Use Ethnography to Sniff Out Customer Wants

Customer-centric companies create products that customers want and need.  But what if customers don’t know what they want?  How do you conduct research for solutions that customers cannot even envision? One option is to explore the use of ethnographic research.

When customers don’t know what they want or even if they have a need, it may be difficult to gain unbiased insight through traditional inquiry-based research techniques such as surveys or focus groups. Ethnography provides an approach companies can use to investigate latent customer needs.

Purchase Your Assessment

Ethnography entails observing customers interacting with a product or service in their own environment.  As a result, it can often be used as a precursor to inquiry-based research methods.  By avoiding structured inquiries, ethnography avoids possible biases in surveys and questions and minimizes the chance that respondents will provide false information.

Four Steps for Conducting Ethnographic Research

Ethnography is concerned with “methods for describing interactional particulars.” Conducting ethnography or observational research requires entering into a research setting and then monitoring, recording, and interpreting the behavior of research participants and, on occasion, interacting with them.

There are four primary steps associated with ethnographic research:
1. Determining “what” and “who” are to be investigated
2. Determining the research setting
3. Collecting of data
4. Analyzing data

When to Employ Ethnography

Ethnography is well-suited to investigate things that are not easily quantifiable but can be observed.  You can observe anyone who can provide reliable information about the phenomenon being investigated.  Once you have an idea about what you want to explore, you can select a suitable setting or place where the field experiment takes place.  Settings can be public, such as parks, libraries, airports, shopping centers, residential areas, educational campuses, or less public places.

Once you have selected the setting, the researcher goes about collecting data.  The data collected is often descriptive in nature.  As a result, data analysis is not statistical.  It takes experience and expertise to interpret the data in a meaningful and relevant way.  Often, the result of ethnographic research is in revealing the right questions to ask in an inquiry-based study.

Ethnography takes expertise and time.  Observational research usually covers a lengthy span of time, which companies may not have in today’s competitive environment and compressed product cycles. Even so, it’s a technique worth exploring if you want to understand cultural trends, attitudes, and lifestyle factors that influence buying decisions and invent products relevant to how people live.

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