The Marketing Science Institute meetings on ethnography are
now over. 

A couple of things impressed.

1. The ethnography for corporate purposes is around 20 years old, and already is said to be indispensable for five of the corporations at the conference: Kodak, Intel, P&G, Miller Brewing and Philips.  Wow.  Not bad for a method that was widely sneered at in the early years. 

2. The stand-off between qualitative and quantitative methods may still have hot spots in the academic world, but this contest is now over in the corporate world.  The corporation is method agnostic.  Now that ethnography has been blessed by both A.G. Lafley and the Marketing Science Institute, it a method in good standing, and no longer the dubious stranger who just keeps "barging in."

3. In the early days of corporate ethnography, the insights were sufficiently robust that the method could be forgiven some of its eccentricities and eccentrics.  That’s now over.  New standards are coming.  Some practices and practitioners will have to go.  Qualifications, rigor, discipline, quality control, these are the new watch words.  Unless they are really good (and some are), "self trained" ethnographers should find another field.  This time around, who knows, they might like to pose as surgeons, pilots, or possibly NASA engineers.  But it’s time to go. 

Eventually, the business schools and the design schools will make themselves useful here in the supply of training systems.  But as it stands, almost all the b-school academics who care to teach this stuff were in the room [John Sherry (Notre Dame), Eric Arnould, Linda Price (Arizona), Lisa Penaloza (Colorado), Craig Thompson (Wisconsin) and Rob Kozinets (York and MIT)] and this is not a good sign.  Still, the MSI conference happened largely at the inspiration of John Deighton, a professor at the Harvard Business School and the editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.  He is as impressive a patron (god father?) as the field could hope for.  Perhaps b-schools and design schools will now rise to the occasion. 

4. Ethnography  reels in lots and lots of very messy data.  We can extract value from these data if and only if we have formidable powers of pattern recognition.  This means it is useful to be an anthropologist as well as an ethnographer.  That is to say, it helps if you know something about the formal properties of social life and cultural matters.

But you don’t have to be an anthropologist.  (In fact, a lot of anthropologists couldn’t find their way out of an ethnographic study with a flashlight and a GPS PDA.)  Nor do you need to be a sociologist or hold an advanced degree.  But you have to have spent some time thinking in a formal way about culture and your culture, preferably in the company of the likes of Durkheim, Goffman, Warner, Levi-Stauss, to name a few.  You may choose your own leading lights, your own "pattern suppliers," but you have to have some.  It’s not enough to have "read a book about proxemics" in college. 

Pattern recognition depends upon having many, formal "patterns" at hand.  These patterns do not do the work of analysis.  Our conclusions will always depart from them.   But they give us templates with which to work, and when you are deep in the 2nd hour of your 6th interview of a project and the data are piling up all around you, interpretive options are most welcome.

5. Ethnography has always been a way to make good on marketing’s wish to be "consumer centric."  Ken Anderson of Intel showed how effectively it can help this corporation answer the big question from Theodore Levitt: "what business are you in?"  In Intel’s case, ethnography helped demonstrate that the one of the new objectives was not so much the "digital home" as "digital homemaking."  This small difference in phrase makes for a vast difference in product development and marketing.  It’s the difference between a product development literalism ("let’s wire the home") and capturing the concerns of the consumer and the value for which they will surrender value. 

6.  But Ethnography is also useful because it makes the corporation more responsive.  Everyone know lives in a world that bucks and weaves with novelty.  Michael Kallenberger of Miller Brewing showed as some of the ferocious innovation taking place in the bar.  Beer consumption is falling in part because women now influence men’s consumption choices in ways they never did before.  This is a huge change, both recent and quite sudden.   That beer consumption numbers was falling, this was a simple quantitative matter.  Why these numbers were falling, this came from the ethnographic side.  What to do about it?  This too will in part spring from the ethnographic work, as Miller Brewing thinks about way of repositioning beer to speak to the "bar cultures"  now emerging. 

7.  And that is, as Dominique M. Hanssens, the Executive director of MSI, pointed out, one of the most important contributions ethnography can make.  It turns out to be a good lantern to take with us when we go looking for innovation.   Innovation is not usually a really great idea we find fully formed sitting neglected in a corner of the consumer culture.  ("Velcro, of course!") Innovation often depends on a conceptual cunning, that sudden insight that if we look at this problem or product or person in a slightly new light, everything changes.  (Not a digital home, but digital home making.)  Innovation comes, that is to say, to those who are capable of changing conceptual frame quickly, often and well.  Because it is so good at provoking and then managing messiness, ethnography delivers value here.  Indeed, it sometimes seems to me almost as if purpose build for critical parts of the innovation process.

8.  One of the real challenges that remains stands at the border between outward research and inward process.  Some corporate cultures have a hard time bringing the ethnographic insight fully in-house.  Mike Lotti (Kodak) Ken Anderson (Intel), Michael Kallenberger (Miller Brewing) all showed that the corporations has now drawn so much value from ethnographic work that the way is paved.  Resistance is down.  Transmission is fast.  Insights are lasting.  Lisa Phelan and Alejandra Arreaga (Philips) outlined a "persona" technique that helps preserve the insight through the product develop process. 

All and all, then, a good conference.  It marks an interesting development in the maturation of the field.  This is no longer the "little method that could," no longer the methodological outlier, no longer the party crasher everyone wishes would just go home.  Ethnography is giving up its amateur status, its adolescent excesses, its most flagrant abuses.  It will make the corporation more responsive to consumers, more responsive to the dynamism of contemporary market places, and better at innovation. 

If there is a larger ethnographic/anthropological point to make here, it is that the corporation is a superbly adaptive animal.  I know how difficult it was for the corporation to "get" ethnography.  Here was a method that seemed to break all the rules of order and discipline that marketing had with some difficulty imposed upon itself.  Ethnography was anomalous and a little nervous making.  (I know.  When I was doing ethnography in the 80s, people shouted at me for daring to do so.)  But it didn’t take long before the corporation took on even this.  Unlike the academic world from which ethnography largely sprang, the corporate world, always liquid and restless, always opportunity and advantage seeking, said, "oh we don’t want to do this but we will."  Capitalism was responsive enough to take up this odd little duck of a method, and having done so, is more responsive still. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Marnie Clippenger, John Deighton, Dominique Hanssens, Donna Peck, Ross Rizley, Earl Taylor and the rest of the MSI team for a great conference. 

Ethnography is much used in corporate circles.  As a matter of fact, I’m headed to Toronto to participate in the Marketing Science Institute’s "Business Insights from consumer culture."  It will be jammed with ethnographers and marketers interested in ethnography.  Here’s a sneak preview of part of my presentation.

This interest in ethnography is being driven chiefly by 4 things:

1) the simple recognition that the focus group is no longer the preeminent methodological tool for qualitative inquiry.

2) the CEO of P&G, A.G. Lafley has smiled on ethnography and in marketing circles this is pretty close to a Papal blessing.

3) ethnography is moving through its life cycle.  It is no longer the new kid on the block, and its time to get serious about what it is, how it works, and how it can be managed for corporate purposes.

4) there are lots of bad practitioners now operating, and it is time for the corporation to begin to separate the sheep from the goats.

If ethnography has an obvious advantage, it is that it disintermediates the connection between the corporation and the consumer.  The ethnographer goes into the life of the consumer, sitting in kitchens and living rooms, to listen and observe.  This is good.  Ideally, it means that the corporation can see how the product and the brand manifests itself in home, in use, in life.  The famous and most obvious example of the value of ethnography: a 20 minute video showing a consumer trying to open a package.  "Ah," says the corporation, "we have a design problem." 

This is fine as far as it goes, but some clients are now treating ethnography as if it were merely for disintermediation, only a way to collapse the distance between the corporation and the corporation.  In the partial view, the ethnographer becomes, in effect, the marketer’s surrogate, a way for the marketer to see into the life of the consumer, his or her eyes and ears in place.  The presumption here is that, with a little more time, the marketer would have gone himself (herself) and would have seen pretty much the same thing.  This might be someone struggling with a package they cannot open.  Who could miss this?  The ethnographer is merely a witness to something so obvious it would have been evident to anyone. 

This short changes the method and the corporation.  For the method is designed not just for observation but analysis.  In a mature methodological universe, the ethnographer returns not just with brute observations but with insights.  And this is called for because many of the things the corporation needs to know are not evident on the surface of the consumer’s life.  We have to see beneath the surface into the beliefs and assumptions, the patterns and the practices, that make this life practical and sensible.  No mere "eyes and ears" ethnographer can supply these deeper insights. 

The "eyes and ears" model of ethnography is, I think, one of the reasons that bad practitioners have flourished.  Many are too uneducated or dim witted to offer anything more than surface reports.  More pointedly, they are often too stupid to see the real analytic opportunity or competitive insight.  This means that the corporation is buying only half the method.  More pointedly, many ethnographers are selling half the insight.  Naive empiricism is fine if all we need to worry about is impenetrable packaging.  But when the marketing problem is more difficult, more nuanced, more interesting, this sort of thing will not do.  Certainly, no partial ethnographer is going to spot a BFI.  No partial ethnographer is going to discover a "blue ocean."  No partial ethnographer can hope to perform the higher order analysis that is the corporation’s due. 

Here is an ad from Nokia that helps make the point.  It’s for the Nokia 8801.  The tag is "It’s your life in there."  The ad is available on line (see the link below).  When you get to the website, you will have to select one of several images that are scrolling horizontally.  You want the one that shows a blond woman with the tag "new."  If you’ve got the time, please watch both ads.   The link is here.

Here’s a recap of the second ad, the one entitled "Jill and her Nokia."  Jill says,

"I met a guy last Saturday night and he asked for my phone number and, like, things were going well at the bar, so I give him my phone number and he puts me right into his phone and was like, hey, that’s ,that’s, that’s pretty quick and then he asked me if I wanted his number and I was like yeah do you want to put it down on a business card or something.  I mean I’m a lady!  Who thinks of jumping right into my phone.  I got to take this as a process.  If we call, if we have some sort of thing going."

[The ad shows the Nokia 8801 and the line:] Nokia: It’s your life in there

"It’s like my cell phone is precious, it’s precious territory."

Now this is a great ad in some ways.  It says the Nokia has gone well behind the boiler plate of its PR, which I found online and reproduce, very partially, here:

Nokia is dedicated to enhancing people’s lives and productivity by providing easy-to-use and secure products like mobiles phones and solutions for imaging, games, media,, mobile network operations and businesses.

…we aim to help people get connected and increase the level of enjoyment and productivity that results.

Using ethnography, Nokia has drilled down into some of the real uses of the phone, and especially the way the phone interacts with the consumer’s life.  The second ad shows us that this Nokia is not merely an "enhancement" of Jill’s life but something deeply personal, a way of marking the boundaries of her social life, a way of deciding whether someone is in or out.  And in the first ad, we see that the Nokia is actually a way to remove people from her life, as when Jill "deletes" her boyfriend. 

Now, I would be prepared to bet a substantial sum of money that this ad comes almost directly from the ethnographer’s note book.  Clearly, "Jill" is an actress.  Clearly, this ethnographic moment has been reshot.  Just as clearly, Nokia decided that they liked the insight of the research so well that they would turn the insight into the ad and reproduce the moment of illumination.  They even went so far as to preserve the original cheesy video work. 

I think this is a bad idea.  The first ad (Jill deleting an old boyfriend) is cringingly unpleasant to watch.  Especially "Jill’s" laugh at the very end which happens to catch the pain of this experience rather too vividly.  The phrase "overshare" is making the rounds of adolescent speech at the moment, and it seems particularly apt here.  This is research overshare.  I don’t really want to know about Jill’s anxieties.  Unlike a former president, I don’t want to feel her pain. 

Don’t get me wrong.  The underlying research, the insight that some ethnographer brought back from Jill’s bedroom, is a beauty.  As I say, it moves us beyond the  "we sell communications" model of the corporation.  But it is just an insight, and as such it is too personal, particular and painful too deliver a powerful branding message.  I am impressed that Nokia did their homework.  I am impressed that they hired an ethnographer to capture this insight but I don’t want disintermediated access to the research.  For marketing purposes, this should be the point of departure.  But it should not be our point of arrival.   

In sum, the world of corporate ethnography appears to be leaving an exuberant adolescence and entering what we hope will be a more solemn, deliberate, and useful adulthood.  It will, we hope, put the things of childhood behind it. See you at the conference, if you are going.  Watch this space for periodic reports, if you’re not. 

References

The quote above from Nolkia’s corporate brochure can be found here.