First, I don’t believe customers “lie.” When we believe they’re “lying” to us, it immediately puts a negative lens on the customer and their experience. Try this little thought experiment: the next time your significant other (or kid, boss, etc.) says something to you, immediately plant it in your mind that they’re lying or not telling you the whole truth. Makes a big difference in how you treat these relationships, doesn’t it? So what makes us think we can do anything different with a customer? How about if we practice some empathy for our customers instead? Our customers may hide things from us or simply not know how to clearly articulate the needs, frustrations, ideas, and convenient work-arounds that play out in their daily experience. They need help and it’s what a trained anthropologist with experience in fieldwork can do.

He suggests that eight to ten participant observations are enough to gather necessary data for decision-making. Field observation in business settings can be time, labor, and money intensive activities. But if we’re going to condense the ethnography, then every single interaction and experience counts. Nothing can be wasted. Field observation isn’t just an academic exercise, it’s purpose is to drive better business and product results. If the whole process – research design, data gathering, and analysis – takes months to complete, that’s critical time lost. Business anthropologists know how to conduct what’s known as rapid ethnography to complete the process not in months, but in weeks.

Finally, the process of getting market feedback and customer ideas in the field is not the sole domain of the C-level suite. As a matter of fact, I’d argue they are the least best option. You have to know how to observe the right things and ask the right questions. You also have to know how to see what’s not there and listen for what’s not actually said. Too many times, CEOS and other executives are too tied to their prior strategies and decisions. They become blinded to what they want to see. And they’re not trained to explore the nuances of things which is often where true discovery happens.

Trust me, a good business anthropologist is going to be able to filter all of this with the necessary focus on business, strategy, and people. It’s this – along with our needed objectivity – that makes us the ideal partner.

Photo credit: discoodoni via Flickr

However, the fact is that ethnography is more than just a set of tools. It’s a practice which means there is a whole way of thinking that must go into applying the tools in an honest, coherent way. This is why I get incredibly frustrated when untrained individuals think they can just go out and do ethnography. That’s like me saying that I’m going to go out and build a skyscraper. Just as you wouldn’t want me to be your architect, don’t be so fast to employ some fast-talking market research consultant with zero actual training to do something that requires careful study, preparation, and understanding.

• Ask them for some credentials. Where did they study or get their ethnography training? If it amounts to zilch or appears dubious boot them out.
• Ask them about the ethics of conducting ethnography. Are they aware of possible ethical situations that might arise? If they seem clueless or cavalier about it, then boot them out.
• Ask them about their prior experiences and demand they give examples. Don’t fall for ethnographic techniques that are just interviews in disguise. If they don’t know the difference between interviews and ethnography, then yes, give them the boot. Hell, give them another boot for trying to pull a fast one on you.

And one more thing. While no social science has a monopoly on conducting ethnography, it’s purpose isn’t to reveal individual customer or user psychology. Don’t expect to know how a product makes someone feel or understand personality traits of a buyer or focus on a person’s psyche. If that’s what you want, hire a psychologist for answers.

What we do as business-oriented anthropologists is to help our clients understand how a customer, user, or buyer ascribes meaning to their everyday world. We seek to understand how people situate themselves in their existence. We look at how their actions match or contradict the words they use to describe themselves or their behavior. We view people holistically and seek to understand them within the context of their cultural surroundings.

Why would you want this information? Because it will mean the difference between whether your sparkly new product or revolutionary new service not only sells but gets used, gets talked about, gets people coming back for more. Because we help clients create things that make a difference in the lives of their customers.

Sorry yet another rant but I can’t sit idly while I see misinformed people continuing to degrade anthropology and ethnographic methods in order to be something they clearly are not.

“The ideas underlying customer experience are not new, and historically many successful entrepreneurs have used essentially qualitative research techniques to develop distinctive customer experiences…Developing a new customer experience involves risk, and research techniques – especially quantitative techniques – may be incapable of eliciting a response from potential customers where the proposed experience is hypothetical, and devoid of the emotional and situational context in which it will be encountered.”
Adrian Palmer, Customer Experience Management: a Critical Review of an Emerging Idea

Customer experience has to be captured in the wild and in the moment. Focus groups are for wimps. Now, go get it.

The scientific method itself also conflicts with indigenous Canadian peoples’ worldview. Most scientists consider knowledge to be objective, evidence-based, and individualistic. It resides within individuals, and scientific research aims to obtain this knowledge from groups of individuals and natural phenomena, to construct an objective view of the truth. By contrast, many indigenous peoples view knowledge as relational—it is received and constructed from one’s relationships with other people, including that which is passed down from ancestors, and with the relationship with the natural world.

What does this mean for market researchers and business anthropologists? It’s yet another cautionary message that simply assuming each population we study shares our values can yield very poor insights. Not every organizational culture is the same. Study companies for just a short time and you’ll notice that each one assigns different values and meanings to knowledge, collaboration, and leadership.

So rather than starting from a place of knowing how an organization works, thinks, and behaves, we have to take a few steps back to that place of unknowing. Otherwise, our research becomes more a study of ourselves instead of our actual subjects.

The capstone of the program is a practicum where students work with a sponsoring organization to design a research project to solve a very real problem. For me, I have two potential areas of interest and am searching for organizations which might satisfy one or both project possibilities. This will be a great opportunity for any company to get help understanding and resolving a thorny problem through research-based solutions. Oh, and also at no cost to the organization.

If your organization would be interested in sponsoring me and would like more information, please contact me at chris -at- chrisbaileyworks -dot- com.

Interest #1: Organizational Change and the New Rules of Business
In the last few years, there has been a phenomenal shift in business thinking related to the influence of social software on business strategy. Professionals in the technology and business consulting fields have termed it “Enterprise 2.0.” Generally, it differs from traditional business by using newer technology tools to break down silos within organizations; build more collaborative working structures internally and externally; develop more authentic relationships between the company and customer. Yet, with these dynamic changes in business strategy, there is a tension between the old ways of operating and the new, less familiar ways of doing things.

My interest within this field is to study how established industries at a macro-level or businesses at a micro-level are adapting to the changes incurred while moving toward Enterprise 2.0. My hypothesis is that as core functions of business are being changed, businesses not only need to alter their policies and procedures, they need to recreate their people-systems and the cultures that exist within their organizational boundaries. They need a more clearly defined roadmap to deal with the disruptive paradigm shifts that Enterprise 2.0 introduces to daily business and the costs and benefits it generates.

The draw to this particular topic is strong as it aligns with conversations I’ve had with business leaders and their admitted need for help changing their internal people-systems and cultures to meet new challenges posed by technology. My own personal experience corroborates this need as most businesses can easily focus on execution, but more rarely do they have the time to understand the “why” behind that execution. It’s even more pronounced when that execution hinges on understanding how culture is linked to success. For this reason, I believe there is a place for an anthropological approach providing a holistic assessment of how the human interactions and relationships contained within Enterprise 2.0 contribute to a new mode of organization.

Two professions – public relations and human resources – and one major industry – mainstream media (e.g., television and newspapers) – are at the top of my list of potential sites to perform a practicum on this subject. Each of them is struggling to adapt to critical changes wrought by technology and the impact on their business models. Delving deeper, there are also key issues often embedded in each of their organizational cultures. These manifest as how executives communicate with their employees on rules surrounding social media relationships, how managers build new competencies that integrate old and new skills, and how employees approach their work in an environment where professional and personal personas are increasingly blurred.

Interest #2: Startup Organization Maturation
This interest is one I have been developing over the past couple of years. Recently, I worked inside a company that was in the midst of evolving from a startup to a mature enterprise. What I discovered in talking with individuals who had been with the company from the beginning is how much they missed the “good old days” and were concerned about losing some of the characteristics that made it a great place to work. There was a genuine concern the organizational culture was changing as the company grew beyond the startup set of employees.

These dialogues inspired me to think deeply about what happens when a startup organization is no longer a startup. What happens when the company starts to grow up, find success, increase its product and service offerings, hires new people with different competencies? How does an organization maintain the positive aspects of its startup culture and excise what is necessary for beneficial growth?

My personal experience came inside a maturing startup in the technology sector. In Austin, TX, there is an abundance of such companies which would provide a wide array from which to choose. Ideally, I would select a technology-based company that is somewhere in its fifth to eighth year of existence. The anthropology angle would be to conduct interviews with individuals at various levels of the organization and with various lengths of tenure. The aim would be to learn the stories and rituals of the early startup to understand what cultural attributes originated, which ones have been discarded and which ones have been retained.

Note: I’m a 100% Mac guy so nearly all of these programs are only available for the Mac. There may be PC-based alternatives that I’ve missed. If there are, feel free to add them to the comments.

1. Papers | Mekentosj: I’ve built my own knowledge management system around Papers and recommend it as a must-have program for anyone doing academic research. Built-in search functions allow you to find the latest research and easily import article PDFs into your library. Once in your library, you can annotate, keyword tag, and create smart folders for all of your articles. Plus, the folks at Mekentosj have built a companion iPhone/iPod Touch app that integrates and synchronizes your Papers library on your handheld. It’s super sweet!

2. PDFpenPro | Smile on My Mac: There are plenty of PDF editors on the market (even Apple’s Preview program has editing capabilities). What sets PDFpenPro apart for me is its built-in OCR, wide array of editing tools, and small footprint that takes up little space and sucks up little memory (its that latter item that beats the crap out of Adobe’s Acrobat program). Plus, it integrates into Papers so any notations or edits I make in a PDF are automatically sync’ed into my Papers library.

3. Bookends | Sonny Software: At first glance, Bookends may not seem like much, but once you start to use it you understand just how heavenly it is. If you’re like me, you know keeping track of bibliographies and citations in your research is a major pain in the rear. Bookends makes it simple. You can export your article citations out of Papers into Bookends and the program takes care of getting them into the right style for you. And it’s even better when you use Bookends along with…

4. Mellel II | Redlers: Yes, MS Word is a decent word processing program, but is it made for writing research? Not really. Mellel is and it does the job admirably. It integrates amazingly well with Bookends so your citations and bibliography are constantly kept up to date with your writing. It has everything you need and nothing you don’t when it comes to writing your next academic article. And it exports cleanly to .doc so there’s really no reason to even open up Word.

5. Google Scholar: I’m adding Google Scholar to this list because it is one of the most comprehensive search engines for finding published research articles. It’s simple and it’s powerful. What more do you need?

Any other research tools that you’ve come to rely on in your academic work? I would love to hear about them.