Using online ethnography to explore the digital camera market

Community involvement

Editor’s note: Steve August is a principal of San Francisco-based KDA Research.

The Internet has become an important part of the marketplace. In addition to purchasing online, millions of consumers regularly use the Internet to gather information in support of purchase decisions.

A key aspect of this information-gathering is participation in online communities. There are online forums for just about any consumer product you can think of, from coffee to consumer electronics. In these forums, consumers discuss their experiences with products and services, provide their opinions and share news and advice.

The use of ethnography (the study of people in context) allows researchers to take advantage of these online market conversations. This practice is a huge shift from traditional research, in which a sample population must be assembled through recruitment. With online ethnography, researchers can listen directly to the market.

Online ethnography is especially useful in the initial creative phase of a product or idea generation cycle - for example, to gain early knowledge of consumer expectations, preferences and beliefs. Because no recruitment is required, online ethnography provides results much more quickly than most other qualitative techniques.

Conducting online ethnography

In 2003, our firm conducted a test of online ethnography to explore its possibilities. The results were so encouraging that we now offer online ethnography as part of our research practice. The discussion below presents some of the most important lessons we learned.

The topic we chose for our test was consumer perceptions of digital cameras. One of the reasons we chose this topic is that we had conducted offline research in this same area, and were interested in comparing the two. A key finding of our test was that the offline results and the online results were very similar. (We are in the process of documenting the comparison.)

The main types of online communities are message boards, newsgroups, listservs and e-mail lists, chats and Web logs (“blogs”). While it was easy to find Web sites dedicated to our chosen topic, finding active communities with current, consistent, on-topic discourse took a bit more effort. Groups.google.com was helpful in finding relevant newsgroups, and various Web logs led us to the appropriate online communities. We found that moderated communities were the most efficient to study, because they contained far fewer off-topic and inappropriate posts.

We were interested to learn that many communities maintain accessible archives of their content, some for five years or more. Clearly, this presents an opportunity to study a subject over time extremely quickly and efficiently. Imagine, for example, an online study of the opinions of women over the course of their pregnancies; rather than having to conduct a nine-month study, a researcher could simply review nine months of archived conversation.

For our digital camera research test, we chose three communities to study, a Usenet newsgroup, a moderated message board and a moderated e-mail-based digital photography group. All three groups archive their material, and we studied consumer conversation in these groups that covered a three- to six-month period.

Many online communities have a specific clause in their terms of service that state that the community is intended for personal and non-commercial use. It is our view that even for communities that do not make this explicit, the observation of consumers online as part of a research study is sufficiently different from an online community’s intended use that researchers should request permission and/or make themselves known.

For the two moderated communities, we contacted the moderators and asked permission for our studies, which was readily granted. We also posted, in all three cases, to the communities themselves, letting members know that we were conducting a study and asking people to contact us if they wished their messages to be excluded from the study. No one ever contacted us, and there were no posts within the communities regarding our activity.

In the course of our test, we downloaded data from the communities and imported it into a qualitative research software tool for coding and analysis. Once we considered our dataset to be complete, we performed a preliminary analysis to identify topics and themes that might merit further investigation. We then contacted several community members via e-mail and conducted follow-up e-mail interviews.

This ready access to community members via e-mail makes it relatively easy to conduct complementary and follow-up research. For example, we could have quickly conducted a quantitative study and/or formal in-depth interviews to round out the research results.

Key findings of the test

It became clear during the course of our research that to truly understand the data, we needed to understand the community. Each community is different; for example, some of the groups we studied assumed a greater level of technical sophistication than others, a difference that is relevant to the interpretation of the conversations we observed. Just as a traditional ethnographer must understand the context in which the people being observed are acting, so must an online ethnographer.

Keeping in mind their relevant differences, however, we found some basic similarities among online communities. In each community we studied, we found a vocal minority posted most of the messages. These “denizens,” as we have begun to call them, are generally lead users - in the case of our test, they were the owners of the newest equipment and the most knowledgeable about digital camera technologies and trends. On the other end of the spectrum, we found a “guest” behavior pattern, people who drop in to ask one or two questions but do not remain as part of the community.

By far the most common behavior pattern we saw was the sharing of experiences. The community members we observed clearly used these shared experiences as a way to validate the information they had gathered from other sources, such as reviews and manufacturers’ marketing claims.

Another common behavior we saw was that guests often came to the communities to make their final purchasing decisions. Often they had narrowed their choices to two or three options before visiting an online community.

We also found that members of a community are vocal about which online and offline information sources are most trustworthy. Clearly, this knowledge of trusted sources could be of great value to marketers.

In terms of specific findings, we were impressed by how quickly we were able to gain a substantial amount of insight into the digital camera market through our study of the three online communities. Here are some of the things we learned:

• Based on our observation of the consumer discussions, we see an opportunity for travel cameras as a market category.
• Many of the inquiries about digital cameras were made by those seeking to purchase a camera for workplace rather than personal use.
• Digital storage is still one of the biggest technical issues of interest.
• There are three clear brand leaders in the category, two brands that are also fairly popular, and several brands that are generally considered inferior.
• One of the top three brands is considered more expensive than others, and its proprietary technology is considered by many to be a negative.
• Brand impressions of traditional cameras do not necessarily carry over into the digital camera category.
• Community members were unimpressed by the attempts by high-end traditional camera manufacturers to leverage their brands by re-branding cameras made by other, less prestigious, manufacturers.

Discover rather than invent

Online ethnography provides significant benefits. It is extremely fast and efficient - an online ethnography project can be completed in less time than it takes just to recruit participants (one or two weeks). Because participants in online communities segment themselves into market categories and consumer types, researchers have the opportunity to discover market segments rather than inventing them. The archiving of online material allows researchers to instantly gather historical data. And because online conversation is by its very nature up-to-date, online ethnography allows researchers to study trends as they form, while they are taking place.

Some researchers may be uncomfortable with the self-segmented nature of online populations. While self-selection is generally considered a negative in traditional research, we believe that self-segmentation via Internet conversation is a different matter. The fact that these consumers are interested enough in a given topic to participate in a market-oriented online discussion makes them arguably more qualified for a study on that topic than respondents who agree to participate in a focus group for a fee.

Online ethnography represents a shift in thinking. Instead of attempting to replicate the desired target population with a recruited sample, it takes advantage of a target population that already exists. In addition to studying what has already happened, it allows us to study what is happening right now. And beyond using the Internet simply to gather and deliver data more efficiently, online ethnography provides a way to harness one of the most exciting aspects of the Internet: its power to connect people and markets united by interests but separated by geography.