If you are on this page it is because in some way you are dealing with qualitative research and especially ethnography as a research approach. Perhaps you too may have happened to do as the researcher in the film “Kitchen Stories” did: sneaking into the everyday life of consumers to observe their behavior as they go about their daily chores, to understand how they cook, how they shop for groceries, how they use and interact with a particular product, or - like the film's protagonist - how they use and move about the kitchen!
... hopefully through a less intrusive approach! 😅
As qualitative researchers, we know how important it is to observe an individual in his or her natural context in order to capture those spontaneous, automatic behaviors that the consumer would not be able to recount in an interview precisely because they are innate, enacted in a non-rational manner.
How then to collect these famous “small data” crucial to explain the -even more famous- “big data,” crucial but partial and unable to capture those nuances and uniqueness that can make the real difference for a brand or product? (If you want to delve deeper and read a lot of trivia about how some of the most iconic and ingenious products came to be, read the book Small data.)
In this article, we try to explain it to you by looking together at what are the methods of conducting ethnographic research in the field of marketing and in particular by delving into the approach of digital ethnography in market research to understand its features and advantages over the traditional ethnographic approach.
To understand what we mean by digital ethnography, we must first explain what ethnography is and how ethnographic research is done and what its benefits are.
Starting very far back, ethnography is a research method rooted in the 19th century and used in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology. It is a discipline that aims to study and understand the cultures, social practices and behaviors of human groups in an immersive, field-based manner, often through participant observation and direct interaction with the people/communities being studied.
While originally developed in the social field, ethnography has also since been adopted by marketing and adapted to the field of market research to gain an in-depth understanding of behaviors, needs and motivations behind consumer choices.
If you want to understand, for example, how families eat breakfast, how women of different age groups intend and use make-up or how gen z enjoy the night life here, the ethnographic method is just the thing for you.
To be able to observe these targets at the very moment they perform these actions in order to be able to grasp-live, real time-not only what is overt and manifest in the behaviors but also to carp about the deeper dynamics of functioning and the less explicit and more automatic motivations that also occur during social interactions. Certainly, from the social point of view a very fascinating method but on the other hand it is also very expensive and with the limitation of conditioning the spontaneity and naturalness of the context and, consequently, the observed behaviors…
Here, I don't think the man in the film felt quite comfortable as the perched researcher observed him from his perch… 😅
But today, luckily, there is the online. An ethnographic research in fact can also pass through digital tools, for example from the smartphone, as a “producer” of content, actions, words.
In such cases, one speaks of netnography or digital ethnography understood as a variant of traditional ethnography to study consumer interactions and behaviors within digital environments and communities, such as forums, social media, online communities, and virtual platforms.
We speak of netnographic analysis then, when qualitative research and ethnography merge through the digital tool allowing the researcher to immerse himself in the spontaneous conversations that arise online to derive meaningful information.
But communities can also be places recreated for research purposes, to collect “ad hoc” or co-created data between researcher and consumer; created communities where engaged consumers are invited around that topic to stimulate discussion. In these cases we can speak of digital auto-ethnography or digital self-ethnography where, through digital tools, consumers are asked to share specific moments or aspects of their daily lives through multimedia materials such as photographs, videos or voice messages without interfering with their daily lives and the spontaneity of their actions, with lower costs and the possibility of crossing distances and boundaries.
Think of the examples we gave earlier: asking a woman to take a video of herself doing her makeup by asking her to illustrate the products she knows as she uses them, explaining her reasons for choosing them and the positive and negative things about that product … or asking a consumer to take photographs of her pantry and photograph each step as she cooks using a particular product. An equally valid approach, with the advantage--compared to traditional, field-based ethnography--of lower costs, the ability to reach distant people, and the researcher's presence in the background, unobtrusive.
Therefore, there is no doubt about the importance of ethnographic research in marketing as a unique tool to grasp interpreting customer or consumer behavior, as evidenced by many successful cases of companies that have made use of this method that we tell you about in this article (link article at the bottom of the page on case studies)
But let's try to reconstruct together the steps to explain how to do market analysis through ethnographic research.
First of all we need to have a goal, but how do we construct an ethnographic research question?
Think about the examples we gave earlier: whenever we think it might be useful to observe consumers doing something in their natural environment, then it is time to use the ethnographic method.
As we have seen there are several techniques for doing ethnographic research , it will be up to us to choose the one that suits us between traditional ethnography, netnography or digital auto-ethnography. Of course, there are the hybrid approaches, combining the various techniques, which is what we like best!
Sicché comes right here, offering an application for ethnographic research-that is, a tool that can support ethnographic research needs through the mediation of the digital tool and by taking advantage of the benefits of online.
Tools, tasks, and question types such as voice messages, videos, and diaries that stimulate the consumer in different ways to achieve research objectives.
