Methods & Techniques
Tommy Stinson — 12 October 2007
In recent days there has been quite a bit of hubbub about the use of anthropologists to support the American military in local involvement in Afghanistan ("Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones", New York Times, November 5, 2007). Anthropologists, public policy experts, military experts, and even design anthropologists have weighed in on the ethics of using ethnography and anthropological insight to support military objectives.
Without getting into the debate about this specific instance, the discussion has reminded me of our call to be ethical in our dealings with research participants, and I wanted to say a few words about that.
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Darrel Rhea — 15 March 2007
This week’s Design Management Institute’s European Conference is focusing on the Metrics of Design. By any measure, the conference is well attended with over 150 designers, design managers, researchers, senior executives and others… gathering to be inspired and informed. It’s a tall order, though, to mix a conference cocktail of “design” and “metrics,” despite how critically thirsty our business public is to be reassured they are on the right path with developing products and services that will serve their customers well.
As keynote speaker on the first day, I felt responsible for communicating that there is a viable balance between intuitive and rational approaches. In fact, my position is that any company needs both to succeed in creating and communicating products and services that are meaningful to its customers.
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Tommy Stinson — 14 February 2007
Last Thursday, Steve Portigal introduced a great cautionary note on the dangers of bad (read: quick and uninformed) survey design. Steve's argument was that design educators do their students a disservice by implying that quantitative online surveying is easy and quick. That it's important to know that a survey is not something that anyone can do without planning and forethought, an understanding of appropriate methodologies, and an understanding of effective nuances of survey flows and guides. (Steve, if I'm extrapolating too much, I apologize!). I think Steve's point is well made, and I would extend this cautionary note to ineffective ethnography.
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Darrel Rhea — 9 February 2007
We have all been part of great workshops, work sessions, meetings, and presentations. We were discussing what the “design principles” are for creating a satisfying experience for a workshop.
My personal experience suggests that the best sessions move beyond cognitively sensible presentations of abstract ideas….to an experience that is personal, emotionally engaging, active and conversational. I’m bored when I am just an observer or participant in someone else’s gig. I start caring when I take responsibility as an author to the solution, when I start experimenting and prototyping, and when I engage in dialogue about it.
This is why meetings and presentations disguising as work sessions fall flat. They shouldn’t be about us showing off and getting intellectual acceptance of our ideas. It is about our clients doing the heavy lifting, using the insights we provide and applying their creativity. That is a huge paradigm shift for many of us in the design, research and consulting worlds. It means that it is about facilitating others, not what we produce but what they produce with our insights.
And that is a performance art.
Miguel Gomez Winebrenner — 31 October 2006
It is vox populi in the marketing and research industries that Holidays, particularly Thanksgiving and Christmas, could bias research results. The reason is that consumers’ attitudes and behaviors during these periods are altered i.e., they may be more/less inclined to purchase certain services and goods based on their need states during these festivities. There may also be increased levels of awareness and effective recall for brands due to Holiday advertising. As such, most researchers try to avoid conducting field during these periods of the year- particularly during the third week of November, and between December 15th and January 5th. However, for certain cases, there is also a strong reason for avoiding data-gathering around Halloween.
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Lee Shupp — 6 July 2006
Jamais Cascio has just posted "12 things journalists to know to be a good futurist" on his blog. It's similar to the futures FAQ I posted a few days ago, but different in that it challenges commonly held media assumptions about the future. I've listed them here along with some comments.
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Lee Shupp — 5 July 2006
When I reveal to clients and colleagues that I'm a trained futurist, I often get bewildered looks, and then comments along the lines of "pork bellies or crystal balls?" No, I'm not a futures trader who works commodity markets. And no, I'm not a fortune teller either. I am interested in the process of change, and in how the future will be different than the present or past. Rather than "predicting" the future, I study underlying forces of change to understand how different alternative futures may play out in different contexts.
Many of my futurist friends have also encountered this confusion, so we recently posted a FAQ list of common questions about futurists and futures research. Hear is a short version for quick consumption with comments about how the FAQs apply to my world:
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Darrel Rhea — 30 April 2006
Making innovation happen in the best environment is tough. Making innovation happen when the lines of authority are foggy is exponentially harder.
In the ideal world, someone owns each of your company’s brands. That is, he or she is accountable for the brand’s performance, and has the authority to control brand touch points and mandate changes. Without this structure of authority, there will be “brand by committee,” or “brand by politics,” or “brand by pecking order.” Usually it’s all three, and usually it’s ugly. If this occurs in a franchise business, which is where many consumer products and services are distributed, it’s worse than ugly.
If you are the brand manager and you own a brand, your responsibility is to define the brand experience. If it is clearly articulated (functional benefits, emotional benefits, economic benefits, and an explicit way the brand creates meaning in our culture), you can define criteria to evaluate how the brand is delivering today. And you can provide a tight creative brief for efforts to improve it. This focus provides a critical context for innovation research.
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Lisa Leckie — 24 April 2006
I came across a blog written recently by Grockwell that characterized digital ethnography as a “catchy idea for doing cheap ethnography,” but I strongly believe there is more to it than this. There can be cost efficiencies to doing digital ethnography, but its real value lives elsewhere.
Specifically, digital ethnography:
- allows us to understand consumer behaviors in real time, as they happen
- creates access to situations and experiences we might not normally get to see -- digital technology helps us capture moments that a researcher may indirectly influence if present
- allows us to explore the true nature in which technology is used and applied by people
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Katy Haberkern-Mogal — 13 April 2006
Conventional wisdom has held that kid and tween focus groups are often of limited value (for any number of reasons including kids’ tendencies to say what they think the moderator wants to hear, group dynamics, concrete thinking that makes abstraction or projection near impossible, etc.). I recently had a chance to test this theory at the IIR Youth Marketing Mega-Event in Huntington Beach. (http://www.iirusa.com/youth/)
Every year, this conference offers attendees the opportunity to observe a live focus group among their choice of teens, tweens or kids under 10. We were asked to step in on relatively short notice to take over one of the focus groups when the kids’ group moderator became unexpectedly unavailable. It was a great opportunity to be a presenter at a prestigious conference so I gamely signed up, despite some trepidation over the format of the presentation.
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Lisa Leckie — 26 January 2006
Long gone are the days when a company could reliably build consumer loyalty through traditional advertising or PR. While traditional tactics for gaining consumer awareness and positioning brands are still relevant, they don't consistently unlock the doors to the development of deep and meaningful customer relationships.
Technology is one of the biggest catalysts in consumers’ changing relationships with brands. Because of technology, consumers have more power over their interactions with brands. They are using text messaging, blogging, online communities and digital capture devices to engage with brands in different ways as well as share information and communicate about them.
Digital ethnography is a methodology Cheskin has invented and pioneered to understand these changing consumer relationships better. At the same time technology is evolving consumer relationships with brands, it is also creating new connecting points for understanding them. Digital ethnography leverages new forms of technology to understand consumers faster, deeper and in more relevant ways.
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Lee Shupp — 11 July 2005
Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink, is riding high on the business best seller lists. I found the book a fast and fun plane read, and agree with the basic precept that we make many decisions quickly, at the gut level, rather than rationalizing everything before we act.
Malcolm has been on the road promoting his book, and one of the subjects that keeps coming up is whether focus groups are worth doing. Malcolm argues that focus groups are dead; that they focus (pun intended) on rational, stated behavior, which is rarely in play as people make purchasing decisions.
I beg to differ. I agree that focus groups are overused- but they are a valuable tool in the market researcher's toolbox.
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Maria Flores Letelier — 27 March 2005
A question that many executives ask is whether they should really divide up a market. Does it really make sense to cut a market into parts? Isn’t segmentation really a last resort, a strategy for those small players trying to grab a niche in the market? Some executives will grant that understanding your general demographic or industry grouping is important, but segmenting beyond basic demographic variables is a luxury. I am often asked these questions with respect to one macro-group; namely, the Hispanic market. First, why even consider this demographic group as a segment in and of itself? Can’t the same messaging and products work with this group as with everyone else? Further, why worry about dividing this group up further in terms of levels of acculturation and understanding these differences? This is a large topic that must be considered carefully. Here I offer some brief notes as a way provoke thought and begin to simplify the fuzzy notion of segmentation.
It does indeed make sense to try to target the largest amount of folks as possible. A quality marketing consultant will not advise a client to segment for the sake of segmenting alone. When it comes to understanding segments, we are talking about understanding people in a larger cultural space. No one can deny that we all appropiate the cultural style of the moment in a different way. Still, an innovative, meaningful positioning will strike a chord with something that is happening in the culture at large, a cultural inflection of style that will affect many people at some point. Coke is often upheld as an example of a star brand that never really needed to segment its market. Coke’s famous, “The Pause That Refreshes” campaign articulated the cultural style inflection that was taking place at the start of the 20th century. The industrial revolution had established a dominant culture of economic duties and hard work. The idea that one could take a break, a pause, within the work day was a new inflection in the cultural style of the time. Coca Cola has continued to tune into changes in cultural style inflections that take place decade after decade, as it did in the 1970’s with the shift from progress to nature; “Things Go Better With Coke”.
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LiAnne Yu — 23 January 2005
These days I see plenty of ads for people with advanced degrees in anthropology to fill brand and product design roles. For someone like me who spent years in grad school wondering what options I had outside of academia, this is very gratifying. Truth be told, it’s fun to finally be associated with a popular discipline! Back when I was in the early stages of job hunting, it seemed only the MBA’s got the cool, international jet-setting jobs. I just got asked if I dug up bones for a living. But with popularity comes one inevitable tendency: the proliferation of fakes.
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— 1 December 2004
In his October article on Design Research, Andrew Zolli limits the interpretation of design to aesthetics and design research to designographics. In addition, he advocates that design research needs to be reinvented. In fact, there are many firms who currently utilize techniques and methodologies that yield rich and innovative design solutions through their craft.
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Christopher Ireland — 10 November 2004
I've gotten so many requests to clarify whether youth voters turned out this year or not, I decided it was worth a blog. The answer is they did--but how you spin the numbers is up to you. Here's the straight, non-subjective data along with various ways you can communicate it, depending on what message you want to send.
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Darrel Rhea — 8 October 2004
The recent political “debates” are important nationally and globally, but aren’t really debates. With the participants – Kerry, Bush, Cheney and Edwards – more often addressing issues lined up by a moderator than directly sparring with each other, I’d characterize them as more a form of interview. (Click for a full transcript and thought-provoking commentary on the first Presidential debate.)
It’s clear that of the four, the interviewees with the most to lose are the least revealing. Incumbents Bush and Cheney demonstrated themselves to be well-prepped, staying on messaging consistently. But, their “answers,” even when sprinkled with new statistics, didn’t enlighten listeners beyond the rhetoric we have been reading in the press for many months. Politically, it was probably a good strategy for them…though didn’t result in exciting debates or even very good interviews.
There are a number of basic types of interviews: journalistic, research, job, and political. No matter which type it is, the basic goal of an interview is to mine for information. Probably what makes each of the types so different is the ultimate desired outcome for that information. Political: explain the candidate’s position on issues of interest to the voting public. Journalistic: entertain, and sell the publication (whatever medium). Job: hire or be hired. Research: solve a problem.
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— 8 October 2004
I recently had the privilege of speaking to a class of bright graduate students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The professor, Brenda Laurel, Ph.D., asked me to help her class understand effective ways of speaking to teens in an interview setting.
The students are part of the Media Design Program and were commissioned by a world renowned company to conduct a study that involved teens and technology. My job was to help them get a glimpse at what they would face when interviewing teens and provide guidance on how to be successful at getting them to open up.
Of the countless groups I’ve moderated, I have to admit that speaking to teens is one of the most challenging groups to speak to but by far my favorite.
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— 6 October 2004
My colleague Gary Feldman wrote a provocative piece about product placement or pimping – the fine line between pandering and relevance of brand name products in movies, tv shows and the like. The difference between product placement as a gratuitously featured product shot vs. a meaningful extension of the brand and consumer experience has to do with authenticity. Leveraging that authenticity and positioning successfully is informed by thoughtful, strategic research.
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Gary Feldman — 1 October 2004
Last night’s episode of Will & Grace included a plot element that is part of a trend I refer to as “focus group bashing.” While criticism of focus groups is not something new, it struck me as ironic that those who like to mock or deride this form of research are often in a position to best leverage the learning and insights that this methodology can provide.
Or to put it another way, the creative development process is actually one of the areas where qualitative research can really be valuable, despite the bad rep it gets from questionable advertising, sitcom plots, and disgruntled agency creatives.
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Christopher Ireland — 16 September 2004
We all woke up this morning to learn that Bush leads Kerry in the polls by 13 pts (Gallup). No, make that Kerry leads Bush by 1 pt. (Harris Interactive). Oops, no make that Bush leads Kerry by 1 pt (Pew Research). In statistical terms, the difference between the Harris and Pew data is insignificant, but the difference between them and the Gallup poll is a whopper.
How could this happen? All these firms are reputable, high quality research organizations with plenty of relevant experience in this field. Their sample sizes are large and their polling methods are sound. Is one side right? And if so, which one?
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Christopher Ireland — 13 May 2004
I just gave a talk at the 2AD conference hosted by HP Labs in Bristol, UK on the topic of Organizing Principles (of design research). I'm going to try and recreate it here, although I can't recall all the Q&A and I'm not yet blog savvy enough to post the graphics along with the text.
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Christopher Ireland — 7 May 2004
While I often converse thru email with people I've met thru blogging, I had yet to meet any of them in person. Until yesterday, when I had lunch with John Porcaro. I knew I would like John (and I did). I don't think it's possible to present a false personality in an extensive blog and since I read his regularly, I had a good idea of who he was. What surprised me was what more I learned from meeting him in person.
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— 6 May 2004
On a recent trip to Tokyo I was struck by the careful attention paid to impression management by many of the city’s residents. Everywhere I looked it was Italian suits and designer purses (granted I spent most of my time in Shibuya). Well, not everywhere but the clothing, gestures, use of space, and communication employed by the people I encountered revealed the contours of “everyday” self-presentation precisely because it seemed strange to me. When you think about it, compared to the rest of the world (even discounting similar, relative income levels), Americans are slobs.
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Christopher Ireland — 23 October 2003
Occassionally (very occassionally), I take an assignment that requires only me. I suppose I do this to make sure I still have marketable skills, but I also enjoy a tough challenge and I love to learn. I had that experience today. I spent 8+ hours with some very passionate & intellegent engineers, VCs, entrepreneurs and at least one math genius. We were defining their company in terms that others could understand and embrace.
We spent the first part of the day talking about who they are as a company and who they want to become over the next 5 years. We talked about the different types of customers they have and the different types of competitors they have. We talked about their values and their sense of worth. After about 3 hours of these discussions, we dealt with the hardest issue: how they were going to communicate in a world that would not give them hours to explain their value.
This is difficult for every company, but I think particularly difficult for entrepreneurs. It's like asking a proud parent to summarize their child in one word. So much needs to be left out. To their credit, this particular client was able to see the power in letting go of all the rich details of their history, their deep thinking, and their strong commitment--replacing it with a concept that a potential customer could immediately grasp, find valuable and hold in their minds.
It doesn't always end this way. Some entrepreneurs can't or won't make that trade. I know exactly how they feel, and I sympathisize. It's much easier when it's not your baby.
— 11 July 2003
Over the past few years ethnography and ethnographers have been popping up everywhere I turn. From human computer interaction, to branding, to computer supported co-operative work, to product development, to tangible computing, to advertising. The value of the unique insights offered by ethnographic approaches in a commercial context is now pretty much undisputed and lots of different entities are willing to meet the demand for ethnographic insights.
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Christopher Ireland — 15 April 2003
I can spend hours listening to people talk about their lives. I have spent entire days following people around and watching how they live. That's probably not a surprise to most who know me. What would surprise them is my longterm love affair with numbers. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the least bit impressed by big decks of data or colorful graphs that say 75% of Americans are in favor of the war. It's relative child's play to get those numbers and make them do what you want. For example, you want a conservative bias to a randomly sampled US population? Call in the afternoon, preferably around 4PM. The numbers I love are the adventurous ones--the ones that take on a life of their own and speak a language that the data gatherer did not control. Here's my latest heart-throb--follow the links for The Secret Lives of Numbers on Golan Levin's cool site www.flong.com.
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