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Anthropologist gets paid for hanging out in bars

Published on July 25, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, fieldwork / methods

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)

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…

Focus On: New product development with anthropologists

Published on July 21, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology

Business Europe

Finding out what the customer wants can be a difficult task. A new approach that is becoming more widespread is to treat potential customers as participants in the product development process. This customer research approach is known as ethnographic research and is defined as “the description and study of human culture”. For the purposes of new product development, customer research is conducted in a much shorter time scale to fit the needs of industry.

The power of taking such an approach is that it provides real life accounts of customers’ everyday activities, needs, desires, beliefs and values; it highlights the differences between what people do and what they say they do, and as a result find needs that have not been directly expressed; and it describes what meanings people place on products and how products are used. It is also cheap as it is purely about observing and listening.

Large multinational companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, Ericsson, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Kimberley Clark, General Mills and Motorola, are using this approach. >>continue

Business Europe

Anthropologist tries to fathom how advertisers can approach today’s youth

Published on July 8, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology, youth

Business Week

Timothy Malefyt is now an in-house anthropologist for BBDO New York, the advertising firm. His mission is to study a group of college students at Columbia University and figure out how in the world they process all of the information that comes their way, whether it’s from TV, movies, billboards, video games, cell phones, the Internet — just about everything but the fortunes wrapped inside Chinese cookies.

If a college student receives a targeted ad on her instant messaging (IM) screen, or a text message on her cell phone, is she likely to resent it? Consider it a joke? Would certain types of advertisements be welcomed? The answers depend, from an anthropologist’s perspective, on the communications rituals associated with each of these tools. >>continue / copy

Business Week

Microsoft hires five anthropologists

Published on June 5, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology

Inc Magazine

Nelle Steele is one of five anthropologist-ethnographers that Microsoft hired full-time to conduct a field study. Called “Dawn to Dusk,” the study documents the work habits and thought processes of a species the software behemoth had never before tried to understand: owners and employees of small businesses >>continue

Inc Magazine

Nelle Steele is one of five anthropologist-ethnographers that Microsoft hired full-time to conduct a field study. Called "Dawn to Dusk," the study documents the work habits and thought processes of a species the software behemoth had never before tried…