Reciprocity – Fact or Fiction in Marketing?

A key element of ethnography is reciprocity – giving back to those you study. It can come in many forms during fieldwork, from physical gifts or service, to a written history of a group’s culture. But how does this concept translate to marketing?

Last week on Twitter I posed the question of whether or not reciprocity is possible in marketing and advertising. Many people said no, but those who said yes had two perspectives. One that reciprocity is possible, but it is very controlled and manufactured. The second group argued that social media and the internet are forcing marketers to be reciprocal if they want to survive.

I’m going to have to agree with the latter position. Sure, not all brands are giving back as much as they’re asking for – but that’s not a sustainable model. The internet has democratized marketing and advertising. People now have the power to learn the truth about brands and have an infinite forum for expressing their opinions both good and bad. As a result, brands have had to give up control and try harder to form a symbiotic relationship with people.

As an anthropologist in marketing, I find comfort in this transformation of the field knowing that the research I do aims to understand how we can build relationships – not to learn about people so that we can exploit them. If we (marketers and anthropologists) do it right, we can reverse the bad reputation that marketing has earn the loyalty and evangelism of people because reciprocity is a given, not a pleasant “surprise and delight”.

What do you think – is it a dream or a foreseeable reality?

Us vs. The Other

In Anthropology we spend endless hours discussing “Us vs. The Other”. It’s social, political, educational - you name it. The anthropologist vs. those she studies. The school administrator vs. the children he teaches. There’s a constant struggle as we walk the line that divides us from them.

In marketing, the debate goes unspoken, but it exists at the core of what we do. Recently AdWeek reported on a study that found that Ad people had different perspectives on what makes an ad effective than the general public. No, really?

Walk around any ad agency and you will hear constant banter about our consumers or customers, not people – or in many cases us, our significant others, children or friends.

In my last posting I discussed authenticity and the role it plays in both marketing and anthropology – if we apply that to the “us vs. the other” debate, then authenticity means breaking down the walls between marketing-types and customers. Just as Julia Child broke down the walls between French cuisine and the American people, marketers should simply be striving toward erasing “The Other.”

In the new marketing democracy where people choose when, where and how they interact with brands, in order to truly find success we must stop thinking of them as consumers or customers and begin approaching them as people. It is from that perspective that we will be able to create the most effective relationships between brands and people, because we will be designing and creating for the actual needs and desires of people, not what we as marketers assume they need and want.

What Marketers and Anthropologists Alike Can Learn from Julia Child: Authenticity

Vanity Fair recently published an article on Julia Child five years after her death and approaching the eve of the new movie “Julie and Julia.” Now I must admit that while I know the name and to some extent the character, Julia is a little bit before my time. As I read this article, I realized what a feat Julia accomplished having successfully translated French cooking into an American masterpiece.

Born to a wealthy American family, Julia ended up in France through life choices and happenstance. It was there that she discovered her love for French cuisine and wanted to share that love with the United States. To do this, she not only had to literally translate the recipes to use American ingredients and measurements, but also had to construct the guide in a way that worked in an American kitchen. Julia nailed something that both anthropologists and marketers strive to achieve – authenticity.

Julia was a true Anthropologist. While she didn’t have the degree, she did exactly what anthropologists do. It was her love for French cooking that drove her to study the cuisine to a near native level. She worked tirelessly to construct an inside-out view of the food and culture that is such an integral part of France, using participant observations and many of the other tenets of ethnography. Then she had to work backwards to deconstruct all of the elements she had learned and use her native understanding of her audience to authentically translate this in a way that was culturally relevant in the United States. Through this process she wrote her ethnography in the form of a cookbook.

The authenticity of this ethnography was proven through the marketing success the book achieved. Selling over 600,000 copies by 1969 (a huge accomplishment for the 1960s) Julia achieved something that many had failed at before. The point here is that authenticity goes a long way when you are trying to sell something. Whether it is cookbooks, bottles of wine, or children’s toys this remains the same: we should all strive to be anthropologists in our own right. Having an authentic offering positioned in a meaningful way for your audience is the foundation for success for anthropologists, marketers and world-class chefs alike.

New Series Coming Soon

I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to take this blog.

The first thing I need to do is to increase the frequency with which I blog. In order to that, I want to create a series of topics that will keep me writing for a while.

The first series I'd like to introduce is: Applying Classic Anthropology Debates to Marketing.

In this series I plan on exploring things like authenticity, Us vs. The Other, reciprocity and "studying in". All of these debates that happen consistently within the academic anthropology realm, have very real applications to the marketing world, and I'd like to discuss how they can be applied to make marketing more meaningful, real, and in turn, effective.

Please join me in debate, suggest topics, and enjoy!

Why there’s still benefit in doing things the "Old Fashioned" way

I’ve talked a lot before about how one of the major deltas between the business and anthropology worlds is the speed at which ethnography can be conducted. There’s great benefit in ethnographic research, however to do it right takes a lot of time, which in the business world usually makes it too costly from time and financial perspectives.

There are many anthropologists out there who are attempting to solve for maintaining the integrity of ethnographic research, while speeding the process to fit within real-world business situations.

Today I’m sitting here, for the first time since graduate school coding field notes. As I’m doing it, I realize the value in the very process of ethnography. First of all, I can’t just summarize the research – I have to actually read through all the notes that were gathered on this project. Then I have to start looking for patterns in the data by creating codes that correlate with the content. Then finally I have to re-read the notes and apply the codes.

By the time I actually get to quantifying the patterns in the data set, I’ve read the notes that were collected at least three times. I am so familiar with them, that the patterns are jumping off the page at me.

This not only makes writing the report a breeze, it also makes for a very rich document. Had I not gone through this process, I might have just pulled out points that stuck out at the time of conducting the research. Instead, more nuanced findings are identified and reported.

We’ll see how the client reacts to the report, but I’m hoping to employ this process more often in my day-to-day work.

Data Visualization and Anthropology

Data Visualization (DV) is all the buzz in marketing. While everyone is rushing around trying to figure out how they can apply it to their business, I wanted to take a moment to discuss how the discipline of anthropology might benefit from DV.

Traditionally, anthropology is not a quantitative science. All Anthropologists are trained in some form of quantitative methods, and analysis – but our essence is in things observational or qualitative. However, that does not mean that we can’t use data visualization to help organize our data into quickly digestible elements for our client presentations, or in our own analysis to help us identify patterns in our field notes.

Here are a few of my thoughts on how we might use DV. I would love your input on additional applications.

Identifying Patterns in the Data: When using an ethnographic coding software such as Atlas.ti there’s a function where you can export a word count into an excel sheet and how many times they are mentioned in the notes. You can feed this list into one of many word cloud generators on Wordle (http://cli.gs/N31M5H) and it will show you which words “pop”. This can help you easily identify patterns in your field notes or transcripts.





Quantifying Findings: One of the biggest challenges for an anthropologist is the need to balance qualitative with quantitative. More often than not, clients want a quantitative element to their research projects, or at minimum want “proof” of our findings. Data visualization tools can help us put a “wow” factor in our presentations. IBM’s Many Eyes http://cli.gs/Gm8VZDis an open-source site where people make thousands of visualizations. The site allows you to enter your own data into the system and customize the various charts and graphs.






Find and Visualize Online Artifacts: Anthropologists (at least from what I’ve seen academically) are just starting to become attuned to plethora of data and artifacts that are publicly available online. Photo and video sites such as Flickr and YouTube are chock full of artifacts that we can draw upon to further contextualize our work. Tools such as Tag Galaxy (http://cli.gs/yYa5Tq) allow you to type in a keyword and see related tags and the photos that are associated with them.





There’s no doubt many more applications for data visualization to anthropology. The point here is that applied anthropologists have to make their findings accessible to their clients and the people they study. Data visualization is a great toolbox/practice that will support the discipline in presenting findings in a way that is mutually comprehendible and visually pleasing – especially in business. I see the field of data visualization as a way to continue to bridge the gap between the academy and the field, as anthropologists continue to work to find the right formula for conducting valid ethnography within the time and money constraints of the business world.

The Challenges of Corporate Anthropology

Harvard Business Tip of the Day: "Use Anthropology to Get to Know Your Customers"

It's always a bit amusing to me when anthropology and ethnography are presented as a novel and straightforward way to learn more about consumers. The blog posting (http://tinyurl.com/c5hf3f) goes on to say that P&G and Google are using anthropology to learn more about new customers and new markets.

Shouldn't we be using anthropology for ALL customers and ALL markets? The basic premise is understanding the world from your customer's point of view, which informs everything from strategy to product development - something that is useful for every project we work on.

The conversation starter provided by Harvard asks where else people have seen anthropology applied successfully and where it has fallen short. I’d like to argue that where anthropology falls short is where it is not applied appropriately. It is not as though “applying anthropology” is an easy thing to do. There are practitioners out there with advanced degrees and years of experience who are still trying to figure it out, so I dislike anthropology being presented as something that corporations can just pick up and turn on, subsequently producing great insights.

In the business world we are faced with tight deadlines and budgets. Ethnography is not something that you can do overnight and get right. The challenge for anthropologists and other market researchers is to find ways of satisfying both sides of the puzzle.

The conversation in my mind should be more about how we conduct ethnography within the constraints of the corporate world. What methods have worked for people, and what have fallen short?

Local Marketing in a Global World

Global marketing is a tricky feat. For years we’ve been trying to figure out “glocalization” or the concept of global marketing on a local level. While there are hundreds of case studies where local translations have gone wrong and missed the point culturally, we’re now seeing the reverse issue where local campaigns are receiving global backlash.

Last week there was outrage against Burger King’s Texican Whopper, "the taste of Texas with a little spicy Mexican." The commercial featured a tall cowboy with a short and round Mexican wrestler clad in an outfit resembling the Mexican flag. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwpNQWrD8PY&feature=player_embedded)

While this commercial might have been successful on the local level (I’m not sure locally what the impact was), what marketers did not expect was that the commercial would be heard about in Latin America. Almost immediately there was an uproar from Mexico and other Latin American countries. The Mexican ambassador to Spain, Jorge Zemeno, immediately publicly denounced the commercial.

What marketers and anthropologists alike are learning from case studies such as this, is that as consumers become more interconnected through social media and global brands, the reach of our work grows larger and larger. So how do we balance both sides of the global/local equation making sure that our campaigns are locally relevant but globally sensitive?

Crispen Porter in Europe created this commercial. I’d bet that had they consulted with their U.S. or Latin American counter parts, they probably would have been forewarned on the cultural sensitivities they might upset with this content. It’s a clear sign that Crispen Porter, a leader in ad creativity, is not a single global brand, but rather a collection of regional brands sharing the same name.

Sure, having anthropologists or other cross-cultural experts working with your teams is helpful, but co-operation is the name of the game in this global world. As global marketing brands, we must unify the delta between our regional affiliates. While this gets complicated in terms of P&Ls and they way each country’s office is run, brands that don’t form strong partnerships between their global offices are going to face blunders like this.

In the very least, when creating campaigns with references to other cultures, contact someone with some local expertise or run the concept by your colleagues in that country – hopefully they can tell you if you are going to hit a soft spot or not.

A New Cultural Paradigm

As we head into 2009, we are inundated with talk about the recession, the credit crunch, the housing crisis, the stimulus package, and on, and on, and on...There’s no doubt that the marketplace and many individuals find themselves in a frenzy.

If we step back however, and analyze the situation from a cultural and anthropological perspective it’s quite interesting to see what is going on. We are witnessing a number of micro-cultural shifts that together are forming a new cultural paradigm on a macro level.

We are experiencing a shift in our culture of consumption. Our social currency, rituals, and beliefs are changing right before our eyes. And while we can’t at this point name it, if I had to bet on it, I would say that the cultural and behavioral changes that are occurring in response to this economic crisis are going to permanently change the way that we as people consume for generations to come.

Gone are the days of mass conspicuous consumption and unquestioned trust in corporations. What people are experiencing today from the job market to the supermarket is going to have lasting cultural and psychological effects. We have already seen that consumers are being much more careful about their purchases. Furthermore they are fully skeptical of corporate executives. Brands and companies must more than ever prove their value through quality, transparency and generosity – because the culture of consumption has changed indefinitely.

As our clients continue to come to us for answers and advice on how they can make it through these times, remember that it’s not just about surviving today. Price cuts and discounts are a temporary tactic that will only undermine their brands once things get better. We have to remind ourselves and our clients that once the economy recovers from this mess, people are not going back to their old ways. Now is the time to solidify our spot as players in this new cultural paradigm.