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With consumers
facing so many choices today, it's never been more important
to understand and listen to them.
At the same time, it's never been harder to connect
and collect information from consumers. Traditional research
may miss key trends because it relies on consumers'
decidedly poor ability to evaluate and discuss
their emotional and non-rational decisions.
"Marketing
problems these days are harder to solve, and standard approaches
tend to reveal the same learning," says Louise Southcott,
chairman of research firm Link Consumer Strategies.
What
if there was a way to discover consumers' motivations,
behaviors and marketing influences without having to depend on
them to accurately reflect those? There is. It's called
Ethnography.
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Borrowed
from anthropology, ethnography "is the study of behavior in its
naturally occurring context," explains Richard Elliott, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Research at
Exeter
University
in the
UK. "Other research is
about asking questions; this is long-term observation --
precisely what [marketers] lack and what makes it different to
any other form of research."
Many radio programmers, GM's and sales managers, without
realizing it, practice a form of ethnography regularly with their
spouses and kids. When we observe them listening to their IPOD,
choosing a station, reading the mail, interacting with friends,
etc., then question them to better understand their behavior,
we're undertaking ethnography. We incorrectly characterize it as
"a focus
group of one," or "my focus group at home."
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Focus
groups work in artificial settings and artificial contexts with a
moderator setting the scene in a sterile room. “Ethnography
situates consumers within the larger social and cultural
context,” explains Donna M. Romeo, Ph.D., an in-house corporate
anthropologist at Whirlpool. Instead of focusing on opinions as a
focus group does, ethnography looks for a 360-degree understanding
of how a product might resonate with the consumer's daily life.
"Such
research can give marketers an advantage in learning not just what
customers want, but what they will want," says Eric Arnould, Professor of Marketing at the
University
of
Nebraska. "Ethnography is a way to get up close and personal with
consumers," he says. "The beauty of the methodology,"
says Patti Sunderland, an anthropologist and partner in B/R/S
Group's
Chicago
office, "is that it's inductive rather than deductive. Part
of the idea of going into peoples' homes or workplaces,
etc.," she explains, "is that you're discovering from them what
the meaningful categories are."
"Toothpaste
marketing, for example, used to be about fighting cavities and
whitening teeth. But ethnographic research found that consumers'
concepts and concerns had changed," explains
Sunderland. "People are really concerned with gums, their
tongue -- the
whole mouth," she says. "When they're putting the
toothbrush in their mouth, it's not just cavities that they're
interested in anymore." Toothpastes such as Colgate Total,
which purports to "continue to work even after you stop
brushing," are designed to appeal to this broader concept of
dental care.
For more
information on ethnography, please contact Tripp Eldredge at dmr:
859-655-9200, ext. 103.
dmr regularly updates our site with important new ideas and applications for marketing. Be sure to check back each month to get our latest insights and how they apply to the broadcast industry.
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