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?