corporate & business anthropology

The emerging field of commercial ethnography

Published on March 23, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology

SFweekly

Since October 2004 Jesse Kipp has been working at a top San Francisco advertising firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, where he operates simultaneously as an anthropologist, a market research assistant, and a documentarian. Kipp is the company’s answer to a burgeoning industrywide research movement called “commercial ethnography.”

The documentaries themselves are highly stylized romps into the inner lives of target audience members — everyone from football fans bitching about a cable outage during the big game to the unguarded talk of Lisa and Amanda, which will be used to inform a new advertising campaign for Britney Spears’ perfume, Curious. In the end, the agency uses the films both to woo new clients and to better understand and craft ad messages. >> continue

SFweekly

What ads tell you about New Zealands and Australians

Published on February 6, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, culture traditions, Pacific Oceania

The New Zealand Herald

For New Zealanders the land represents everything that is pure and authentic. It’s. the essence of who we are. We love it so much that we fear losing it which is why we get so upset about foreign ownership and Maori claims to the foreshore. But Australians see the land as something to be tamed. The land is something to be observed, or crossed, not something to integrate with.

Buy it or not – and being from an advertising agency they hope you do – these are some of the results of an eight-month study by FCB New Zealand. Chief executive Nick Baylis analysed advertisements in both countries. “This piece of research gives us the jump on everyone else because it uses semiotic and anthropological studies that people in New Zealand just don’t use” >> continue

The New Zealand Herald

For New Zealanders the land represents everything that is pure and authentic. It's. the essence of who we are. We love it so much that we fear losing it which is why we get so upset about…

Anthropologists on fieldwork for Microsoft in India

Published on January 12, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, Asia, corporate & business anthropology, culture traditions, design anthropology, technology

RedNova News / Seattle Post – Intelligencer

Microsoft Corp.’s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries.

A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India, plans to employ anthropologists, ethnographers and others to observe and document the lives of people in India’s rural villages.

A primary aim of the new group is to help Microsoft understand the situation in rural villages before the company tries to create appropriate technologies for them – rather than first creating the technologies and then trying to find areas where they might apply. >> continue

SEE ALSO:
Microsoft hires five anthropologists (Inc Magazine, june 2004)
antropologi.info’s special on Corporate Anthropology

RedNova News / Seattle Post - Intelligencer

Microsoft Corp.'s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries.

A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India,…

Mobile phone company Vodafone gets inspired by traditional Kula exchange system

Published on December 18, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, culture traditions, gift economy gift giving, Pacific Oceania

New Scientist

Every year, the people of the Trobriand Islands in the Solomon Sea off Papua New Guinea exchange ornamental seashell armbands and necklaces. It is a social ritual that according to Malinowski cements social bonds between fishing communities. Strange as it may seem, this tradition has inspired a recent new service from communications company Vodafone.

Anthropologist Richard Harper has been working for Vodafone in the UK since 2003, where he has adapted kula-style gift-giving rules to encourage social bonding among groups of people in phone-texting networks. Under his guidance, Vodafone has launched its Postcard service. You send an MMS picture-and-text message to Vodafone, who will print it as a postcard and mail it to whomever you want. Like the islanders’ gifts, Vodafone’s postcards are permanent – unlike text messages.

The idea is that the recipient will then want to send a postcard of their own, perhaps to a third party, and so draw more subscribers into the network. Exchanging more valuable artefacts, such as music or video files, may be next. >> continue

(link via Purse Lip Square)

LINKS UPDATED 21.9.2022

New Scientist

Ethnography, cross cultural understanding and product design

Published on December 10, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

Ideas Bazaar reports from an interesting seminar about – among others – ethnography and product design and points to aviable conference papers online.

The Global Watch Mission Report Innovation through people-centred design – lessons from the USA emphasises that people in their social context rather than task-centric users should be considered a fundamental source of innovation. Furthermore it states that “cross-cultural understandings are becoming increasingly important for companies such as Intel who are using multi-sited worldwide research as part of the innovation process” >> download the report

>> to Ideas Bazaar’s comments

>> Anne Galloway’s comments / summary of the report

>> Louise Ferguson’s comment: “The user/human/people agenda is hitting the mainstream rather than being the preserve of a niche community.”

>> Press release University of Surrey: Innovation Through People Centred Design – Lessons For UK Business From the USA

>> Corporate Anthropology

>> Social Software: Video presentations of a conference in Oslo

Ideas Bazaar reports from an interesting seminar about - among others - ethnography and product design and points to aviable conference papers online.

The Global Watch Mission Report Innovation through people-centred design - lessons from the USA emphasises that people in…