What is ethnographic research?
Ethnographic research in business used to be an option the bigger companies used to innovate and stay ahead. These days, it’s a requirement, especially when 52% of customers would turn away from companies that didn’t deliver a more personal shopping experience. With the volume of data available, companies of any size have myriad opportunities to increase customer loyalty by augmenting the customers’ experience.
Benefits of ethnographic study
- Identify unmet customer needs: This gives organizations the chance to come up with cross-selling and upselling opportunities to increase the financial benefits and build customer trust. Companies that can anticipate customer needs see increasing profits over time.
- Develop new products or services: Building customer loyalty allows companies to have a captive audience with which they can grow their business by developing new products and services. Product or service diversification boosts company brand image and profitability and sets them apart from the competition.
- Devise a successful marketing strategy: Blindly marketing to a general base can be a waste of budget. Conducting proper ethnographic studies filters out all the noise and improves customer targeting and marketing customization. It can easily become one of the most effective tools within your marketing strategy that saves you money and helps you stay competitive.
- Position your brand effectively in the marketplace: A strong brand position drives the marketing strategy by determining customer messaging. With a strong brand, customer trust increases and they’re more likely to buy from you. In some cases, they even tell others about your company.
- Break into new markets: Your research may indicate that there are new markets to pursue, thereby increasing your revenue potential and ability to help more people. Your company may even expand its offerings to be more competitive.
- Uncover emerging trends: Ethnography can help organizations identify emerging trends long before the competition or even before customers. Finding ways to understand how the data points you in a particular direction can help you prepare for success and challenges. This is one of the best ways to ensure your business is around for the long term.
Business ethnography research techniques and methods
Researchers use a range of techniques to conduct their research, including:
- In-depth interviews: These are conversational and designed to build trust and rapport with customers within the space of about two hours. The objective is to understand just how much the product or service really means to them.
- Fieldwork: This is an extensive process where researchers try to gain an understanding of how the customer uses the product or service by shadowing them. This can take weeks or months, and customers are often compensated for their time.
- Netnography: Netnography is a term that denotes online ethnography research. Under this modern model, digital communications via devices or social media require close observation of the habits of customers and targeted segments.
Preparing your business for the process and results
Carrying out ethnography studies requires certain skills and expertise that may require you to outsource them unless you have the budget to build an internal team of qualified researchers. One of the reasons you need to have well-trained professionals is because you want to avoid bias in the study. Additionally, the sheer amount of information involved requires a deep understanding of how to sift through it to glean useful data and stand firm when presenting that data, as the results may cause friction within the business.
How to use business ethnography
Getting data is one thing. Structuring it so you get the best information and results is another. To get a better idea of how to use business ethnography data to discover the best results, there’s a five-step process to help marketers maximize their understanding of the findings.
Change to a different perspective
Sometimes, shifting the question you’re asking helps you see it from the other side of the table. This way you don’t limit your strategies based on shallow assumptions.
Collect data
While hypothesis-driven surveying and focus groups are valid approaches, taking the time to dig deeply into the lives of customer segments helps you get data that reflects their true, firsthand experiences.
Seek out patterns
Do deep dives into the data and try to connect the dots and reveal patterns. The objective here is to find the root of the subject’s behavior, and the best way to do that is to take it layer by layer.
Garner key insights
At this stage, you should be ready to question your core assumptions and look for gaps between them and the customer’s assumptions. This is where bias can be uncovered, allowing businesses to get to that next-level insight.
Build for impact
This is where insights become initiatives. Whether it’s inviting further input or simply coming up with a new product, this is where insight is turned into action, and the company’s purpose shifts to embrace that change.
FAQs
What are some examples of ethnography?
Social media analytics is a great example of digital ethnography. Researching this shows what users like and share organically, which can provide valuable insights to marketers. Eye-tracking is another example. Users’ eye movements are tracked across digital content, which can assess marketing efficiency and customer engagement.
What are the disadvantages of ethnography?
Ethnography takes a lot of time because ethnographers need to understand how subjects live and interact, which can take months. In some cases, it’s tough to get a proper sample size that’s representative of what you want to study. Research relies on the honesty of the subject and the relationship with the ethnographer. Finally, there’s the possibility that bias can sneak its way into the data.
How long should an ethnography be?
There isn’t a hard rule about time. Some professionals believe a good minimum is about six months. Despite that, its size and complexity determine how long the research will be. There are some ethnographic research projects that may take a few weeks or a few months.
