transmit their myths and values, teach the young, celebrate the past and maintain the Durkheimian organic solidarity that, quite frankly, PepsiCo is lacking.

My memories are rich: Mom buying a case every Saturday; a Pepsi and a Mars bar during Love Boat and Fantasy Island every Saturday night; sitting on the front porch on a sweltering August day during a rainstorm with a cold one; accompanying the first beef patty I ate in Negril while watching Tiger and Frankie Paul on stage; the disappointment every time I go into a fast food joint and discover it’s aligned with Coke; and so on and so on.

Memories are a basic, 101 ingredient of Web 2.0. How could PepsiCo have missed that and spent on Arnell? I don’t know, but every time I pop a can in the office I wonder why my drink is in such a lame can. Then, wrapped in memories of bottles in the days before online contest codes when you peeled the rubber from the cap to see if you’d won a free one, I wonder who relied on a focus group (not the population!) to tell them that Pepsi Natural was a better name for Americans than Pepsi Raw. After that, I wonder when PepsiCo in Canada is going to get it on shelves here. All this wondering….shouldn’t I know? I’ve been living in the Pepsi population since I was first allowed to drink pop. Like my most recent memories of the brand, that’s sad. For PepsiCo, sad is bad.