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.