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.