Marketers need to accept the fact that we live in a world of product and channel proliferation where we already have served nearly every need several times over, where there are over 100 varieties of bottled water, over 50 different features available in celll phones and 10 ways to purchase a pair of Nikes. We need to abandon the simplistic notion of the simple need-fulfillment paradigm. The complexities of today’s consumers can no longer be measured in terms of a set of attributes, product or brand attributes, features or performances that need to be fulfilled or exceeded and that ensures product success. This is the path to commodization. Market research and focus groups aren't telling us anything we don't know. We must drop the notion that consumers can tell you what they want.
The answer to this is ethnography. A recent Business Week article has brought Ethnography out of the shadows. We see many marketing companies will join the "ethnography bandwagon" and dilute the method the way they’ve diluted focus groups and other research methods. What is ethnography? Ethnography is a form of research focusing on the sociology of meaning through close observation of sociocultural phenomena. Typically, the ethnographer focuses on a community (not necessarily geographic, considering also work, leisure, and other communities), selecting informants who are known to have an overview of the activities of the community. This process is intended to reveal common cultural understandings related to the phenomena under study. These subjective but collective understandings on a subject are often interpreted to be more significant than objective data. Ethnography-based innovation opportunity discoveries are often very powerful. These observations can then be used as a basis of brainstorming sessions to allow the marketers to arrive at a solution that uses the habits existing on one hand to resolve the problems persisting on the other. We have yet to see how digital technolgies can allow ethographic research to be performed in a more effective manner.
