Consumer Anthropology
Getting Down to Business: Anthropology and Marketing Research
Anthropologists have long relied on ethnography for a better understanding of people and culture. Not all ethnography, however, is purely academic. Anthropologists are increasingly using their ethnographic skills to help companies gain insight into the lives and behaviors of consumers.
Companies use marketing research to help them identify demographics, understand the emergence of fads, develop ways of improving computer software, and determine what features to include in new models of automobiles. Traditionally, the answers to these questions have come mainly from focus groups, samples of consumers brought into a “laboratory” to test and discuss products. Because of their artificial settings, however, focus groups fail to provide companies with complete pictures of consumer behavior and the roles that different products play in their lives. Ethnography, with its emphasis on observing and interacting with people in their natural settings, helps fill in gaps.
Norman Stolzoff of the marketing research firm Ethnographic Insight.
For the past 20 years, the anthropologists Rita Denny of Chicago and Patti Sunderland of New York City, among the founding members of the marketing research firm Practica Group, have been conducting anthropological studies for a variety of companies, including General Motors, Hewlett‐Packard, and Intel. In many ways, they say, their research is quite similar to that of an academic anthropologist. Recently, for example, they were hired by an American restaurant to help develop a menu aimed at young adults. To explore the ways in which food fits into the cultural lives of twentysomethings, they conducted ethnographic interviews while people prepared meals in their homes, ate dinner at restaurants with friends, enjoyed meals at relatives' houses, and drove and ate in their cars. They also asked participants to create video diaries to capture late‐night and early‐morning eating. Much as an academic presents research findings in a journal article or at a conference, Denny and Sunderland provide their clients with a written report of their findings, a presentation, and an ethnographic film.
Of course, there are differences between doing ethnography for academic reasons and using it in marketing research. “The chief difference that strikes any academic is the time line,” says the anthropologist Norman Stolzoff, founder of the marketing research company Ethnographic Insight. An ethnographic study he may do for a company such as Whirlpool may last no more than 10 weeks—a much shorter time, for example, than the 18 months he spent studying popular culture in Jamaica for his dissertation. Despite the brevity of the research, its results “far surpass the volume of information of other market research,” Stolzoff says. Companies are so pleased with the results, according to Sunderland, that “ethnography is almost an expectation” when it comes to conducting marketing research.