Despite often being perceived as a bit of a 'black art', ethnography can provide unparalleled insight into the customer experience. So how is it different from 'normal' research? Simon Pulman-Jones, head of ethnography and innovation at GfK NOP, explains.

Ethnography may differ from what is traditionally regarded as normal research but it is far from the dark art that it is sometimes perceived as. Indeed, it's high time to dispel some of the myths that have sprung up around ethnography so that organisations can understand its true nature.

The first myth to dispel is that ethnography is not a method; it is a research approach that uses a wide selection of methods:

• Secondary and semiotic analyses - understanding the systems behind all the things that you 'just know'.
• Informal observation – used as a 'first pass' research tool, to generate questions, focus issues or confirm choice of venue or target audience.
• Formal observation – expert researchers in the natural, day-to-day setting, observing what people do, how they interact, the kinds of things they use, etc.
• Interviews – in-context, narrative interviews, which try to elicit the participant’s view of the world.
• Self-documentation – where the participant is given the tools and structure, and then records their own critical and open-ended self-reporting, logging the things that they see as most important to the question, rather than being led in any way.
• Groups and events.

It does not aim to study people but instead uses the techniques above to observe people in order to examine every day experiences, situations, environments, activities, relations, interactions and processes in very rich detail.

Same difference? 

Although ethnography encompasses a whole range of techniques, they all share two common principles:

1. They are always 'in context'. The ethnographer doesn't bring the research subjects or participants into an artificial environment, such as interviewing facilities. They carry out the research in the participant’s own home, office, regular shopping places – the day-to-day places in which the participant would naturally carry out the activity under survey. This eliminates any unusual influence on the participant due to unnatural surroundings, leading to a more natural, unforced and therefore accurate research experience. 

2. The participants are seen as the experts. Ethnographic data gathering is often determinedly open-ended, using both theoretical and practical tools to let what anthropologists call the 'native point of view' emerge.

Ethnography is rooted in the disciplined treatment of data. By far the most important part of 'doing ethnography' is the rigorous analysis of all the data gathered and interpretation of key data patterns. The participants are experts on their own experiences and the ethnographers are experts at translating those experiences into a descriptive and analytical account that clarifies business issues and reveals the cultural basis for consumer experiences. The goal is to produce a consistent body of data that can have utility beyond the study’s original scope.

Why use ethnography?

The commercial benefits of using ethnography are that it provides a clear understanding of any given experience from your customers’ point of view - entirely true-to-life - as well as remarkable richness of data and highly actionable information with long shelf life.

The unique value is that it reveals not just what people say or how they think, but also provides a clear understanding of how experiences work so that businesses can see what actions they need to take to support, improve and change those experiences.

Ethnography can explain behaviour in ways that more traditional research cannot. It is based on the assumption that people have reasons for what they do, even if those reasons seem inexplicable to the casual observer. Good ethnographic research will uncover the basis of behaviour of all key parties and throw into sharp relief the ways in which they might be misaligned.

Moreover, ethnographic tools are capable of producing far deeper description of behaviour, looking at multiple levels of resolution. Conversation analysis, for example, looks at individual conversations at the level of tone of voice, inflection, gesture, body language and sub-cultural references; not just at what is said. A 'cultural inventory' focuses on the material culture surrounding an interaction, such as the cues we process almost pre-consciously when we recognise a room as a doctor’s office. These two data types are not even the core data for ethnography – behaviour and interaction over time – but simply necessary context for interpreting the observations gained.

This rich, visual nature to ethnographic data is a key part of the value – one participant’s history, recorded in context, explored from multiple points of view and illustrated with visual data is often more compelling than the summary of a large and representative quantitative study.

However, perhaps the most significant advantage of high-caliber ethnographic work is derived not from its academic legacy but more directly from its recent history as a business tool. Most of the pioneers of applied ethnography developed approaches that were tailored to innovation, decision-making and production processes. In practice, the focus on building models is what realises an ethnographic programme’s value to a business. A model can be applied to issues that weren't part of the original research brief and can be updated and extended long after the original research programme has ended.