CHAPTER 08

IN THEIR SHOES

Using Ethnography to Understand Consumer Engagement and Buying Insights

While most of the world was suffering some form of financial crisis, we were helping a fast casual restaurant chain to reposition its brand and reengage its consumer base. The financial crunch had a strong impact on people eating out, which made the pleasure of taking the family out for dinner limited to special occasions. The once affordable save-mom-from-cooking family outing became an indulgence. Outside of weekends when there was excess demand, the mid-week casual dining customers were staying at home. More than ever, the competition for restaurants was the supermarket (with huge marketing budgets), which promoted great-value family-friendly meal options for consumers to cook at home. As a result of these and many other factors, the way consumers considered and looked at the fast casual dining category had changed. We needed to effectively relearn how to market to a changed consumer dynamic. We needed to reenergize the Brand Purpose, enhance and connect the consumer experiences, freshen the brand story, and amplify the social conversation. All in service of increasing foot traffic and check size.

To Eat with You Is to Know You. Part of our challenge was to deeply understand consumers in this new dynamic: how they make dining decisions, how they feel about the experience, what their needs are, and most important, why. We had to walk in their shoes to understand their lifestyles, their wants, and needs, along with all their associated emotions both across and through the Experience Space. The best way to do this was to embark on a journey of great discovery. Therefore, in addition to traditional secondary research, our teams started dining at the restaurant. When our teams returned with photos, stories of their experiences, insights, and observations of consumers, SapientNitro reimbursed their costs. Some of our team members even went so far as to work shifts in the restaurant, and during each shift, they video-interviewed their restaurant mentor. After gathering all of this direct front line information, we mapped the consumer journey and detailed what we considered key stages of the consumer experience. Then, with an experienced ethnography researcher, we studied and explored consumer experiences. We interviewed families at home while they were having dinner to better understand that experience and how they felt about it in comparison with eating out. Next, we performed entry and exit interviews at restaurants to capture expectations and reflections. Last, our researcher dined in the restaurant with families and couples—making notes of observation, recording conversations and behaviors, and studying how consumers felt along the journey. We used all of this information to map dimensions of the experience, define opportunities, and unearth insights. These were the insights that were embedded at the intersection of behavior and emotion, or what consumers did and how they felt. All of which was immensely valuable input for Storyscaping a new world of experience.

At the Peak of Anticipation. One of our newly discovered insights ended up being paramount in our strategy for social amplification. It is natural to think that the best time to stimulate a positive social conversation about a restaurant experience is right after dining—upon completion of your meal, when you’re leaving, on your way home, or upon arrival home. However, during this phase of our project, it was only after literally getting into the shoes and minds of our consumers that we discovered the exact opposite was true. In this case, the restaurant’s fast casual dining style included extensive pasta, salad and desert bars—each offered buffet style. This eating arrangement triggered the height of emotional connection during the anticipation stage while diners contemplated which combinations of options to feast on and how they could create any taste sensation or side they wanted. And, there’s more! These consumers could have multiple desserts separately or in one bowl, reaching their creative peak with ice cream and chocolate sauce, bacon chips and jalapenos—all plausible options. At the tail end of the consumer journey, we found the exact opposite of what one might expect to be a fully positive experience. After dining, customers certainly were satisfied, yet also burdened with remorse. Remorse for eating more than normal, remorse for partaking in that wacky combination they felt they just had to try, remorse for consuming one too many deserts. Contrary to expectation, social amplification at the end of the journey was likely to be a negative, while conversation of anticipation would more than likely inspire positive consideration. Both of these were strong emotional states tied to behavior and the experience. Had we not walked in the shoes of these consumers using ethnography and research, these and many other insights would have been left to our imaginations and, perhaps, our assumptions. In this case, we drew on many insights throughout the consumer journey in a full-on effort to successfully understand consumer needs—living out the key reasons (the how and why) they used the restaurant’s products and services to satisfy themselves. All this is pertinent information used in the Storyscaping approach. We also used one core insight as a pillar for determining the Organizing Idea: Our individual tastes are as diverse and different as we are.

This is just one quick story of how getting into the shoes of consumers opened up a world of insight we would never have seen from our position on the outside looking in. For us, ethnography and other associated research practices are fundamental in building environments, tools, products, and content—all things that enable the immersive experiences that consumers expect today.

Start with People. Now let’s explore the principals and practice of ethnography and associated research to get a better grip on how we can more clearly understand consumers and their choices along their journey. Our premise is that people have experiences and that brands mobilize communications, products, services, environments, and more, to shape those experiences. Experience, in this sense, emerges from ongoing patterns of perceptions and interactions, and we cast aside the portrayal of consumers as detailed personas surrounded by touch points. Instead, we start with people on their own terms rather than as a series of homogenous demographics pushed through a sales funnel projecting a single possible outcome—consumption. Storyscaping is built on a significantly deeper understanding of consumers and their relationship with the brand through their experience. In fact, this understanding should go as far as being an “always-on” understanding—more on that later.

Although we recognize that, in reality, consumer emotion (as explored in our consumer insight pillar) and this pillar of understanding needs and behavior are inextricably linked, we separate them purely from a logical viewpoint so that you can see how a brand can be connected on an emotional level. That’s what brand storytelling tries to do, which is different than when a brand tries to interact with something. Part of brand interaction is giving consumers a benefit that solves some sort of need. Since that need could be emotional, realize that you cannot separate emotional and functional need in perfect terms because they are connected. We look at these pillars specifically and individually in their two dimensions in an effort to enable deeper understanding and ensure Organizing Ideas and Story Systems, which are better informed.

Behaviors Are Storytellers. What do we mean by understanding consumer engagement? What are we saying when we talk about “buying insights?” Needs are something that can be solved; and when we link that to understanding consumer engagement, we are saying that it is not a matter of finding a square hole so you can build a square peg to put in it. When we talk about understanding those needs it’s not just knowing what the need is, it’s about knowing why that need exists and understanding that it is connected to many other elements and dimensions of a person’s life. It’s also about recognizing that sometimes that need isn’t conscious—it could be biological. And, as we discussed in the section on product/service positioning, utility needs may even have strong unconscious habitual characteristics (in which case we would study the influences of the habit, the context, the perceived outcomes, etc. rather than just the habitual behavior and functional need). By studying needs and behaviors through meaningful research, we also identify the interconnection with the realms of self-identity, culture, brand value, and Brand Purpose—the realms of the symbolic. Here we are looking at needs and behaviors as the way in which these things become real and have manifested for the consumer. It is in our behavioral routines, in the ways we interact in the world, and in the products or services we plug in that tell our story about who we are or what we want to do. This holds true whether it is a deeply considered decision (such as what to feed your cat—c’mon, you know people can be obsessively particular about this), and when it’s one of the plethora of decisions we make which are made barely above the level of perceptibility (such as your choice of socks this morning—you just reached in the drawer and grabbed a pair that was a consistent color with your pants).

Research helps reveal how we are using the products that companies make and sell and how we tell stories to one another about who we are. In that storytelling, we gain additional ideas and discover new ways to be who we are. We are always looking for ways to make those stories fresh and more compelling; therefore, we need to continually understand consumers, their frames of reference, their language, and their expressions.

Need to Move Beyond Need. All too often the concept of understanding consumers has been reduced to just identifying their needs and market research has become a kind of dreaded hurdle that must be cleared before you go on to the next phase of development. Or in the worst cases, a “validating needs” approach is applied which acts like a screen that is so finely meshed nothing but absolute mediocrity passes through it. Similarly, using arbitrary gatherings of isolated and uncontextualized data (like social listening sentiment) to understand consumers is nothing more than a charade. We believe it is more important to explore something one of our thought leaders in this field calls, “answers of uncertainty.” Dr. Rick Robinson, vice president, marketing analytics—IOTA, describes this as, “The things you find out which result in someone saying ‘maybe it’s . . .’ or ‘it could be that. . .’ or ‘what might happen if. . . .’” In other words, it’s an understanding of consumers that results in stories of possibility rather than in the reduction of risk, the elimination of uncertainty, or the validation of paths already taken.

Moving forward with this perspective on consumer needs and behaviors, we can now explore in more practical terms the principals and practices of ethnography to inform our understanding.

Ethnography is a core qualitative methodology within the field of anthropology and in simple terms, it is the study of societies and cultures. For our purposes, we are after a representation of the relationship between attitudes, perceptions, beliefs in the world, and the material world. In a commercial sense, the material world can be considered the interactions or behaviors with products and services, environments, and systems that are associated with our functional needs.

Let’s Go Hunting. The key to any research is defining where you start. In our commercial context, we need to think about it very practically. We cannot just grab a team of anthropologists and start out on a problem with a really wide range of discovery that will take two years to study. Instead, we have a practice that delivers the “Hunt,” an approach that ensures you frame your work within a meaningful business context. Don’t just do the discovery and then map on the business context later: Start with a hunt statement. The hunt statement is the overarching frame for the research—a broad or “global” statement of what we want to understand and why. It’s a clear, concise, and compelling description of a project’s most essential objectives. It provides a North Star for the research team, guiding the work by providing the team with clarity of Purpose. It reflects your understanding of the competitive landscape. Here is an example of a useful hunt statement:

Understand the families’ experience of learning differences—particularly from the main care givers perspective—in order to build an experience model that will inform both on and offline ABC Co. learning experiences.

At its core, the hunt statement defines how the research addresses your business problem. By having the right hunt statement, the research is opened up for discovery while remaining contextually and commercially relevant to the business. It’s also important to note that the business context should not be the brand’s Purpose or product positioning because these are constraints. You really want to define a context for discovery that will identify opportunities to fill with the brand and products rather than the other way around.

Now that we’ve described the context for research, we can look at some models for planning. Our intention here is to give you practical understanding of how ethnographic research can aid consumer understanding, not to give you a PhD in research methods. We are just scratching the surface here in an effort to illustrate the value of using ethnography to understand consumer engagement and buying insights.

Get a Bigger Slice. If you only look at what people are doing, you’re only getting a narrow slice of the picture. If you only ask what people are thinking, you’re only getting a narrow slice of the picture. Here you can plug in the expression “think, do, use” as a planning tool to anticipate how different elements of experience may interact in order to create routine observable behaviors. It is not meant to explain all experience. It is a visual tool—an aid to thinking critically. Each of the components—think, do, use—has an equal effect on the others. There is no hierarchy. It is not a cognitive model that says people think, and then they do, and then they use. It can be used to analyze both an individual’s routine behavior and that of a collection of individuals—whether a user segment, a country, or a culture. From a working standpoint it is helpful to think about these two ways of using the tool, individually or collectively, as separate.

There are more heuristics and approaches to plan research and discovery. We could get into a long discussion around sampling the right people for research too, but we wont—we will just stick with a rather fundamental suggestion: The most important thing to remember with respect to sampling, no matter what method or approach is applied, is to ensure the sample is based on what you want to know and not on different user groups. Remember, we are trying to understand the relationship between attitudes, perceptions, beliefs in the world, and the material world—not solely the variables between one defined segment and another.

To bring this together, let’s look at a case study where ethnography helped discover a cure for the common cold. Okay, it didn’t cure the common cold, but it did inform the common cold experience model—a model that inspired and informed new product development and experiences for one of our clients. This client was lamenting the fact that the cold care category was oversaturated with products and there was nowhere for them to “move.” The resultant opportunity map showed them that all of their products and their competitor’s products fit in only one phase of illness. There was plenty of opportunity in the other phases—opportunities that were revealed by the cold care strategies their customers were engaged in during those phases.

We started by examining the common cold occurrence. Through the use of in-context qualitative research, we were able to identify a pattern in people’s experience of having a cold. We then created a stunningly simple and intuitive four-stage model of the experience:

The current effort focused product almost exclusively on HAC. But clearly, there was more to say here. There were other ways of speaking to the same desired audience than, “Runny nose? Try this. Coughing? Try this.”

HAC was where every cold care product was spending its marketing dollar. Instead, we explored having-a-cold as states of physical awareness. Awareness of a person’s body, their mental state, and also their emotional states—each was heightened. Awareness of “being exhausted” or “mentally taxed” all went up and down. We mapped how people felt at different states to identify intersections of behavior and desire.

How people moved from one stage to another and what they felt within each stage is essential for rethinking how to frame messages for a cold care product. We did not examine user groups. We identified what we wanted to know—how do people experience a cold? Plotting the answers exposed us to fresh opportunities for approach, product enhancement, and increased market share.

We concluded that consumers were in the most positive and motivated state-of-mind during the Getting Over a Cold stage. Their desires for comfort and relaxation were heightened. We saw that they were in an active frame of mind to “do more to avoid getting sick again.” They bore strong needs to strengthen and replenish themselves. This was all key to more effective strategy for the cold care product involved.

Map Out the Opportunities. One of the key applications of ethnography and establishing the experience model is the opportunity map. As illustrated in the cold care case study, the opportunity map is a powerful outcome of understanding the behaviors of your consumer and how products and services meet their needs. Opportunity maps can differ in how they are defined; most often they are illustrated as matrices. This matrix is an illustration of relationships that defines opportunities, based on your business objectives and the research findings.

Remember the restaurant chain we opened this chapter with? In that case, we explored opportunity by touch points along the journey and overlaid consumer emotional sentiment. The illustration here only shows one dimension of the opportunities. Each dot was explored more deeply with consumer insights and product or service associations.

THE BRAND’S POINT OF VIEW PROVIDES AN OVERALL FILTER & FOCUS

When we move beyond the traditional approaches to ethnography, we can leverage technology to gather data on behavior in new and meaningful ways. This does not make the more typical ethnography or research methods redundant, but it does have some commercial benefits in terms of data gathering and how we can understand consumers on new levels.

You Know Something? This is a new dimension of understanding the behaviors of consumer. To quote Geertz, “We use scientific imagination to bring us in touch with the lives of strangers.”1 Our aim is simply to understand deeply and find meaning in behavior through analysis of small slivers of everyday life. It’s about people, places, and things. We deploy data gathering tools like sensors into the world for such research projects. These data gathering tools are anchored to people, places, and things. We draw quantitative and qualitative data. We tell stories and develop typologies of people and events, like the three types of mobile phone users or what a collaborative meeting sounds like. Our data consists of categories such as: noise levels, light levels, accelerometer data, temperature and humidity, Bluetooth, proximity, digital activity, surveys, and selective video. We use machine learning, statistics, and clever processing on large swaths of data to understand what we’ve collected. It’s not necessary to know everything in efforts to know something.

In Japan, there is a thermopot (a fancy teapot) equipped with a special sensor.2 It is used to help monitor the well-being of elderly who live at home alone. Why a teapot you ask? Many elderly people live alone and that has some risks. In many cases, someone visits and checks on them, which only gives you data based on that specific time when someone visits. With today’s technology, we could have cameras watching and sensors on everything, or just on the teapot. The beauty here is that when the teapot is heated and lifted off the element, it sends a signal to a relative’s smartphone to indicate that the elder is active. So imagine, the desire to know your mother is doing well can be solved by a sensor on her teapot. Why? Because you feel comforted when the teapot is making tea every day—that means she is up and at ‘em and doing well. If she drinks tea at least three times a day, this sensor provides a practical and effective gauge, not to mention an elegant solution for the way instrumentation can give you the answer to the question you ask.

Like this example, the sensors we use are intentionally limited—low resolution, low sampling rate, restricted (but diversified) data types. Why? Privacy issues and avoiding analysis paralysis. Corroborating evidence helps us deduce meaning from activity, validates what we think we are seeing in the data, and adds richness through layers. And the gathering doesn’t stop, which means we can better inform our goal for describing interaction, action, perception, and emotion, attention through interpreted stories and hard data.

Our project, Elder Care, is just such an example and one of various applications where we are using sensor based research to inform insights and opportunities. We started with the thought that we might be able to know something about when an elderly person’s health shows a sudden decline. The hunt: Develop a robust picture of daily living patterns within a specific elderly person’s home, in order to identify changes in behavior or changes in bodily condition, which may suggest an emerging health problem. Our approach: Kauth House is a study of an individual with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and more generally a pilot for the study of elderly in homes. We are establishing processes, protocols, and training materials for a broader community of study and also establishing benchmarks for understanding this individual with COPD. In order to identify changes in behavior or bodily condition, we must first establish a baseline to measure against. By establishing a “normal” set of behaviors and conditions, we will recognize abnormal conditions, which may signify a downturn in health.

A set of sensors were considered relative to the desired data sets, the environments, and the anticipated behaviors. A study of the activity zones was conducted and this informed sensor deployment.

A set of sensors were considered relative to the desired data sets, the environments and the anticipated behaviors.

Initial data visualization is being created to further refine the approach and establish base line norms.

Success in this research for insight means more than just hardware and research—it’s a recognition that working within an always-on world of consumers requires a dynamic and constant exploration of the Experience Space. The mere fact that every smartphone has multiple sensors from GPS to accelerometers, light sensors, and the like, makes it possible to research our always-on-ness. Using the Internet as the platform, allows us to understand this world so we can better serve consumers and their stories.

What You See Is What You . . . Today, in order to fully realize the value of our research, the data, the findings, the interpretations, and the analysis should be illustrative. Ideally it should also be always on and dynamic. We believe the visual representation (dynamic and diagrammatic) of data is critical and key to effective interpretation. Today we can actually visualize almost all data layers. We have an aggressively creative stance toward using graphics and diagrams and even dynamic diagrams to represent each layer of data from raw data to interpreted models, like the experience model of the Sneezy case study. It is this visual representation that informs key insights or opportunities; and the defining of a key insight serves as the highlight of reference for the Organizing Idea.

Elder Care Project, Sensor Deployment

Elder Care Project, Activity Zones

As with all four pillars, the strategies, insights, and findings of the pillar serve as valuable inputs for the Story System and development of Storyscapes, and we draw out one as a reference point for the Organizing Idea. For example, we studied the consumer journey in the health and beauty category, more specifically hair removal. It illustrated many emotional influences around self-esteem, social pressure, and what you would expect in the category. This pervasive range of options—all for one slither of the segment—is mirrored by a constant desire to look and feel beautiful. As such, there is an ongoing expectation of the new and a desire for a simpler solution, while behavior showing commitment to a solution is often diluted by options and so-called innovations. Our core consumer insight was then defined as: “Confidence is my most powerful drug.” This insight and understanding of the consumer’s engagement behavior could now inform the Organizing Idea with greater relevance to how the brand can serve consumer needs in a competitive and cluttered context.

Now you have a solid grasp of Brand Purpose, product positioning, consumer insight, and consumer needs as they relate to Storyscaping. In the next chapter, we move on to offer a detailed definition of the Organizing Idea and how Systems Thinking is applied to create worlds of connected and immersive experiences. These are worlds that will be relevant and meaningful to consumers, their participation, and their evolution of their own personal stories.