The Ethnography of Marketing
A software tool allows researchers to study human behaviors and plot them along dimensions that reveal product and service needs.
Ethnography is most helpful for:
- Achieving a high-level overview of your customers’ environment and the ongoing “pain points” they experience
- Identifying important customer “jobs” to be done, and devising an initial product development roadmap
- Developing a detailed understanding of how customers perform certain tasks or use specific products, in an effort to identify gaps in product performance and areas for potential improvement and innovation
- Establishing a comprehensive set of customer needs (as part of a Voice of the Customer study), by ensuring that what customers do, as well as what they say, is reflected in the final affinity diagram of customer needs
- Validating that a new product concept or prototype meets customer needs by placing it with customers and observing their usage in a real-life setting
Advantages
- One of the more widely cited benefits of conducting ethnographic research is that due to the first-hand observation that is involved, usually conducted over an extended period of time, the research can provide extensive and in-depth findings about human behavior. In addition, because ethnographic research relies on observation rather than examinations or predetermined tests, the research can evolve and explore new lines of inquiry.
Disadvantages
- Due to the fact that ethnographic research relies on observation, it often takes a longer period of time to produce thorough and reliable results. Also, because the research is reliant upon the observations of just one or a few people, the conclusions about what the human subjects were doing, saying or feeling could be altered by the observers' cultural bias or ignorance.
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