Ethnography with Innovare

In recent years, marketing research has placed growing importance on ethnography and ethnographic techniques.  It is not surprising.

Ethnography is a powerful set of techniques that allows companies to obtain a snapshot of people's lives, their experiences, their relationships, the processes they use, their triumphs and their disasters.  Ethnography captures the subject's inner thoughts and feelings, their emotions; their values and the rules that guide them. 

When Do We Use an Ethnographic Approach? Ethnography is most suited for use as an exploratory tool when looking for new insights into consumer or customer experiences, their perceptions and their behaviors. We recommend that it be used to develop new ways of thinking about a market, a consumer/customer process, or a product or service area.  The insights developed and resulting new ways of thinking informs strategy development, technology direction, product and service innovation, advertising, and marketing communication. Ethnography is now being incorporated into the front end new product development process of many companies, where the insights gained through the research are used generate new concepts and populate their innovation pipeline.

What Can I Learn Using Ethnography?

Ethnography allows us not only to to hear what people say they do, but to see their real behaviors, and then probe deeply to understand what drives their behaviors. All within context of the specific products, services, or situations that are central to the ethnographic study.

"What people do is often very different from what they say they do."

Conventional qualitative research provides only a partial picture.   Innovare offers a more holistic ethnographic approach. Consider the following simple example of what you hear in a focus group with consumers compared to what you see in the field.

In a focus group, when asked about their experiences of diapering their sons, the fathers agreed that  - “It's pretty easy – we take off the dirty diaper, use some wipes, toss it all into the diaper pail, then grab a clean diaper and put it on."

Using an ethnographic approach the field researcher observed, "a father diapering his one-year-old son on top of a changing table. He has the dirty diaper off, held in his right hand, his left hand on the baby for safety. (he's full of energy) Dad reaches over to throw the dirty diaper in the diaper pail – but – he’s one hand short to open the pail! With various contortions, he’s able to achieve his goal, but not with ease or safety."

The ethnographic approach provides substantially greater insight.  It is more complete and contextually based.  Ease and safety rise to the surface as important factors to consider and a focus for innovation.  Making the process easier and safer can now be applied when developing and positioning products and making the emotional connections. 

How Does Innovare Approach Ethnography?

 We offer several types of approaches depending upon the research goals.  To learn about some of our ethnographic tools click on the following link:

Our Ethnographic Tools

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