Anthropologist gets paid for hanging out in bars

Fast Company Magazine

Girl walks into a bar. Says to the bartender, "Give me a Diet Coke and a clear sight line to those guys drinking Miller Lite in the corner." No joke. The "girl" is Emma Gilding, corporate ethnographer at Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world's top advertising agencies. Her assignment is to hang out in bars across the country, watching guys knock back beers with their friends.

Since at least the mid-1990s, the advertising industry has been fighting a war on multiple fronts. Some larger firms believe that ethnographic research such as Gilding and Shapira's can help identify consumers' emotional hot buttons, allowing them to craft messages with more resonance.

But ethnographic research is not a panacea. For one thing, it's expensive. The process is time-consuming. Paco Underhill, whose books Why We Buy and Call of the Mall are classics of modern retail ethnography, confesses to a bigger concern: How does this research translate into sales? >>continue

(via Ideas Bazar Blog)