Ethnography is the study of human behavior. Researchers and scientists who want to understand other cultures have long used ethnographic methods. It really isn't possible to ask people details about their culture and how it is different to other cultures because culture is such an ingrained construct. Sometimes the best way to understand a culture is to experience it by living in it, much the way researchers have done in the past by living with remote tribes in Africa or the Amazon.
As the need to understand customers at a deeper level grows, it becomes more and more apparent that at times, the traditional customer research methods are incomplete in creating breakthrough innovations. To help deal with this shortcoming, many practitioners are resorting to methods based on anthropology, and their approach to VoC is commonly referred to as ethnography. You may also know of these methods as immersion or observational research.
In the past, surveys have been one of the primary tools that marketers have used to gather this type of customer data, but ethnography has the ability to provide a much deeper and richer view into the customer than any survey could achieve.
Today's corporations are deluged with data and research revolving around customer behavior and needs. While there are often numerous data points about customers, what is often missing is how to understand customer behavior in context.
Observing your customers, how they interact with your products, and how they perform their daily tasks will help you to understand your true customer needs, which may be vastly different than the perception of those needs.
Marketers and product developers who are not, and cannot, become customers may be able to observe and question those customers as they perform their work duties or attempt to solve a problem over the course of their day. This research technique is called shadowing. An example of shadowing might be a researcher spending a day with a user of an accounting program to see their daily usage and patterns when using the software.
When it is difficult or impossible to access a customer in their own place or work, such as a secure government facility, or in their personal life, such as in their home, it is possible to use Self-Observations/Diaries where you request that your customers provide self- observations about their activities in using your product and document their observations in a diary or report. While this is preferable to not having any ethnographical research, it is not nearly as accurate or robust as performing in-person research.
While it is far preferable to use the shadowing method of ethnographical research, whichever method is used, it is imperative that the researcher imposes a minimum of his or her own bias on the results of the analysis.
In either case, it has been shown that if a product developer or market researcher relies only on methods that are based on what customers say, and ignores what they actually do and how they use their product, then this can interject significant errors between their perception of the customer's need and the true voice of the customer.
As an example, in one focus study conducted by Microsoft, customers were asked whether they liked the product and whether there were any features they did not like or wished to add. The respondents claimed they did like the product and there were no features they did not like or wished to add. However, when the Microsoft developers began videotaping these customers and recording their keystrokes, a much different picture emerged. The developers could see the difficulty users had in using the product, the hesitation when not knowing what to do next, and the facial expressions, which told the developers that the customers did not really embrace the product.
All too often, developers and marketers simply ask; What do you think about my product? instead of understanding the actual customer wants and needs, and as we know, what a customer says is not always the complete truth. This happens for a number of reasons:
- The customers are not technical experts. Often customers have difficulty expressing exactly what they are having trouble with or what kind of product would solve their needs.
- In a related example, some customers are not willing to admit that they have problems with your product for fear they will appear ignorant or not smart enough to use it.
- A customer's ability to describe a product's problem requires a certain amount of familiarity. If they are not familiar enough with a product, they will not be able to elaborate on its shortcomings.
- Conversely, if a customer is too familiar with a product, then he or she has learned how to get around it and may have found ways to make up for its shortcomings by modifying their own processes. In this case, the customer may have a hard time remembering the details of the pain he or she initially experienced or just chalked it up to not understanding how to use it.
- When a customer is asked about their past problems with a product, much of the response has to do with the way the question has been asked. Unfortunately, a developer or marketer who is not always completely objective can author many of the survey questions a customer is asked.
- Customers have their own agendas. While this may not be conscious, this greatly effects how a customer will answer questions in a survey or in an interview. Often they will have preconceived notions about what a marketer wants to hear or who is in the room when the question is being asked, which results in inaccurate, and sometimes diametrically opposed, responses.
It is important that any researcher using ethnographical methods does so with the proper frame of mind. While it is very easy to make assumptions about why a customer is behaving in a particular fashion or why he/she is using your product in a certain way, it is much better to simply observe and record as much fine detail as possible during the fieldwork. You are trying to understand the customer's view and point of reference and not trying to fit your preconceived judgments or assumptions. Leave the analysis piece for when the observation is complete or as part of a follow-up discussion.
As one would expect, part of the process in an ethnological interview is selecting the right customers to conduct this research. As most of the time we will conduct ethnological research in conjunction with the interview process, I will discuss how to select customers in more detail for both the ethnological research as well as the customer interview in Chapter 5, The Interview Process—Preparation. We will also talk about integrating ethnographic research as part of the customer interview in Chapter 6, The Interview Process—The Interview.