A Refreshing Look at Ethnography in the Corporate World - A Post-Mortem on the Forrester Consumer Forum

Two weeks ago I attended Forrester’s Consumer Forum in Dallas Texas. For those of you not familiar with Forrester, it is a research company that produces analyst reports on business, especially in the realm of technology. Every year they hold a Consumer Forum where marketers, researchers, and business folks from both the client and agency sides gather to learn about consumers. This year the topic was “Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Consumer.”

At the conference we heard from leaders at American Airlines, Blockbuster and Citi, as well as leading analysts from Forrester itself. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Josh Burnoff, a Forrester Analyst and co-author of Groundswell (a fabulous book on social technologies that you should pick up if you haven’t already). While hearing from all of these high profile business people was fabulous, the highlight of the conference for me was a session on Qualitative and Quantitative methods.

This session had two speakers on research. One was from a market research company and the other from Wells Fargo. The latter is the one I want to mention today.

As a practicing anthropologist in the field of marketing, I often hear and read about ethnographic research. However, as most anthropologists will attest, this is quasi-ethnography at best. Most of this type of research in business encompasses some limited methodologies of ethnography, but misses the main point of understanding people in their native setting in an attempt to understand them from the inside out. When I heard that this speaker was going to be talking about ethnography, I was curious, but of course skeptical.

To my surprise and delight, she presenting a refreshing perspective on ethnographic research. Each year, Wells Fargo conducts one ethnographic study. Understanding that true ethnographic research is both resource and time intensive, they don’t try to cut corners and thus only conduct one such study a year.

While I’m happy to give you details about the study itself and the results presented - the point here is that companies that are doing true ethnographic research are seeing significant return on their investment. It’s certainly tempting to cost-cut and speed to market with traditional marketing research such as surveys and focus groups, but those only present what people say, not what they do. As any anthropologist and many market researchers will tell you, what people say and what people do are very different. Ethnographic research takes both of these views in context to gain a deeper understanding than most methods.

As an anthropologist in business I am constantly looking for innovative ways to conduct ethnography. Wells Fargo has given me hope that ethnography is not just a myth in the corporate world. I believe that social technologies provide a means to do this in a way that satisfies the time and cost restrictions that exist in an applied context. I look forward to discovering and discussing the progression of ethnographic research over the next few years.