To know more about your customers’ life aspects is an essential step in defining an effective strategy and many companies are now aware of this need. Unilever, Citroen, Toyota, Kraft Foods, Pepsico, among many others, seek in ethnography a way to achieve higher — and, why not, more humanised standards. To better understand the reality of its audience, the first step is to leave aside any preconceived idea and bias.
A ethnographic research applied to consumption means to be immersed in the reality of the audience, looking to understand their daily lives, ways of acting and reasoning about life and learning what the logic and the mechanisms behind each culture and behavior is.
Through empathy, observation and analysis, considering a branding strategy ethnography is a way of transforming insights generated by research into ideas and ideas into innovative products and services that truly dialogue with the audience. IDEO, a company recognized worldwide for making Design Thinking known (a human-centered methodology focused on innovative products and services), uses ethnography in the immersion phase (beginning of the process). Using in-depth interviews, photographs, field daily records (everything that is seen, heard and felt), among other tools, ethnography research is made of real participation of the researcher in people’s daily lives, so that it can capture how the consumer interacts, uses or thinks about a particular type of service or product.
A great example of the use of ethnography can be seen in a General Eletrics case. Doug Dietz, a GE medical equipment designer, was at a hospital when he saw a child crying because the equipment was scary. Doug decided to redesign the experience, turning the examination rooms into fantastic and entertaining scenery such as the bottom of the sea, a ride with pirates and a jungle. By stepping into children shoes and making a funner and less stressful exam, the solution helped to reduce from 80% to 10% of the use of sedatives in children, and consequently reduced hospital costs, increasing the number of tests and most important, the wellbeing of patients.
Ethnography is also useful to understand the relationship between consumption and our own identity. According to Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and vice president of Intel’s Corporate Strategy, we use certain types of products or services to say who we are to ourselves and to others: the cars we drive, the technological objects we use, the apps we download. It all says something about us or who we want to be. According to Box1824, consumption nowadays has the tendency of being less and less compulsive, meaning consumers are beginning to associate status to what they buy and not the act of purchasing. When people start to think more about what they’re buying, they start to choose brands’ speeches carefully − looking for the reasons behind their ethical and moral values. A good example of appropriation of this trend is The One for One, a Tom’s shoes initiative: every time a pair is purchased, another one is donated to someone in need. Consumption in this case equates to a political and a social act.
Frequent social, economic and behavior inconsistencies have now transformed the consumer, making them even more skeptical and demanding: tired of the repetition of marketing and empowered by social networks, people expect brands to communicate transparently, closely, and to always provide surprising experiences with their products.
It should be noted that today, consumer trends do not necessarily follow the “top down” flow anymore, which means, from the upper to the lower classes: many influences come from the exact opposite direction. Due to the increase of jobs, income and the reduction of social inequality, between the years 2003 and 2014, about 40 million of Brazilians migrated from classes D and E to class C. This niche hitherto neglected, became the the population’s largest share. With no specific knowledge about this audience, some brands have faced great challenges trying to understand their new consumption patterns and the influences brought by this audience.
To provide products, services and experiences better aligned with the behavioral profile of its audience, its representations and perceptions of reality, we must put aside our world view and start seeing through the eyes of others.
