10 Tips to Conducting Ethnographies

Getting into the heart and mind of your consumer is one of the keys to successfully marketing your brand. One of the best ways to understand your consumer is to conduct an ethnography.

What’s an ethnography? The ethnographic approach is used by anthropologists and social scientists to study cultures or social systems. Marketers have co-opted this type of research to help them understand consumers and have developed their own methodologies to get rich insights on how to better market to them. Simply put, an ethnography helps you learn about your consumers in their natural environment – whether it be in their home, their car, their workplace, or their social hangouts.

Ethnographies can be utilized in many different ways, and I’ve done many different types of ethnographies. I’ve shopped with foodies at their local grocery store, and then followed them home to watch them make a meal. I’ve watched hair stylists transform their female clients. I’ve hung out with young 20-something women in their apartments, and then followed them to their local bar for a night out. While I’ve met consumers in restaurants, bars and coffee shops, a vast majority of the ethnographies that I do happen in the home. While many of my examples may come from home ethnographies, they also apply to conducting ethnographies in other places.

When conducting ethnographies, you should adhere to the same best practices as you would with any other qualitative research. But ethnographies also have additional considerations that worth knowing about. With that in mind, here are ten tips on how to effectively conduct ethnographies for your brand.

1.  Screen for the right person

Developing a great screener will help you get the right candidate for an ethnographic study. There are many factors that will help you design your study, but in general, if you are looking to understand drivers in your category or brand, you’ll want to talk to people highly engaged in your category or brand. This might mean recruiting frequent purchasers/users, or consumers who spend a higher than average amount in your category. If you are looking to improve brand loyalty, you might want to talk only with your brand users. If you are looking to drive brand growth, you might want to include competitive users in your study. Include psychographic questions in your screener to make sure they are engaged in the category and additional open-ended questions to screen for articulateness. Make sure you pre-screen your respondents, even if you have a great recruiter. This ensures that you have a top-notch candidate that fits your screening criteria, and it will give you an opportunity to establish rapport before meeting in person.

2.  Develop an effective moderator’s guide

When writing a moderator’s guide, it’s important to start with the objective of the research. What do you aim to learn? Are you trying to understand why a product isn’t doing well? Are you repositioning your brand for growth? Are you looking for innovation opportunities? Once you identify the key objectives, then you can start crafting your moderator’s guide to get the most out of your time with consumers. Start off the guide by getting a sense of her life - What does she do for a living? What does she do for fun? Who does she live with? What’s important to her? Get a sense of what a day in her life is like. Then you can start delving into the category you are interested in and then more specifically around the products and brands she uses. Always start from the broadest topic and move to more specific topics, and avoid jumping around too much. Finally, a moderator’s guide shouldn’t be prescriptive. It’s meant to outline the crux of your conversation with a consumer, but it should also allow for off script conversations and meanderings, as this might lead to some very interesting insights.

3.  Bring a camera or a video camera

You’ll definitely want to take a camera (either still or video) on your interview. Video is a great way to document your interview, make DVDs and edit them into short videos. You can also bring a camera and a digital recorder to document the ethnography. Photos or video will help you tell the story of your consumer when you are ready to share it with your organization. Take a photo of the respondent, her home and anything she shares with you during the interview. Make sure you get permission to take photos, audio, or video beforehand and bring a release form which specifies that the images will only be used for internal communications. When reporting back to your client or organization, photos help paint a picture of your consumer and her life.

4.  Be considerate and don't overwhelm your consumer

Someone has just invited you into her home and her private world. Be respectful of her environment and be mindful of not overwhelming her. That means that you should have one main moderator who’s directing the questions. That doesn’t mean that other participants can’t chime in. By all means, ask away. But find natural ways to interject questions without derailing the conversation. A good moderator will always invite questions from others when the time presents itself. Also, you should consider how many people you feel comfortable bringing along to an ethnography. I love having my clients there with me to hear first-hand from their consumers. But I like to limit it to one or two additional people. Ask them to participate by assigning one person the task of taking photos, and the other to take notes. Be mindful also of the gender breakdown of your group. For example, if you’re talking to women about a sensitive topic – like birth control or feminine products – it’s ideal that your moderator is female. That’ll ease your consumer, particularly if there are male clients who come along for the ethnography.

5.  Make time for 'Show and Tell'

One of the benefits of being in a person’s home is that you get a firsthand glimpse into how she lives. It’s also a great way to see what types of products and brands she relies on and why. You can deduce how important a product is by where it’s stored and how accessible it is. Home visits can also illuminate some inconsistencies in a consumer’s attitudes and behaviors. A consumer might say that he only buys a certain premium brand, but then you discover private label products in his cabinet. Or a consumer might say that she eats really healthy, but then you find canned meat by-products and sugary drinks in her pantry. These discoveries are good fodder for getting deeper into consumers’ behaviors (without making them feel self-conscious, of course).

6.  If you have time, have consumers do a demonstration

While this might take a while, demonstrations are great ways to see your brand in action. When I did a study for a baking brand, my team asked consumers to make a dessert. Because we had many other things to discuss during the ethnography, our bakers made something ahead of time, and then they decorated it in our presence. We were able to discuss all aspects of the baking process and then in real-time, understand the needs in decorating and presenting desserts. I’ve done demos in handbag usage, skincare, haircare, and food preparation, to name a few. Have your consumer talk you through her demonstration so you can understand her emotions while using a product. Demonstrations can illuminate interesting insights that can lead to product improvements, innovations and marketing communications.

7.  Build in a variety of approaches into your ethnography

Depending on how much time you have with your consumer, you should think of a variety of exercises to maximize your learning. A true ethnography, particularly ones used in the social sciences, are typically long observations over many months, even years. Since you likely won’t have the luxury of doing this, but you can find other ways to get at deep insights in a shorter period of time. Here’s one way that I approached a 5-hour ethnography to understand family media usage in the house. We arrived at the house when the children came home and first observed silently. We interviewed the tween for 45 minutes, then did more observations when the working adult arrived home. We conducted a game which I called ‘Family Feud’ – a parents against kids game to understand television usage and programming preferences. Then we observed dinner. After dinner we did an interview with the parents. Now that’s a VERY long ethnography compared to most of the ones I do (which are usually 90 minutes to 2.5 hours long). But it’s an example of how you can use different approaches to maximize your learning. Use a combination of interviews, observations, show and tell, demonstrations, and games to keep the conversation interesting.

8.  Use exercises and projective techniques to understand your Brand

If understanding brand perceptions is a key objective of a research project, you can utilize some exercises that can help you diagnose your brands strengths and weaknesses. A simple exercise is a brand sort. You write down your brand and your competitors’ names on index cards, and then instruct your consumer to sort them by a number of different attributes. You can have them cluster the cards to see how they view the category. Your consumer can rank order the cards in a specific way – like from healthiest to unhealthiest. Another variation is to bring actual products to the ethnography and construct your exercise around the physical packaging. These exercises can help you understand how consumers perceive your brand relative to your competition. You can also ask projective questions like the ones I’ve outlined in my post about Brand Character or have consumers pick images of unrelated objects that best reflect your brand. These exercises will help identify key associations for your brand that will assist you in strengthening your brand positioning.

9.  Respect everyone’s time

When you design your study, hopefully you’ve accounted for everything you’d like to explore with your consumer in the allotted time. Make sure you show up on time, make introductions, take care of paperwork, set up your equipment, and monitor your time throughout. When you write the moderator’s guide, divide it into sections so you know how to transition from one area to the next, and write down the approximate time it will take to go through each section. If you’ve spent half an hour of a 90-minute guide in her general lifestyle, you won’t get very deep into her attitudes and behaviors around your category or brand, and you’ll run the risk of running over. Stay focused and finish on time.

10.  Be prepared for the unexpected

Every ethnography is different. And you never know what you might encounter. For the most part, you’ll have a great conversation and you’ll uncover really great insights that will help illuminate a path forward for your brand. But - there will be times when things go wrong. A consumer might cancel on you at the last minute, leaving you short on your sample size. That’s why it’s a good idea to schedule a few more ethnographies in case of a cancellation. You may also find yourself in a situation where the respondent is the wrong person for the study. I’ve only had to walk out of an ethnography twice in my career. If, for any reason, you need to exit a person’s house, do so politely and graciously, and make sure to follow up with the recruiter on why that person wasn’t appropriate for the study. Make sure you don't jump to dismiss a respondent too quickly. Once I walked into a home with my client, and discovered that the woman we were interviewing was a hoarder. There were boxes and books piled to the ceiling in her living room. The woman also had a half dozen cats, and my client was allergic to cats. We ended up doing the interview on the porch, and while my initial instinct was to leave immediately, she ended up being the best interview we conducted for that study. So, in a nutshell, you will encounter many things in people’s homes. Keep an open mind and be prepared for the unexpected.

So there you have it – ten tips on conducting ethnographies. Ethnographies are my favorite way to understand what makes a consumer tick. If you’re looking for insights on how to strengthen your brand’s messaging or stretch your brand into new categories, ethnographies might help lead the way.