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.

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.