Observing the world
Editor’s note: Tim Plowman is a design anthropologist at Cheskin, a Redwood Shores, Calif., research and consulting firm. Adrien Lanusse is a strategic director at Cheskin. Astrid Cruz is a research manager at Cheskin.
As markets become more global, companies have an increasing need to understand the often subtle nuances of customer behavior across countries and cultures. Most companies are comfortable fielding traditional forms of research in foreign environments, but more recently developed methodologies, such as commercial ethnography, can seem daunting, complex and mysterious when not done on familiar terrain. Observing a few guidelines and experimenting with some alternative options can make internationally-fielded ethnographies as powerful, insightful and easily implemented as those on home soil.
Commercial ethnographies, properly done, yield a deep, detailed understanding of the life and circumstances of individuals, effectively revealing attitudes, behaviors, preferences and style within their appropriate cultural context. The practice of commercial ethnography has evolved from its academic roots to include a range of specific techniques customized to support research objectives. Figure 1 shows many of the specific tools used when conducting academic ethnography. In contrast, the circular area indicates methods that are primarily used in commercial ethnography. It is simply not practical for business entities to engage in the same form or extent of ethnography as academics, primarily due to time and cost constraints.
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Despite these constraints, ethnographic methods can and should be considered a viable means of learning about consumers in foreign markets. Adherence to a few key principles will ensure a successful and productive experience:
1. Work with trained, professional ethnographers.
Graduate students or moonlighting social scientists may be less expensive to hire, but the financial savings can be diluted by a lack of rigor, lack of perspective or lack of depth. The necessity of using a trained ethnographer is even more critical when conducting research in an international context. Professional anthropologists with graduate-level training in ethnography are likely to have already conducted extensive and complex research in a foreign context. Among the benefits that come from this sort of professional experience is an acute sensitivity to working in unfamiliar cultural contexts.
2. Partner with local ethnographers, but establish centralized control and direction.
Ethnographic training and traditions vary significantly by country. This is especially true of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Therefore, it’s important to establish a clear objective, a consistent framework for fieldwork and to ensure that all ethnographers conform to this plan, regardless of their theoretical training.
3. When possible, support a team approach.
It is difficult to get consistent execution and perspective from multiple ethnographers across diverse countries. Additionally, using only in-country ethnographers can create the potential for class, gender and ethnic tensions to emerge between the local ethnographer and the respondent. Ideally, send a domestic ethnographer to partner with a local ethnographer. The presence and leadership of an outside ethnographer can increase reporting consistency. Also, an outsider has permission to make mistakes, ask dumb questions and generally behave outside the standards of normative behavior (provided they are not offensive). Finally, this partnership arrangement brings the best of two worlds together: a professional with specifically selected expertise in ethnography and a deep understanding of the research and business issues, paired with another professional with local cultural sensitivity and native language skills.
4. Choose locations carefully.
Picking the right market or city is always important, but it’s critical when doing international ethnography. Unless the country’s culture is homogenous, the choice of location can greatly skew the research. Using the U.S. as an example, imagine if an ethnographer reported back on the country’s culture after conducting a dozen ethnographies in Hawaii. Locations should be decided after careful examination of the overall objectives and scope of the study, e.g., who is the target audience, what is the product, brand awareness and usage in various areas, what is the preliminary marketing strategy, etc. Selections should be further reviewed to ensure that they don’t under- or over-represent characteristics that are not common to the population being studied.
5. Accommodate cultural details.
Once locations are selected, numerous logistical and country-specific issues need to be addressed, including work hours, observed holidays, recruiting process and travel needs. Most notably, accurate translation contributes significantly to the quality of ethnographies and shouldn’t be overlooked. Find reliable translators in each country being researched. Using translation houses in the home country, while perhaps more convenient, may deliver translations that are too formal, miss colloquial and idiomatic expressions, and generally lack nuance. Back translations (retranslating the transcripts back into the native language) can improve accuracy if time and budget allows.
6. Do your homework.
Some study of the country and its culture is mandatory prior to any international ethnography. Publications such as Culturegrams and resources on the Internet can offer guidance on aspects of communication such as appropriate levels of eye contact or whether a culture is high-context or low-context (which may affect how much conversation versus observation may be necessary).
Beyond translations, differing worldviews often require the ethnographer either to develop an incredibly flexible guide or to create different versions for each country based on a master guide. Consult reliable anthropological authorities on cultural distinctions and pay close attention to issues of social interaction, gender distinctions, religion and the role of socio-economic divisions in each country. This background information provides a lens that becomes even more useful in the analysis phase.
Finally, the flow and pacing of ethnography may vary radically from context to context. The time needed to establish rapport with respondents and get them to be open and candid varies by culture and can’t easily be rushed. Knowing this ahead of time can improve scheduling and reduce anxiety and errors.
7. Capture the visual context.
All ethnographies should be videotaped or photographed (depending on the acceptance of cameras in the locations being researched) whenever possible. In an international context, field notes alone may fail to illustrate the importance of visual cues including décor, design aesthetics, color, architecture, fashion and icons. If the cultural context is unfamiliar, even the most experienced ethnographer will miss details in the initial visit. Digital photos and videos can bring those details to light in later viewing.
8. Encourage guided tours.
Because time is usually an issue in international research, respondents should be prompted to take the team to places and surroundings that are relevant to the research objectives (favorite hangout, store, work, their home, etc.). They should be similarly encouraged to engage in activities representing their normal routine. In this sense, the respondents will be reconstructing their everyday experiences for the team. While reconstruction introduces a small element of artificiality, the benefit of rapidly accessing a range of behaviors, attitudes and contexts relevant to the research objectives far outweighs any disadvantages.
Throughout the ethnography, the team should alternately observe, ask questions, prompt respondent narration, ask for representative examples, prompt demonstrations, take notes and test hypotheses generated in the course of the ethnography. As with any properly conducted ethnography, analysis begins in the field both during the interview and during the immediate debrief and write-up later that same day. The immediate processing of data will enable hypotheses and model development to go through the iterations necessary to recognize key insights.
9. Use pre-assignments.
The use of pre-assignments across countries can enhance ethnographies with rich detail. Although it requires more upfront planning, the use of diaries or the creation of photo albums prior to an ethnographic interview can quickly expand and accelerate the discussion. The same cross-cultural challenges cited earlier apply here: pre-assignments must be flexible enough to accommodate differences but consistent enough to add to the overall analysis.
10. Centralize the main analysis.
Whether you are doing multiple ethnographies within one location or within multiple locations, centralizing the main analysis ensures cohesion, even data gathering and more actionable insights across countries. Current technology tools make this a relatively simple task to coordinate, particularly the use of virtual, shared collaboration spaces, mobile computing tools and digital photography. Teams operating in different countries around the globe can engage in periodic debriefs, all record their findings using a common format and submit their field notes, photos and local analyses to one central repository where all can synchronously or asynchronously view and comment.
Using the raw data from the various countries (multiple readings of the interview transcripts, viewings of the photos, and review of field notes), analytic work sessions should focus on:
- identifying basic attitudes, behaviors, and practices;
- identifying larger patterns that consist of collections of attitudes behaviors and practices that appear to fit together; and
- identifying relationships among patterns that explain higher level and nuanced relationships among the phenomena documented.
Don’t forget to pay special attention to the data that doesn’t fit your model - it could yield insight into cultural variation across markets. The output of these work sessions will be increasingly refined categories, conceptual models demonstrating emerging relationships and preliminary frameworks that highlight both distinctions and commonalities. In the end, the insights and learning should speak clearly and convincingly, regardless of where it originated.