Closer than ever

Editor's note: Amanda Ford is a project manager at Applied Marketing Science Inc., a Waltham, Mass., research firm.

As a marketing researcher you may have conducted ethnographic research in the past to uncover insights about a consumer’s use of a product or service. While ethnography is the traditional term for this method, you may have heard this type of research referred to by other names such as consumer safaris or contextual observation. However, at the time of your research engagement, you may have been limited to when or where the observation could take place, who or what you could observe or the length of time you could observe. As advancements in technology continue, researchers are exploring new digital techniques to enhance their ethnographic research. These digital techniques have the potential to change the way we think about and conduct ethnographic research.

The term “ethnography” emerged in the 1920s as a word to describe the practice of systematically studying human cultures and behaviors by observing people in their natural setting for days, weeks and sometimes years.

Today, in marketing research, ethnography is often used as an alternative to traditional face-to-face, in-depth interviews. It is used to gather insights for product and service development and improvement initiatives. This observational research approach involves listening to and observing consumers in a natural setting for as little as an hour or up to several hours, depending on the nature of what the researcher is trying to observe. The technique can yield important insights into how consumers use and interact with products and services – insights that may be overlooked in a traditional face-to-face interview. Ethnography is an effective way to uncover important insights and latent consumer needs to drive business decisions or innovation strategy. These latent needs are often difficult for respondents to articulate in traditional research. In some cases, these needs may not have even been realized by the respondents yet. Through observation, ethnography helps make these latent needs more pronounced by putting the respondent in context of the product or service, allowing the researcher to probe and explore the needs in more detail.

This article provides an overview of digital techniques that can be used to enhance your ethnographic research and insights. Incorporating these digital techniques may also address some of the limitations of the use of traditional ethnography in market research.

Variety of methods

Digitally-enhanced ethnography uses a variety of online research methods or digital techniques to help collect data from respondents. Incorporating digital techniques into your ethnographic research enables the study of consumers of a product or service through the use of computer-mediated social interaction or communication. This computer-mediated social interaction can include the use of smartphones and Webcams as well as online diaries, forums and communities.

The beauty of incorporating these digital techniques into your ethnographic research is that doing so makes it possible to accompany consumers in many different real-life situations in order to aid in contextual observation that otherwise wouldn’t always be possible due to time, budget, geographic or even recruiting constraints. Researchers can even communicate with the consumers in the moment to gather insights that may not be available out of context at a later point in time. Researchers can either be non-participant observers or become involved in a way that encourages or steers conversation.

There are many benefits to incorporating digital techniques into your ethnography. Below are the top benefits of digitally-enhancing your ethnography when compared to traditional ethnographic practices for market research:

Cost and time savings. Conducting traditional ethnography can be costly and time-consuming. Typically, there are costs to recruit and incentivize respondents. Associated travel expenses can add up quickly too, particularly if the researcher must travel to multiple locations to conduct the ethnographic research with a sample representative of the target market. By incorporating these techniques into your research, you can reduce or even eliminate travel and time expenditures.

No need to co-locate respondents or researchers. Likewise, incorporating these digital techniques helps bring respondents and researchers from different geographic locations together electronically. Online research can allow researchers to access hard-to-reach respondents and can bring together respondents for research in ways that may not be possible with traditional ethnography due to budget constraints or recruiting challenges. For example, while it would be difficult to recruit respondents who all shared a rare disease to a focus group or in-person interview, the ability to recruit these respondents from multiple locations and still bring them together online can be highly beneficial. By incorporating video, photos and other multimedia into the online discussion, the researcher gets a virtual front-row seat to a respondent’s experience with a product or service or their daily habits or experiences.

Extended field observations. While spending multiple hours or days with respondents is typically not practical with in-person ethnography, digital techniques allow researchers to study a consumers’ habits or attitudes ethnographically over an extended time period without interrupting their daily life. Doing so allows researchers to study a consumer’s full routine or usage cycle from start to finish, rather than only seeing a piece. Respondents can typically log in to the online tool, such as an online discussion board or forum, to provide feedback asynchronously at a time that works well for them. Extended dialogue can also result in greater creativity and better thought-out contributions. In this format, respondents may feel they can more freely express their feelings and opinions than when speaking directly to a researcher in person.

Anonymity. These digital techniques also allow for increased anonymity of your research subjects by reducing the need for respondents – or even researchers and their subjects – to meet face-to-face. This can foster more honest and creative contributions – especially advantageous when researching sensitive topics such as feminine hygiene, obesity or incontinence. Instead of pictures or real names, respondents can use avatars or user names to preserve anonymity. This allows for more candid feedback on topics respondents may not otherwise feel comfortable discussing with each other.

Benefits and drawbacks

With all the digital tools on the market today, you may be wondering which digital method is the best method to enhance your ethnographic research. Here are some of the most common methodologies to incorporate into your ethnography (see chart), as well as their benefits and drawbacks.

Mobile ethnography allows researchers to elicit real-time thoughts, feelings and attitudes through the use of mobile technologies, such as a smartphone. Today almost everyone carries around a phone, allowing access to respondents on-the-go, at home, at work or in-store. This access provides insight into how consumers shop or even how they use a product or service. Using mobile ethnography, consumers are asked to respond to prompts, survey questions and polls with user-generated photo and video. Webcam interviewing can also be used for richer, real-time contextual insight into the life of a consumer.

One form of mobile ethnography gaining traction is the location-based survey, also known as a hyperlocal survey or geo-intercept. When a user is in the vicinity of a location of interest, a mobile survey will be available for your respondents to complete. For example, if looking to conduct research with patrons of a coffee shop, using geo-targeting, respondents who are nearby are notified that a survey is available. Researchers can then obtain real-time, on-the-go feedback without respondents needing to later rely on memory.

Using online diaries or journals, researchers can gain deeper understanding about consumers’ routines, habits or attitudes about a given product or service. The researcher posts daily tasks or questions that must be answered by respondents using free-form open-end responses, pictures, mobile uploads, Web site links, video/Webcam diaries and more. Many different forms of online diaries exist that support desktops, laptops, tablets and even mobile capabilities.

Using the online tool, a moderator can observe and review the diary entries from a remote location while collecting the data and artifacts from the respondent. The moderator can probe to gather additional detail from the respondent when needed.

In an online community, participants are recruited to an online forum or bulletin board to discuss a product, service, shared interest or experience. Just as in online diaries, respondents are questioned by a moderator. The researcher facilitates and prompts discussion through the posting of probing questions. Ethnographic techniques can be incorporated by encouraging sharing of concept images, videos, Webcam entries, etc., while the researcher observes remotely. To avoid bias from other respondents, conversation can be closed so only the moderator can see respondent posts or kept open where respondents can interact, exchange ideas, question one another or brainstorm together. Participating in open online communities tends to create a positive experience for participants who share common interests.

A similar form of online research, often referred to as netnography, is a variation on online communities. According to Robert Kozinets, netnography is a qualitative research method using immersive techniques that allow the researcher to enter the consumers’ online conversations non-obtrusively. That is, this form of ethnography uses observations in a context not created by the marketing researcher.¹ Instead, insights from your target audience are extracted from already-established communities, review sites and forums, without any probing or additional input from the researcher.

Depends on many factors

While there are clear benefits to adding digital techniques to enhance your ethnographic research, deciding which techniques are best for your research depends on many factors, including: the objectives; the product or service being studied; budget; timeline; target audience; and even client preferences. And while there are clear benefits, I wouldn’t say this form of ethnography is superior to in-person research. Instead, it’s often best to combine traditional in-person research, such as in-depth interviews and in-person observation, with these digital techniques. For example:

• Online communities or diary entries can be a great tool to provide prompts and prepare respondents for in-depth interviews or focus group discussions.
• Online diaries can be used as a homework assignment prior to in-person interviews to prepare the moderator with key follow-up questions.
• Photos or video submitted during mobile ethnographies can help illustrate findings in deliverables.
• Online diaries or communities can be used to give greater context to the use of a product or service that happens over an extended period of time or in multiple phases (e.g., an interior painting project).

Finally, while these digital techniques certainly can benefit and enhance ethnographic research, like most research, consider the following limitations:

• Be wary of extrapolating results or findings to the general population unless you have been careful to recruit a representative sample of participants to your study.
• Because of the digital nature of the research, remember that all participants must have access to the Internet and be technology-savvy in order to take part in a digital ethnography. It may be more difficult to recruit demographics that may not be as comfortable with the technology needed. Additionally, some populations may have difficulty using a computer, such as in a medical study requiring participation from respondents with arthritis. In these instances, this methodology may not be the best option.
• Likewise, some populations may not typically access the technology needed for a digital ethnography as often as others, making engagement challenging. For example, construction workers are often working outside or on job sites without access to a computer or Internet for many hours at a time. Before deciding on your research methodology, think about who you’d like to involve in the research and if they typically access a computer often enough to participate as much as is required by the study.

Consider all benefits and limitations

As with any research method, researchers should consider all the benefits and limitations when deciding if digitally-enhanced ethnography is right for their research. Employed properly, these digital techniques can be creative and effective research tools to capture latent consumer needs that can be used to further drive innovation and important business decisions.

References

1 Kozinets, Robert V. (2002), “The field behind the screen: using netnography for marketing research in online communities,” Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), 61-72.