24 October 2010

On Ethnography as Strategic Consumer Research

Using ethnography in strategic consumer research by Elliot and Jankel-Elliott (see below) is cohesive introduction to ethnographic methods. The researchers are on the same line with Arnould and Price emphasizing the strategic opportunities of marketing-oriented ethnography.  To avoid recap what has been discussed in earlier reaction papers of market-oriented ethnography, I will just discuss main points of the process of building the interpretation and finally strategic possibilities.

Tools for Interpretation building
A typology of levels of involvement in observation identifies four modes: the complete participant, the participant-as-observer, the observer-as-participant and the complete observer. Between these modes, ideal approach is seen as attempts to minimize the effect of the researcher on the researched and maximize the depth of information that is obtained. So in this ideal, how does interpretation fit in?

Elliott and Jankel-Elliott define interpretation as multiphase process which is driven by data and refined by cross-behavior resonances and disjuntures that point to the sociocultural basis of structured patterns of action. In this process, the disjuncture is seen as a starting point for building overall analysis and coding them from the comparison of the two data sources (observation and interviews) is the key.

For example, interviews always include overgeneralizations and absolutes of informant’s life (always, everyone …) which can be coded from the textual reports. These similar passages can be further analyzed in multiple data sample and finally to behavioral data.  The question is, why these absolutes and generalizations are important to informants in oppose to areas where they are absent. For example, the ideal of ‘Always’ is a strong force guiding both future and present expectations as well as action.

Glosses are another source of possible discjuntures, and coding them is seen to be useful in guiding the researcher to account for discrepancy between how people interpret their own behavior and the one observed by researcher. Glosses can be coded according to informants’ explicit claims and/or to claims that are easily recognized by researcher. In determining why the gloss occurs, the data may provide other behaviors that express similar cultural meanings and values.  Also, claims of commonality and idiosyncrasy are juicy.

Some codes apply to only one behavior; others may mark similarity across behaviors. Tropes are meaningful symbolic links between various behaviors or verbal statements. Why is something unique and special to informants? What is the cultural meaning? As ethnography goes beyond cataloging emic (the informants’ understanding) repetitive themes, the method demands its diverse data to provide the empirical grounding for etic representation (the researchers’ understanding) that accounts for the cultural significance of disjunctures between informants’ understanding and their behaviors.

Managerial Implications
Trough coding and troping interpretation builds to an understanding that encompasses both divergent and convergent elements in a multilayered representation of market behavior. A richly textured interpretation, ‘thick’ description has its implications on strategic marketing which the researchers have classified to four types of managerial goals.

Firstly, through market-oriented ethnography marketer may accomplish thorough understanding of the unarticulated layers of consumer meaning embedded in behavioral constellations. This is especially important when the consumption field is managed through taken-for-granted sociocultural understandings. Sociocultural layers of meaning are difficult to articulate but nonetheless something to which consumers act on.

Secondly, market-oriented ethnography may help in assessing gaps in a specific product/service in delivering resonant meanings across behaviors. By coding and troping, marketer may indentify links to additional layers of meanings and foster product uses that resonate with the existing meanings or other products within the constellation. Thus, needs for modification and re-positioning the product/service may also be identified. Unlike brand- or product-focused market research that develops contrasts with substitutes; market-oriented ethnography turns to complementary products in the constellation.

Presenting and describing example cases of the layers of meaning that organize behavioral constellation is the third managerial implication of market-oriented ethnography. Instead of verbal reports, thick transcription which uses multiple representations is called for to build up the exemplar vivid and concrete. Videos, customer storied and such can effectively capture the meaning and better address on managerial level.

Finally, fourth managerial goal that market-oriented ethnography addresses is the understanding the market over time. On-going ethnography may is a generative source and the ethnographer can predict likely responses with little or no data collection. In its extreme, thick inscription privileges the experiences of the researcher who becomes full insider in the consumption use context. The privilege of experience is not exclusive, though, as researcher’s involvement includes high interaction with other participants. The strategic advantage of the method is, however, the ability to check potential strategies against the researcher’s embodied understanding of any emergent meanings at any point in time. Thus, thanks to the longevity perspective of the method, the relative cost of the research is reduced.

Conclusions   
Market-oriented ethnography does not analyze how a product/service is purchased or used but the full set of actions and behaviors that naturally co-occur with purchase or use of that product. Understanding the broader phenomena rather than the brand makes possible to distinguish quality spaces (co-constituting set of meanings in certain set of behaviors) and behavioral constellation (understanding co-occurring behaviors and their emergent meanings).

Whereas motivation and brand research are based on interviews, ethnography gives primacy to observation of behavior in context to provide a perspective in action and also premise to verbal reports in interviews for a perspective in action. These two methods have different roles in the interpretation building process and comparisons between the two data sources can provide an access to disjunctures between perspectives and perspectives in action.

Ethnography is a thorough method to discover more about the meaning of particular consumption constellations to a particular market segments. Overall, ethnography may help marketers to provide the products and services needed to narrow undesired gaps between behavior and goals, values, norms and beliefs. Also, Elliott and Jankel-Elliott suggest the modes introduced may improve positioning, promotional strategies based on cross-product complementaries, developing line extensions, product re-formulation and niche marketing strategies.

Reference: Elliott Richard and Jankel-Elliott Nick ‘Using ethnography in strategic consumer research’ Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Volume 6, No. 4. 2003. pp. 215-223

22 October 2010

Three Approaches of Market-Oriented Ethnography

Consumer ethnography’s goal is to understand the non-discursive meanings and experiences that materialize as people go about their everyday lives. It attempts to uncover tacit knowledge, unarticulated and contextual understandings that are in routines, nods, silence, humor, postures, gestures and verbal statements. Tacit knowledge enables people to define social situations and act accordingly within them. In this attempt to discover the tacit areas of consuming, three approaches are present: macro-, micro- and lastly meso-level ethnogprahy introduced by Arnould and Price.

Macro-level ethnography focuses on the identification of templates or spaces for consumer action with which they give structure to consumption choices and life goals in general. Interesting examples of macro-level approach are ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) and cultural branding by Holt.  The goal of ZMET is to understand informant’s unconscious thought through analysis of metaphors that are present in informant-selected images/photos and interviews. The photos taken and images chosen by informants are key element of the method as it’s heavily based on the belief that people think in images rather than in words.  The method has been used to discover consumer’s metaphorical understandings of the functions of advertizing and goodwill towards advertising.

Cultural branding, on the other hand, takes metaphors to another level by discerning cultural templates for action and interpretation. Holt argues that the mythic templates are dynamic and charged in nature. The examples are numerous: the template of a home-mom is in tension with career mom, apple users are in tension to pc nerds, snacks are in tension with full meals. Holt furthermore argues that iconic brands can help consumers mediate these tensions. The potential of consumer goods to break through is in finding new ways to articulate these tensions. In other words, boost the need to be unique and belong.

Micro-level ethnography focuses on the a) relationship between the market-provided product/service and the consumer by observing behavior and b) analysis of symbolic dimensions the products build on. The first, product-in-use or task-oriented approach has been favored in marketing and the popularity lies on the method’s potential to uncover regularities in behavior that cannot be articulated.  The latter, studies of brand and consumption communities, has risen previous years but the builds the grounds to the common assumption that people buy things what they mean.

Meso-level ethnography, introduced by Arnould and Price, lies on the basis of understanding how people use resources provided by firms in the culturally, socially situated practices of their everyday lives. The focus of the cultural and social space is the factor what differentiates to the other two. For example, in the case of home visits the researcher tracks the ‘cultural field’, the self-organizing consumer activity space or social network rather than focusing on the tasks performed at dinner table. Thus in their study of family meals and homemade as cultural model, Arnould and Price extended the cultural field of this family occasion to shopping, the role of children, preparing, eating, cleaning etc.

The strength of meso-level approach is its ability to distinguish disjuncture between behavioral ideals and realized behavior as well as between informant’s and observer’s representations of reality. Also, competing tensions of commitments and meanings can be discovered. For example, household food practices reflect aspects of gender, power, identity and social stratification. In Arnould’s and Price’s study one informant spoke her mind of sharing household work with her husband, but the observation revealed that this never happened. Family dinners are seen as sacred rituals but time, meals and other activities define the tensions of every participants meanings of that activity.

Homemade is not easy to sell to consumers as it’s highly personal and somewhat mysterious. However, in their meso-level research when questioning the ideal and concept of homemade, Arnould and Price found four factors why homemade is important. They differentiate home from market, they foster a sense of historical continuum, they link the household to the domain of the sacred and they help people enact important roles and role relationships. Home meal assembly services have managed to find a niche in this relational practice: customers are still able do rather than buy homemade leaving the marketer’s role away from the heart of home.

Conclusions
The weakness of macro-level approach is that it aims to generalize cultural templates by aggregating  psyches of individuals while the relational, changing dynamics and discourses of everyday life may be unidentified. The micro-level approaches, on the other hand, tackle with transferability of results as consumer cultures are so fragmented and dynamic. Also, task-oriented ethnography doesn’t usually grasp the ‘why’ of particular consumption patterns.
Arnould and Price highlight the positioning of brand. With their example study of family meals and meaning of homemade, they pinpoint the importance of understanding who and what really matters to consumers. They call for this kind of new customer-centricity where firm is seen as relational resource that facilitates performance of consumers’ meanings. By acknowledging where the brand stands in consumer’s life, companies can better position themselves and identify new opportunities.

Reference:  Arnould Eric J. and Price Linda L. ‘Market-Oriented Ethnogrpahy Revisited’ Journal of Advertising ResearchSeptember 2006, 251-262

20 October 2010

Quick peek on Brainstorming

I’m working with a project that combines the good possibilities of recommendation engine and ease of travel planning. Internet and the rise of DIY travelers have really taken the share from travel agencies: people devote humongous time to search for perfect hotel and cheapest flights as well as to inspire from new travel locations. It’s not really effective and the information given may not necessarily be specific enough. Not to mention the advertizing spam that you have to deal with search engines - a lot of time is wasted to dead ends.

I’ve been playing with hunch with couple of friends of mine and sure, it’s really entertaining but in the end (at the moment) the app is too general and without worthy information behind the recommendations. Travel agencies have noticed the possibilities of recommendation engines, too. For example, Loma-aparaatti by Aurinkomatkat that they call “Ihmekone” that recommends a location based on 183594 customers.  On scale 0-5 you can define what kind of vacationer you are on areas such as shopping, family situation and culture etc. After the simple questionare, you get the recommendations or you can try again. Again, fun to try out but doesn’t really provide anything new for the customer that s/he wouldn’t find through search engine. The interrelations between different areas and the context are missing. Plus never mind the branding.... aparaatti!

Travel agency websites don’t take into account social aspect at all. They don’t provide forums, customer experiences nor recommendations. People don’t commit themselves to a travel service and thus a company specific social platform in travel business is kind of fool’s errand. But what is surprising to me, is that they don’t even link to social media advocates! This recommendation and planning service with no doubt is for the whole tourism/travel business, no use of every agency developing their own.

So the travel recommendation and planning service provides added-value in the following areas. A) Making the search process more effective by filtering the relevant experiences and information. B) A social platform where you can plan together with your friends. At the moment it seems to be handled through various means: email, face-to-face and on the phone. C) information provided is based on users and search engines D)  By generating your own profile you get recommendations based on a)  you know what you want b) what your friends prefer c) I’ll try my luck.

What I’m working on now: the role of travel preferences through life, how travel planning occurs online and the gaming perspective of generating the profile.

So let me know if you’re interested. More information incoming, so stay tuned!

17 October 2010

We're Not in Kansas Anymore




It is said that repetition is the key of all learning. Yawn. People who repeat and memorize go to factory line. After climbing the ladder for 15 years, they still j u s t produce sausages from the CEO's stool. Not ranking any professions here but attitudes.

Key of all learning, whether real life or work, is testing. People who test question what they learn, produce and invent. They develop and create. At best by sharing and being open they can excel themselves. Testing alone and with a group. Testing your idea and your comfort zone. 

Being present in what you do is experiencing, which on the other hand in most cases is not easy nor nice. However, succeeding is not dependent on thick skin. In this process of testing you only have to test yourself and be able to change.

The question of originality and creativity is topical in all fields. Also MariKoo had her say on the subject over Uutisraivaaja competition. Pls check the open discussion and ideas around this competition. Surely we're able to do the same?




Ego. Scared to fall flat on your face. Then not giving 100 %. Not sticking your face out because afraid of demeaning. Afraid of not being good enough or somebody stealing your idea. Perfection and envy are the archenemies of creativity. In stead of being open to what ever you shut away. 

14 October 2010

On Nethnography as Marketing Research Method

Continuing with Kozinets’ Netnography ( Kozinets Robert V.  The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities. Journal of Marketing Reseach Vol. XXXIX (February 2002), 61-72).

No doubt online communities are important. They have real existence for their participants and thus affect many aspects of behavior including consumption. Businesses especially in the field of consumer goods ought to be interested in what people think about their brands and how these products/services are used in everydaylife. The Web is a historical treasure trove: what is once written in the Internet will always be there.

The Method
Kozinets suggests search engines as a tool for identifying relevant community of research interest. The problem with public search engines, like Google, is that they are not specific enough.  As Kozinets proposes, communities that have more focused topic or group, higher level of traffic, larger number of discrete message headings, more detailed and rich data and more between-member interactions of the type required by the research questions, are preferred. Social media metrics, on the other hand, can be more useful in ranking and sampling the communities according to discussion activity and time horizon from the start. Now that Facebook and Ping are trying to make the search itself more social, hot and viral phenomenon may be easier to find. The aim of netnography, however, is often more complex than just observing the visible.

Data collection includes directly copying content from the site and data that the researcher produces through analysis. The data can be overwhelming and the selection should be within the limits of research agenda. Kozinets suggests for starters dividing the information through communication type: informative, social, on/off topic etc. The challenge in this classification is that the nuance/subject of online discussions usually changes quickly within thread and thus the linkages (thus meanings) may be ignored if not revised thoroughly.

What I also find interesting is the linkages between communities. Whereas forums are usually closed in a sense that they don’t engage in focused discourse as a community to another forum or community. Blogs, on the other hand, do have these linkages and relations as same group of people follow same blogs and participate in the commentary of each. Thus the field of netnography does not necessarily restrict to just one community platform.What constitutes a community after all, are the relationships around a subject.

For classifying relevant data, Kozinets proposes member types: tourists, minglers, devotees, and insiders.The latter two are the main interest of the marketing researcher. These roles, however, are not static and they do change over time. Kozinets argues that from marketer’s point of view again, these power relations are interesting in the sense how members are upgraded for active and loyal participants. Using the classification to generalize consumers is dangerous though: the relation of active online members and off-line active consumers is not that straightforward.

An important notion of nethnography when compared to traditional ethnography is member checks for the final analysis. With member checks the researcher can 1) gain further insights into consumer meanings from community members 2) prevent possible misunderstandings when the community has the opportunity to correct errors 3) chance for on-going relationship marketing.

Let us go and take what is Ours
Kozinets emphasizes Netnography’s possibilities in comparison to traditional marketing-oriented ethnography: cheaper, faster and unobtrusive. The representation of self in the Internet is more open than in a fabricated research setting where the subject can be more careful with her/his opinions and actions. Also, if necessary netnographer can use methods such as interviews and surveys as well in addition to information that was not given in confidence for the researcher. As for the cost-efficiency of netnogrpahy, I would say such an argument is misleading. Even though data itself is ready to be explored and in “easily” text format, time piles up the costs as diving into a community is not an effortless job.

A lot is depending on the researcher: s/he must have diverse interpretative skills of non-physical cues, hypertext and intertextuality over the phenomenon under study. What is challenging, too, is that the results may be difficult to generalize to a wider context out of the sample. But as Kozinets acknowledges, ethnography is usually used to gain understanding of something particular, local and specific.

Social media are the battlefield of marketers. The debate over private and public is an ethical issue, especially in participative nethnography, and the researcher must consider the risk of negatively affecting the community, members and the study itself in the end. Kozinets calls for ethical guidelines to avoid such harm: fully expose your presence and intentions, ensure confidentiality and anonymity of informants, seek feedback from the members and finally consider community’s own perceptions of private and public. Not only for researchers, these are great guidelines for marketers and businesses in overall. 

13 October 2010

On Ethnography as Marketing Research Method

In marketing, the interest of ethnographic research has focused on the ways consumers form communities around consumption artifacts but also the ways in which marketing is performed especially concentrating on marketing practitioners. New trends how to study marketplace behavior and interaction are arising from critical-, visual-, virtual- and autoethnography.


Speed and temporariness define today’s consumption communities.
In today’s international, mass-mediated and technology intensive society field work is a challenge to carry out: meanings are produced and mediated beyond concrete boundaries. Moisander and Valtonen suggest the concept of servicescape to define the field: a physical setting or environment of a place and it includes dimensions such as ambience, spatial layout, signs and symbolic artifacts which affect how customers and employees behave, interact and experience the space.

Consumption of a certain object does not express a commonly shared identity; rather communities always include overlapping and often conflicting identities and meanings. Even though community is using shared set of images and symbols, intertextuality over objects and ideologies are always present and meanings are produced within community. In marketing and consumer studies people under study are taken as natives who form achieved or ascribed communities/subcultures which include interpersonal relationships, social structure, and unique ethos and shared set of beliefs, values, rituals and symbolic expression. Usually subcultures such as brand communities are seen as secondary to the wider culture.

Contemporary consumer-related communities are periodical in nature. Also, the produced meanings are ephemeral. Even though communities can be based on brief social ties, the intensity of sharing of meanings over certain activity can be strong. Especially in technology-intense culture, social life is scattered and occasional.

In addition to Moisander’s and Valtonen’s notions of postmodern community characteristics, I would upraise anonymity as a distinctive community feature. Even though community socializing is more and more making its home into the Web, people still participate anonymously through avatars or pseudonyms. Tehy are afraid of virtual risks such as identity robbery. Only being identified by real life acquaintance can be embarrassing even though comments made would have been in a newspaper site. 

Virtual communities play various roles: a person engages in communities of relationshipscommunities of transactions(anti)brand communities, communities of interest and so forth. Depending on person’s level of engagement to the certain subject or community, s/he will create account for the platform. Nowadays many communities require login, and apps such as Facebook and Twitter have brought synergies so that a person doesn’t necessarily need to create separate account for every platform.
Supposedly anonymity will lessen with the change of generations as people open up. For example, Facebook’s Zuckerberg fantasizes of an open Web where people wouldn’t have the need for privacy. Realistic or not for people to engage to Internet medium rather than the subject of choice, anonymity will be around for a long time. Autoethnography, where the researcher is simultaneously the subject and object of the study, would be an interesting way of studying anonymity and identity development in online media.

Avatars and pseudonyms are virtual representations of a person’s self. Whether acting anonymously or manifesting the openness of Internet, the question for marketers is what kind of relevance is given to the opinions of anonymous comments. Are they real opinions? Why were they made? Do they matter? Is flaming the axioma of anonymous members? This obviously depends of the context - the meaning the community gives for the comments and the commentators. There are no black and white solutions for approaching anonymity, but it is one of the key areas what to observe in the field of virtual communities.

What is observing in Consumption-related Communities?
Notes, writings, tapes, photographs, images, artifacts, newspapers, interviews etc.  What should we observe from these? The challenge of ethnography is not observing itself but distinguishing what to look. Moisander and Valtonen present areas such as intertextual linkages of objects, texts and ideologies in cultural systems of meaning.  

As noted earlier, contextuality is always present as the goal is to distinguish discourses in which people interpret and produce meaning. Relationship between cultural production of subjects and the setting in which such subjects can be produced. Obviously traditional social categories such as race and age still play an important role how these communities are constructed.

Virtual ethnography (or netnography) requires acute lingual and interpretative skills from a researcher as virtual communities lack face-to-face interactions. Non-verbal cues are limited but diverse: standard emoticons are widely in use but every community has its own ways and meanings of using them in addition to creating their own.

The focus of observation is also dependent of the field of ethnography. For example, critical ethnography challenges the conventional, taken-for-granted nature of social reality by asking ‘What could be?’ instead of ‘What is?’ It’s fundamentally political approach concentrating on power, control and subjectivity of the ethnographer and the researched while linking the results of the field to a broader context. It also highlights the role of research in producing both restricting and emancipating alternative possibilities.


Conclusions
Ethnographic is time-consuming method as it involves attaining the insider perspective.  Moreover, researcher must be familiar with the routine of documenting: recordings, writing and interviews and such. Thus all the examples given here, needless to highlight that the role of ethnographer is challenging. In addition to observing the phenomenon, s/he manages the relationship between the self and the others in the field.

It is obvious that the observations are not the truth of the phenomena but rather truthful accounts. In contemporary approach of ethnography the researcher is not non-biased but has a voice, power and own (personal, academic, career etc.) background to reflect on. Writing and expressing something is always excluding something else. Knowledge is built on us through history and this should be defined in the study as researcher’s orientation determines the whole research agenda and process. The role of critical reflexivity is to highlight researcher’s biased role rather than neutralize it. Moreover, when gaining the insider perspective, the researcher is likely to affect the field and through her/his own actions participate in cultural production of the community.

Objectivity has ruled academic and business world the last century. In such context ethnography is radical approach and offers detailed data of social and marketplace behavior. Ethnographic methods can provide perspectives on marketing strategy and questioning assumptions of marketing inquiries.  Social media is THE site for ethnographers and marketers where thumping up and site peaks don’t really unfold the story of the consumers. Many online communities that are full of people engaging in hobbies, buying and selling, socializing and expressing are open for lurking and monitoring. Virtual ethnography is called for more than ever in the era of mediated consumption. Semantics in general, such as sarcasm, is still unreachable to search engines. 



Moisander, J. and Valtonen A. 2005, p.45-67, Sage Publicications

12 October 2010

Multitasking is procastinating?

Do you ever wake up to notice that you're doing things that you were not supposed to do? How many tabs you usually use when at your laptop? Do you think multitaskers are todays heros? Neither do I but everyday I find myself in the middle of these sinful situations. The entertainment side of web and social medias are my favorite substitutes when preparing to an exam or not getting creative grasp on work etc.

Past Friday's workshop of culture made me to analyze the culture of media consumption. During the past year I have come across studies that forewarn the dangers of media multitasking. They say that media multitaskers pay a mental price: bad memory, stress, unability to concentrate. Do I need to continue? The press is also starting to publish these little news of new research. For example, Naomi Baron in her book Always on states that online and mobile technologies (instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, social networking site as Facebook and blogs) profoundly influence the way we read, write, listen and speak. 

New technology makes possible to fulfill even the short moments with music, images, news, messages and entertainment in general. Baron argues that our ability concentrate is on stake as we loose the capability to bury ourselves into something. We procastinate.

Many everyday routines require multi-tasking, take driving a car for example. While listening to radio we coordinate our limbs,  observe traffic and other drivers. I guess multi-tasking depends on the level of routine we have gained, to become the ultimate driver you need a license and heaps of experience. Online media is not as approachable and manageable to all. Especially for the latter it is why online literacy and media education should be provided already in primary school.

Baron states that new technologies haven't influenced the language as much as our relationships. Baron poses a question: what kind of people do we become as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media? Are we really present for our friends when hanging around in Facebook while doing our work? Is it the medium that allures me or the need to chat with a friend?

It's obvious that the pace of technological change compared to cultural evolution is power to ten. But blaming online media is No Go as these new technologies only boost the features inside us. 

Balancing between mediation and meditation is a tough job even for new savvy leaders.

10 October 2010

Intoloop keeps us waiting


Just wanted to share Intoloop with you. Intoloop is a social media platform which promises to connect people around their passions. Whereas Facebook focuses on the present moment, Intoloop targets on people's passion for documenting their life and memories. This said, it is not surprising they are about to release beta version by the end of this year with virtual Baby Diary app. 

The interdependence of the present and the past is truly intriguing, and I wonder if an app combining these dimensions is visually and functionally possible... if it's automatically printed from present app, the visual representation can be rather messy. On the other hand, documenting cant be too much of manual hammering... and in the end, do will still need to consider if the memoirs could be printed to physical form?

Check article here (in Finnish). I guess they are getting in shape as they started a twitter account lately. Let's stay tuned!