Tag Archives: business anthropology

The Convenient Lie of Customer Lying

by on December 5, 2011 in Research

Last week, Alessandro Di Fiore wrote a blogpost at HBR that provoked some pretty strong reactions from me called How to Get Past Your Customers’ Lies.

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

Clearing The Air About Ethnography

by on September 26, 2011 in Research

Everyday there is evidence that ethnography is entering the general business vernacular. And there is also plenty of evidence that it remains woefully misunderstood. I’ve heard it bandied about as just another tool for getting information about customers and users.

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.

X-Men And Our Own Struggles With Alienation

by on June 5, 2011 in Life

There’s a rather fascinating op-ed today in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘X-Men: First Class’ reminds us we are all mutants now. It argues that “the superhero movie series reflects an America that has increasingly come to accept individuals with unique identities, desires and talents.”

It’s a good article that raises some interesting ideas. However, where I’ll disagree with the LA Times writers (and perhaps Grant McCracken, though I haven’t fully reviewed his work titled Plentitude (pdf download)) is where they argue this “quickening speciation of social types” is a recent phenomenon. If you need any evidence, just think back to when you were in high school and how many different social types existed. The fact is we’ve always typed individuals. And we’ve always set out to form our own tribes as a way to confirm (or deny) self-identification as well as develop the security of numbers.

Now, it’s a lesser-known fact that I’m a huge comic book collector. I first started reading in 1984 and one of my favorite titles was X-Men. I don’t think I was completely aware of it at the time, but what I undoubtedly found within the stories were themes I could easily relate to: feeling outcast, alone, angry, and different from those around me. I surely felt a kinship between my teenage self and the various mutants within X-Men who sought acceptance from society.

But another way to look at why the X-Men remain popular since their beginnings in the 1960s is to see their relationship to our own cultural outlook. Not only do they fulfill a hero archetype, they connect us to an inner sense of alienation. Each of us is alienated from something in one way or another. It could family if we’ve chosen to do something outside of their wishes. It could be work if we are disconnected from the leadership structure. It could be online in social networks if our attempts at communication are ignored by others.

The moral story of X-Men – not just First Class but throughout the canon – is there are two paths we can take. One is with Magneto who believes alienation should be met with anger and vengeance. The other is with Professor Xavier who argues that alienation can be met with a hope for societal acceptance.

At the end of X-Men: First Class, characters are asked to make a choice: join Magneto or Xavier. It’s the same in our own daily existence. If we’re feeling alienated and apart from the group in which we seek acceptance, do we take the path of brooding anger…or do we take the path of hopeful determination?

When Disaster Strikes: Does Your Product Marketing Include A Succession Plan?

by on June 2, 2011 in Marketing

One of the activities I love the most about being a product marketer is interviewing customers. While I start with the mission of learning about their use of Journyx’s products, the anthropologist in me always aims to develop a richer picture of the customer’s organizational cultures. In the span of an hour-long interview, I can’t go too deep but I can begin to glean some important clues about the relationships between people and their tools. My working hypothesis is that how a company adopts and uses technology – whether they do it successfully, fail dramatically, or fall somewhere in between – is tied closely to the cultures that exist within the company. (There’s a whole lot more to say about this and I hope to dive into it in more detail in upcoming posts.)

In my latest interviews, one subject that’s popped out at me is how knowledge around technological tools changes and is passed from person-to-person. In other words, how does an organization’s cultural understanding and use of Journyx’s time tracking toolset transfer from experienced employees to new hires? Think of your own organization. There are two ways of looking at this.

1. Within your own company, what tools do you use to get work done? Could be Sharepoint, Salesforce, or some other online tool. It could also be a non-online tool (think about how to get that conference room projector to work). Hopefully, you have individuals who are experts in managing these tools…but what happens if they leave? More to the point, what happens if they leave unexpectedly? Does your company of a succession plan to ensure a successful transfer of knowledge? If not, maybe it’s time to think about that potential scenario where your expert goes away and you’re left fumbling around looking for answers.

2. If you’re a product marketer, this offers a unique opportunity to build customer loyalty. I can’t think of many companies out there actively helping their customers build personalized succession plans. There’s tremendous value to working with customers to build succession plans. Think about how much stronger the relationship will be after helping a frazzled customer successfully continue their processes when disaster strikes?

Is succession planning a part of your company’s product service portfolio?

Why We Care About Corporate Logos

by on January 23, 2011 in Branding

I’ve been thinking a lot corporate logos, their meaning, and what it contributes to the customer experience. In a bit of serendipity, today I read this post from Derrick Daye at The Blake Project entitled Branding Debate: Does Logo Design Really Matter?. He writes:

What’s important are the associations people have with a logo–not the logo itself. A logo (trademark and its associated visual language) is the symbolic representation of a whole narrative story built into an organization over time. Brand equity is the result of successfully delivering on the promise your brand represents in the hearts and minds of consumers. Indeed, there are some time-tested design guidelines all enduring trademarks share, but that is not what enables them to endure. What makes a logo endure (and be cared about) is not the design, but the promise it represents.

When The Gap changed their logo (then backslid after an uproar in social media channels), I started to think about this enduring quality of logos and their meaning to consumers. At first, I was actually critical of the company for reverting their decision on the basis of a minor uproar. No one likes change so it’s always going to be a battle when a company decides to change something meaningful like a logo. And there’s always a segment of design creatives that will bitch and moan about anything that doesn’t please their own narrow aesthetic philosophy.

But then, I got curious about what all this might mean to the relationship between a company and their customers. Approaching it this way, a consumer’s attachment to a company’s brand, logo, and promise is a far more interesting exercise in seeking out symbolic meaning. The anthropologist, Victor Turner, argued that symbols are important because of their ability to both condense meaning as well as contain a multiplicity of meanings. While it may sound paradoxical, it actually illustrates the various layers in which a symbol – such as a logo – resides.

Let’s take Southwest Airlines, for example.
When we think of Southwest Airlines (even if we’ve never actually flown with them before), images and ideas come to mind. We know certain things about the business and the promise it represents. The logo becomes a sort of shorthand for how customers and company relate to each other. If Southwest decided to change their logo, it might signal a potential shift in this relationship. And because each customer has their own personal experience with the airline, the customer generates several meaningful impressions when confronted with the logo. We might think of their “Bags Fly Free” commercials or a memorable time we flew with them. We then attribute positive or negative meanings depending on these experiences.

Now, let’s juxtapose that with Enron.

A very different set of meanings are involved, right?

Here’s an exercise. Take a look at these logos and think about what the business is trying to convey to you. Now think about what that brand means to you. What feelings does it invoke? What brand promise does it represent? What’s the overall symbolism?

Logos and brands are just simplified, symbolic constructs that make it easier for customers to recognize and related to your business. Whether or not you decide to change your company’s logo, think about all the different ways you generate meaningful relationships with your customers. And then consider how your customers have created (or want to create) relationships with your business. It’s these relationships – embodied in your logo – that will prove a strength in good times and bad.