Earning Client Buy-In on Ethnography

This isn’t the first time that I’ve discussed the difficulty of selling ethnography within the private sector. For business standards, ethnography has a lot working against it – it’s time intensive, it’s cost intensive, it doesn’t yield hard numbers that executives lean on, and it receives a lot of scrutiny for small sample sizes.

Some clients will never get over these so-called “drawbacks”, but if there’s even a twinge of interest, there’s a way to increase your success rate while maintaining the integrity of ethnography: Involve your client in the research-planning phase.

This starts with an initial meeting with the client to determine exactly what they want to learn. If what they are wanting lends to ethnographic research, then write down quotes from the conversation that illustrate the need.

The next step is to plan a working session with your client, where you will map out the research plan together. I’m not going to get into the logistics of how this is done (ask me independently if you are interested) – but ultimately what you are seeking to do is make the client feel like they own the ethnography. They help plan it, they come to understand the value of it, and they are much more likely to take it back to their leadership and push harder for approval than they would with a proposal they weren’t involved in developing.