The Selfie and Techie Revolution: The Case for Keeping Trained Ethnographers on the Battlefield

If your experience has been anything like mine, the past year has been a blur of Zoom meetings, online research sessions, and virtual conferences touting that “Tech is king; DIY research is queen!” Specifically, in the field of ethnographies, the advice I’ve heard is…

• Send participants a camera!
• Push them questions!
• Give them a selfie stick and a neck device!
• Have them press levers, check boxes, move slide bars, input key words!

As a sociologist and ethnographer, I can hear myself warning, “Hang on! Aren’t we missing something?”  Are these technologies providing us with tools to capture better, deeper, more authentic insights, or just reflections of what participants want us to see (or what they think we want to hear)?

Let me be clear: I am not anti-technology. I’m not fighting for a horse and carriage when a car can help us arrive at our destination more quickly and comfortably. I’m not resisting change or downplaying the need to be agile researchers. Instead, I want to be sure we don’t lose all that is good about classic ethnographies, while embracing all that is good in our techie/selfie/DIY culture.

What is Ethnography?
Let’s define ethnography as the art and science of describing a group or culture, whether they are a tribal group in an exotic land, or a family in suburban Dallas. An ethnographer’s job resembles that of a reporter or a “qually” in some ways, but with a few key differences.
An ethnographer:

• Interviews relevant people (or observes them performing tasks)
• Reviews records (for quallies, this would be assigning pre-work or diaries)
• Weighs credibility of one person’s opinions against another’s
• Looks for ties to special interest groups and organizations
• Writes the story (for clients/stakeholders)

The key difference is that the reporter and qually typically seek out the unusual; the exceptional; the problem; the wrong that needs to be righted; the unmet needs. The ethnographer writes about the routine, daily lives of people.

1. It’s about history: knowing the origins of ethnographic research so we can blend the best of the classic with the best of the new.
2. It’s about agency: confidently advising clients how to achieve their objectives.
3. It’s about value: knowing and calling our place in the ring and in the stands.

1. It’s about History: Looking Back
Imagine your 20-something daughter going off into a culture that speaks a different language, with some cash in a money belt, no cell phone... off the grid for a year or more to learn, engage, write, and return.

That’s my personal story and the story of one of my heroines: Margaret Mead. Born in 1901, Margaret was an American anthropologist who earned both MA and PhD degrees in the 1920s—what a courageous and confident woman she must have been! After expeditions to Samoa and New Guinea, she published Coming of Age in Somoa, which became a best seller. In all, she made 24 field trips among six South Pacific people and is credited with changing the way we study different human cultures. Image at right: Margartet Mead in the South Pacific

From Margaret—and other great ethnographers who have followed her—we are reminded that good research isn’t just about “talking to people.” It is a discipline that has both rigor and a defined process. Before asking the first question, we need to:

• Begin with the problem
• Identify a theory or model, aka the lens through which to examine the problem
• Design the research
• Specify data collection techniques
• Determine tools for analysis
• Specific writing style (e.g., audience specific)

It’s also critically important that we acknowledge the biases and preconceived notions we have about what people think and how they behave. Even our choice of markets, segments, and recruiting specifications reflect various biases. On the plus side, these biases focus and limit the study. On the negative side, they can undermine the quality of our research. To mitigate the downsides, responsible researchers must make specific biases explicit, and should include additional quality controls, like triangulation, contextualization, and a non-judgmental orientation.

2. It’s about Agency: Advising Our Clients
Every good researcher’s goal is to meet their client’s business objectives for the research. But great researchers seek to get to a deep understanding of people and their culture or subculture. This informs what they believe, how they form meaning, what they desire and aspire to, their language, their norms that instruct behavior, and more!
In research, we are cultural explorers and advisors to our clients. Here are three ways to be a cultural explorer in your future ethnographies, either online or in person:

FIRST: Engage as a participant-observer

• This is the essence of ethnography: engage, participate, and interact as a local (participant), asking questions when it’s not intrusive (observer).
• Application: First, identify your “way in” (classically, through a “primary informant” who vouches for you); define your role (who will you say you are?); and set your approach. For instance, rather than asking questions after each task, embrace your role as the participant-observer and observe meaning participants ascribe to tasks, ritual, and beliefs by being fully present, and then, subsequently verify what you observed.

SECOND: Know it’s all a performance

• Sociologist Erving Goffman offers an important perspective to the social construction and presentation of self in his dramaturgical model. As in theater, there are front and back stages where we constantly flip through roles as we move from one interaction to the next. Additionally, we are forever in the impression management business by the “expressions we give” (things we say, poses, performed body language, facial expressions) and the “expressions we give off” (less control over these inconsistencies between word and actions).
• Application: Identify those inconsistencies in your research, call them out as another expression and seek to understand the underlying roles. In ethnographies for market research, I typically assess participants’ roles (what I’ve observed) and then verify by asking them add to the list. I ask them to describe the role, its significance, markers of success/failure, where they perceive themselves to be along the continuum, and so on. Watch for role shifts and impression management. Most importantly, when possible, triangulate methods to eliminate bias. For example, engage with people who are part of their social network and assess the fit between the presentations of self in these various contexts. Friendship groups are great for this.

THIRD: Expose weak ties/strong ties

• The pioneering work of another sociologist, Mark Granovetter, offers us ways to account for how people are connected. Basically, he posits that our interpersonal relationships (both close and removed), all have the power to bind disparate groups, pass information and influence, and bring circles of networks in contact with each other. For marketing, this is crucial because we can extrapolate how far brand messaging can go when these ties are multiplexed.
• Application: Explore the array of social networks that your participant has—from Facebook and LinkedIn, to neighborhood, school, and social groups (their own and their family’s). Draw lines that represent weak and strong ties and explore the nature of communication and information that passes from one to the other.

And a BONUS... FOURTH: Look for symbols

• While most of us are not trained semioticians, we can become adept observers of symbols in people’s surroundings and in their rituals.
• Application: Bring a paper calendar to an interview and ask participants to share what they do at key times of the calendar year, using this paper prop to trigger their memories. Another application is asking participants to search for artifacts in their world and share their significance. Some may be too obvious for them to even think about calling out (e.g., the cross over the door, the mezuzah at the entry, the remnants of incense in the living room)—and that’s where your participant-observer skills come in!

3. It’s about Value: We Bring it to Research!
Whether your background is sociology, anthropology, or something else, it’s so important that we apply our expertise with the same rigor and enthusiasm as the day we were handed our diploma. And for most of us, the lessons of academia have been augmented and seasoned by years of experience. Don’t let technology be the focus, make it a valuable tool in your research toolbox.

There’s a reason people still value craftsmanship! When I lived in France and Germany, we’d go to the leather man for a jacket or purse; to the chocolate shop for special treats; and the furniture maker for a unique piece. Here in the U.S., I love supporting artists of all kinds, from art to homemade soaps and textiles. Why? Because these craftsmen and women bring a knowledge, expertise, and passion to their work that can’t be replaced by technology. Here’s to being the artisans of qualitative research—using the best tools and techniques of yesterday and today!

A 20-something Alicia in the Yucatán

About the Author: Alicia Menanteau, PhD

Founder and President of Insights360, Alicia is a classically trained Sociologist (PhD, University of Chicago) who brings the sociological perspective to market research, helping clients uncover context, meaning, and motivations in human behavior. From her doctoral fieldwork studying the AIDS pandemic in Mexico to 100 percent online research during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alicia generously shares her positive energy and sharp insights with clients, research partners, participants and her online research students.

As a Bicultural Latina, Alicia is considered a chameleon in the research world due to the breadth of her capabilities. For her clients and agency partners, she’s their go-to Moderator for GenPop, Multicultural and Hispanic/LatinX research. She also provides many clients with full-service research from approach design to analysis and reporting with the support of her mighty Insights360 team.

Called a grown-up “Dora the Explorer” by her colleagues, Alicia is an enthusiastic pursuer of adventures of all types—cycling in the south of France, a lead role in the musical Mamma Mia, and rock climbing in Corsica. Always open to living fully and being fully present, Alicia embraces the expression, “Put me in, Coach!”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciamenanteau/
www.insights360.com

Taking Qualitative Research to a Whole New Level with Agile Principles

The term “agile” (with its roots in software development methodologies) has been misused in the business world for quite some time. Like its counterparts, the term agile has become a substitute for “quick and dirty” work, which has nothing to do with what agile actually is. 

Then what is agile? 

As explained in a previous article, agile is all about testing hypotheses, using forms of effective stakeholder/team communication, and most importantly, using iteration. 

In a nutshell, as is depicted in the image below, the value proposition is fairly simple. Instead of executing the whole project in one go (as in a waterfall process), agile methodology utilizes sprints whereby every sprint takes the product one step closer to the ultimate outcome. During these sprints, the intermediary outputs are validated by stakeholders (customers, team members, etc.) and this iterative process continues until the project is complete. As it is much easier to change intermediary outcomes than the whole body of a project, catching errors early drastically reduces project delivery time and improves quality.

How can one use agile to achieve exponentially better results?

I was fascinated when I first heard about the Grounded Theory as a qualitative data analysis methodology. What most caught my attention was that it allowed grounding data into several sources of truth instead of only one.   

For example, we were conducting research for a bank to find innovation opportunities revolving around fraud, and how to help customers to decrease fraud in their daily lives. During the in-depth interviews, we found that fraud is very common during second-hand car sales processes. Now, here comes the interesting part. This is just one hypothesis that we found among a dozen, but it was a powerful and widespread one. To gather more data on this topic, we turned to the internet as another source of truth. 

We found a YouTube channel in the automotive category with several thousand subscribers. There was a single video on fraud during car sales that had been watched more than 2.4 million times! These behavioral consumer data indicated that we were tracking something valuable. Analyzing and clustering the comments and feedback with our anthropologist, we theorized which consumer segments would be more likely to use such a product. This is ethnography done on the internet; there is a name for this process, netnography. For the sake of this post, I will not take a deep dive into netnography, but according to Wikipedia, we can summarize it as a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation. 

Utilizing the aforementioned data, we amended our questions. At the end of the research process, we even changed the research methodology! This is just an example of how research sprints can add value to qualitative research. We start as a tabula rasa, an empty slate, and fill ourselves slowly with the information that is provided by consumers. We don’t just shape the report, but also shape our methodology, ourselves, research participants and research questions according to the data that we capture, hence we slowly dive deeper into behavioral or psychographic consumer segments. 

So how should I conduct my next research project? 

Agile is not about strict rules or utilizing strict methodologies like netnography. Sometimes we just leverage in-depth interviews in our sprints or mix and match methods, such as metaphor elicitation, UX research, or diary studies. 

The key takeaways for your next research project: 

1. You may want to divide research into sprints and iteratively try to optimize the questions, methodology, participant choice, etc., 
   
2. use several data sources to validate assumptions, not simply rely on interview data, 
3. get creative to capture the most relevant insights and don’t be afraid to try new methods, mix and match. 
   

About the author:

Batukhan Taluy is a born hustler, strategist, and an insights professional. Through his company Uservision, he consulted more than 40 Fortune 500 brands globally to make them more user centric, leveraging agile qualitative insights. He has created new generation market research methodologies and approaches, which have been published and elaborated in seminars & workshops which are organized by leading institutions and universities. He is also an avid technology, music, film enthusiast and a lifelong learner. 

Five Lessons I Learned While Designing My First Customer Journey Map

As a marketing researcher, I help brands develop strategies to attract and retain customers. To that end, I have conducted countless brand positioning studies and concept tests, as well as your typical what-does-this-mean-to-you-personally? qualitative interview, yet never had I ever designed a journey map… until this year. A journey map is the visual representation of the sequence of steps customers take to interact with products or services—from discovering the brand to switching and returning and beyond (Tincher & Newton, 2019). Earlier this year, I leveraged the technique to guide customer communications.   

Now, you may be thinking, “Why would you need a journey map to craft communications?". Here is my answer in the form of another question—have you ever seen different ads from the same company that seem to contradict or compete with each other? When this happens, it is a clear sign that teams, often working in silos, have lost sight of the big picture. However, customers never experience messages as one-offs, but as part of one big interconnected narrative that shapes their perceptions of a brand. Mapping the customer journey is the best way to fully grasp how a brand, as a whole, shows up to the world. 

At its core, journey mapping helps companies identify critical points of friction that cause customers to leave a brand. Effective maps guide efforts toward optimizing high impact moments, thereby unlocking significant revenue potential. As an example, journey mapping allowed T-Mobile to learn that frustration around contracts and data overage fees was pushing customers to switch providers at an alarming rate. By eliminating these frustrations, the company went from losing a million customers a year to adding a million customers per quarter.  

The secret to a successful journey map is simple: show everything from the customer’s vantage point. That is, visualize the journey the way the customer experiences it, not the way you think they experience it. For instance, the start of a journey is definitely not at the moment someone subscribes to a service but way earlier, perhaps while enjoying brunch and suddenly their friend cannot stop raving about the new app they downloaded. 

Here are the five most valuable lessons I learned while designing my first journey map:  

Not a one-size-fits-all  
You should plan on designing multiple maps to represent different types of customers. If your company has a segmentation model, definitely reference it and design one map for each of your high opportunity segments. In the absence of segmentation, you can always use some basic profiling such as first time vs. repeat, regular vs. occasional, or early vs. late adopters.   

Having several maps will reveal key differences across groups. In an era of information overload, people expect solutions that are personalized to their specific needs. Understanding differences in customer preferences will enable your organization to design more targeted approaches to drive retention.  

Get the journey phases right, then add layers 
Journey phases are the building blocks of the maps. They chart the path the customer follows; if these are off, the rest of the components will fall apart. Most categories include research, consideration, purchase, trial, post-trial, etc. Be sure to adapt these to the category you are researching. Then start layering some information, such as:   

• What problem is this customer trying to solve for?  

• How and where do they interact with the product or service?  

• How do they feel before, during, and after each interaction? 

When layering, use diagrams and colors to visually represent the peaks and valleys in customer sentiment. This will make for a more nuanced map that will inspire organizational alignment.  

Ditch the notion of an end 
While on paper you may represent a journey as a linear path, in real life, journeys are in fact loops. The Semisonic song I used to listen to as a teen that goes, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end” rings true in journey mapping. Efforts at later stages should prevent customers from switching, becoming latent, or worse, exiting completely.

Big data has made it possible for companies to expertly curate information, making discovery and trial more effortless than ever before. With the widespread availability of behavioral data and predictive analytics, customer journeys have become much more fluid, continually teetering between active and passive engagement. This gives brands the upper hand to nudge customers into the journey rather than waiting for them to make the first move.  

Design for efficiency and speed  
The simpler the process is for a customer to learn about, select, order, and generally experience a product, the better the company’s chances are at minimizing churn. While a brilliant copywriter may take pride in a quirky and well-articulated, yet long list of instructions, no one will want to fit that type of reading into their weekend plans.  

Today almost everything is digitized, however there are still many occasions when customers carry the onus of initiating contact when they need help. Automating actions to the point of making them invisible (think single sign-ups, syncing information from existing accounts, providing recommendations based on past behavior, resolving issues before they become complaints, etc.) is critical to building the long-lasting habits that drive customer loyalty.  

Challenge the status quo  
The business decisions that stem from journey mapping are just as important as the map itself. Once you have rallied the troops to begin the important work that follows, it is very easy to overcomplicate things by focusing on individual projects rather than the single integrated strategy that will create customer delight. 

Push back on busywork that deviates and distracts from the overall goal of driving retention and keep advocating for holistic solutions that fully enhance the customer experience, not band-aids.

I have always been a big picture kind of thinker; maybe that is why I find journey mapping so alluring. There is something deeply satisfying about placing seemingly disparate pieces of data on a board, taking a step back, and then noticing the patterns that form. 

References
Tincher, Jim, Newton, Nicole (2019). How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer? Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.  

About the Author: Breyda Ortega

A mixed-methods corporate researcher, Breyda Ortega oversees marketing research at Cruise, a self-driving car company in San Francisco. She combines her background in statistics, psychology, and neuroscience along with a natural ability to “read” people to guide strategic business decisions. She currently serves as QRCA’s Qually Award Vice Chair.

Journey Mapping: Big Picture Thinking

I sit here writing, waiting for inspiration to hit: Where is that pithy line that usually finds its way to my brain? The one that sets up the essay/article/slide so well? This is what I do: I take big ideas and craft them into compelling packages to showcase their meaning. But times are intense. And inspiration isn’t so light and sparkly right now. My mind shifts to the bigger issues at play. As I ponder the pandemic, and the stark lifestyle changes it has brought on—civic uprisings, Black Lives Matter, pain, unemployment—it’s hard to deny how interconnected we are, and how vital it is to consider the context when trying to understand a problem.

Annual Conference Reporter on the Scene: Cultivating Connection: Helping Decision-Makers Understand the Humans Behind the Data

Presenter: Cory Davison, 4Xperience

Summary of Conference Session

At the QRCA Annual Conference presenter Cory Davison of 4Xperience asked attendees, “How do you connect the qualitative findings with the decision makers, to further drive action?”.

One of the biggest challenges for qualitative researchers is to deliver insights to the different audiences and promote a common understanding of who the humans are providing input in the research. Driving action makes our research meaningful. Action starts with “humanizing” the data and connecting with the decision-makers who may interpret the research from many different perspectives.

During her presentation and utilizing real case studies, Cory Davison shared a simple framework with 5 steps (Relate, Speak their Language, Understand their Audience, Walk in their Steps, and Focus on the “So What” which can be the bridge to connect consumers and the humans interpreting the data.

Key Session Takeaways

I really enjoyed Cory’s session and had many “takeaways” including the heart of her presentation which was that as qual professionals we need to find a way to relate to clients through stepping into their world and remembering that they deal with varying thoughts, feelings, emotions, just like us. They are deserving of our empathy.

The boardroom dishes out many challenges including shorter attention spans, dealing with big data, many versions of the truth, etc. By remembering that our clients are human like us, we can make presentations interactive, build bridges from an experience perspective, and use tools like the Insights Discovery Tool to understand what clients know, believe, and do can break down barriers to connection.

On the topic of presentations, we need to make sure that as practitioners we are speaking the same “language” in order to connect with our clients. Focus on what matters to them, including the metrics client uses, emphasizing the story the data creates, developing a process map with interval views (product/brand path from beginning to end), and an experience map (showcases what happens when the human factor is involved). Understand their audience and bring it to life through personas. Most importantly, Cory reminded all of us to “be clear about what you know and don’t know”.

Present the data in a way that can be understood. Researchers and qual professionals need to remember that journey maps are different from process maps.

• Journey maps are about what customers do vs. what a brand wants them to do.
• Journey maps answer: what does the persona do, think, say, feel? “So what?”

We must direct clients in what to do with the data. The “so what” must include the persona, company, and solution. Coming up with a mantra or agreement statement can aid understanding - something clients can go do. For example, we can use an action phrase to make the connections for clients: "Therefore we recommend/enabled by/ and if we do this…."

Aha Moment

It’s very easy to get caught up in the research and forget that clients are “human” too. This presentation was a great reminder to take the time to understand the client pain points, their stakeholders, and ways to connect with their preferences using a tool like Insights Discovery.

Final Comments

We forget the power behind the creative techniques used with consumers. Our tools can easily be adapted for relationship-building with clients.

Moving forward, I will be adapting my deep dive techniques developed for consumers to connect with clients.

QRCA Reporter on the Scene: Marta Villanueva, NuThinking