So, borrowing some of this knowledge from anthropology, it would be wise to read one of the previous lines again: “ethnography is merely the exercise of testing a hypothesis.” This might sound as a simplification, and well, it might be. But the basis of ethnography is to test a pre conceived idea or hypothesis in the “real world” and applying the ethnographic method of observation, analysis and comparison with other known cultures or marketing groups. Anthropology has discarded the idea that the methodological approach of ethnography is free of any preconceived notions or that it gives a “true”, or “more true”, look at people’s ways of living (or consuming, for this matter). Instead, scientists arrive at the observation point (a tribe, a poor neighborhood in a city or individuals and families, as costumers, in the modern days), with a clear idea of what they are going to watch, which conducts they wish to observe, which attitudes are going to be analyzed and to whom or what they are going to be compared. This is far different than the idea that an ethnographer, of any sort, arrives at the observation point and gets to see the “truth” of costumers concerns which was previously veiled by the partial study of focus groups or the inconsistent method of polls.

It took over a century for anthropology to understand the notion that observation, from any perspective and under any approach, is always veiled and is always imbued by the “luggage” of preconceived notions that the scientist (or marketing researcher) carries along. It sounds unreasonable that marketing takes this approach so lightly and assumes that its results are, oh my, the truth that had always been in front of us and yet we couldn’t see. Thank god for ethnography then. But researchers are missing huge methodological steps. They are assuming that mere observation and analysis, let’s say: living in the same house for a few days with a bunch of consumers, will drop results as to what consumer habits are and what are their real experiences with the products. But ethnography can’t say this. Nothing can, except the consumers themselves. The point is that we see what we want to see, and if it’s not present, then we define it by the negative statement: Family A lacks consuming habit W1, or whatever. Many aspects of our true behavior will be lost in these analyses, because a respectable ethnographic study is based on regular, prolonged and intense fieldwork. And even after years living with the same tribe, the study may still be obscured by our previous ideas about consumers.

The point is that applying a methodological approach of a social science without actually taking into account the vast concerns that it carries along, simply sounds wrong to me, at least from a practical point of view. Unless it’s done properly (which doesn’t mean that it has to be done by an anthropologist), it’s useless. The observations that derive from ethnographic studies are first analyzed, synthetized and ALTERED by the researcher. It’s not, and will never be, a direct look at consumers tastes or conducts, but a reflection of what the researcher wanted to observe and how the researcher transformed those “facts” that were observed into valuable information for marketing departments of big corporations.

My honest opinion, it’s banal. Yet I'm really interested in the debate. My opinion was not aimed directly at anyone and I made no remarks to other people, or the author's, comments, not because I didn't read em, but because it would simply make the task of writing too painful.

P.D.: my apologies if I have spelling, grammar, etc., mistakes. English is not my native tongue.

This is a fantastic article. It succinctly defines a much-maligned term and sets out its limitations as well. It's sheer marketing laziness to play back an insight as an ad. However, I like the fact that Nokia's product design is informed by this kind of work – I found their "loudspeaker" and "silence" features to be tremendously useful.

They do have a ways to go when it comes to advertising. Much of their advertising in India seems category-generic, with the focus on the product/features – nothing wrong there but each ad could be from a different brand, for all anyone knows and that is something they should fix.

Looking forward to your posts from MSI.

Reynold

A theme I detect from this and your recent posts on co-generation of brands, is that companies wishing to be successful in the interactive economy have to stop viewing their target customers as alien or exotic species, that is, as "the other", and welcome them into (or join them in!) the control room of marketing. When will the reflective revolution of 1960s anthropology reach marketing, I wonder?

Part of this I think is the collision->blurring of consumer and producer as a cultural story, and so advertising repackages what we know about what they do back at us.

Personas – one of the tools that the interface/interaction design community like to use to make sense of field research (personally I abhor them – they are reductive and silly and dangerous in the wrong hands, but beloved nonetheless) – often apppear in advertising. I put one of 'em up at http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com/2006/04/lg-advertising.html

And yeah, you raise a wonderful and painful point about the crappy level of work being done under the banner of user research or ethnography or what-have-you. We've had clients call months after we worked with them, announcing they had purchased a video camera and gone and done their own work out in the field. Oh, and by the way, could they hire us to tell to look at their videotapes and tell us what they mean? Yikes – we obviously did a bad job at demonstrating where our value lay if they thought it was going to require a $400 piece of A/V equipment to replace us. That was back in the bad old days when we thought it was bad-bad-bad to bring "the client" into "the field" because they might screw it up or something.

I love bringing the client in the field – they add value – they always screw it up but I've found that it isn't actually all that fragile and it doesn't really matter too terribly – the interviews are harder to do and don't flow as well and yet we get way more out of them because my clients tell me what surprises them, they have their own analyses, they are already part-way there when the insights come back, because they may not have been able to come up with them but they are able to recognize 'em.

Okay, this is getting off-topic but I could obviously go on.

Hope the event is great! We just got back from Toronto on Monday (not quite as erudite a gathering; it was the American Society for Testing and Measurement's working group on Sensory Research)…

If your earlier post was about ATMs and the archetype of "motherhood," this is about cell phones and the archetype of, well, maybe what's left of "virginity." Communications celibacy. Is the guy I meet "phone-worthy"?

Great post by the always interesting Grant McCracken about the strengths of ethnography, but the too common waekness of simple observation replacing meaning, and its rather insidious creep into its own advertising oeuvre.

You say you don't want disintermediated access to the ethnographer's research, but this, too, is not a problem for me. Or rather, I don't feel it. There is intermediation here, but it is a light touch and that lets the ad seem honest. The ethnographer's eye may have spotted the cultural significance in a women's use of a cell phone to signal relationships and mark social boundaries, but there is little sense of a third party intermediating the experience and telling me as a consumer what this means.

Of course in this, as in many things, Seinfeld was there almost a decade ago, in an episode in which Jerry frets about his position on his girlfriend's speed dial list, makes it to the number one slot, and becomes caught in the middle of a "speed dial war" between his girlfried and her mother.