Anthropology, The Oscars and the Creation of Personas

Like much of the country, I watched the Oscars this weekend. As I witnessed various Hollywood talent receive their awards, I started to reflect on what makes a good actor or actress. How do they transform from character to character, and how does this differ from who they are in real life?

As I got to thinking about this, I realized that the key to good acting is ethnography at it’s finest. It’s studying and understanding a character so deeply that you can embody them (the inside-out perspective, if you will). While anthropology doesn’t go as far as to try to play the people we study, in my particular line of anthropology I’d argue that we actually have a harder job in the creation of tools like personas.

Let’s start by looking at the Wikipedia definition for personas. It states, “A personality, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor.” If we took out the phrase, “played by an actor,” would that be very different from the definition of personas in marketing?

The marketing specific definition states, “Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.” What I’m interpreting is that the only difference is in the execution – actors “play” the character, while marketers deliver them on paper.

Ultimately when developing the marketing version of personas, both of those definitions apply. In developing personas, they should be real, believable, and hopefully Oscar worthy. They need to include such attention to detail that they can be used as a strategy and design tool. In some ways, I’d argue that those developing personas have to go one step beyond acting because their “characters” must transfer to the other players in the production seamlessly so that anyone member of the troupe can play that role.

Good personas are the result of a three step process: research to gain an ethnographic understanding of target audiences, the embodiment of those archetypes through analysis and synthesis of that research, and the creation of a performance of those characters that can stand up to the toughest critics.

So is anthropology that different from acting? Maybe there’s a career change in my future…Or maybe Los Angeles is getting to my head.

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.

Is Undercover Boss Guerilla Ethnography?

There’s a new show on CBS called Undercover Boss where C-suite executives from companies like 7-Eleven, Waste Management, and White Castle go undercover within their own companies. Over the course of a week they try a series of jobs on the front line of their organizations and learn invaluable lessons about their companies.

While their methods and practices certainly don’t comply with the ethical guidelines of the AAA (American Anthropology Association), what they are revealing is that ethnography can be a valuable tool for turning the lens on our own organizations.

It is participant-observation that gives them an honest and uncensored view of their company from the perspectives of the work force. In each episode, the executives learn things they never would have thought to consider, how their policies are impacting the front line, and the realities of their employees’ professional and personal lives.

What we can all take away from this is that the view from the corner office is extremely myopic. Executives don’t have to go undercover to see what’s happening within their companies. Instead, they should be spending time on a consistent basis understanding the day-to-day happenings at all levels. Over time, they will find that their perspectives widen and when they make decisions in the boardroom, they will increasingly positively impact efficiency, effectiveness, and moral.

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!