The Lost Tribes of New York City

Urban anthropologists and filmmakers Andy and Carolyn London observed and interviewed people around New York City and transposed their voices onto inanimate objects.

Crafting a Culturally-sensitive Value Proposition Based on Consumers’ Perceptions and Needs

A Case Study Illustrating SolutionSync’s Approach, Methodology and Deliverables

Seizing Opportunities in Dire Straits

Today’s turbulent economic conditions are making it most challenging for companies worldwide to not only expand their client base, but to merely maintain it. In addition, many of those companies had already invested significant resources in the development of new products and services just before the financial crisis hit our world in 2008. In the midst of a weary, stumbling economy, many companies find it risky and costly to launch new products and services, given rising consumers’ hesitancy to spend and caution of companies to green light new projects.

Despite anxiety about the impacts of the economic recession, creativity and adopting novel means to rapidly respond to crisis, change and emerging social needs can help businesses discover new prospects. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of how a particular product or service can cater to current consumers’ perceptions, behaviors and lifestyles can open up new horizons for companies, help them seize opportunities and realize long-term gains.

With many projects in the pipeline and mounting pressure to reduce expenditures, companies today are looking for speedy high quality, low-cost solutions to prioritize most promising ventures. Rapid, qualitative field research can enable companies to make informed decisions and to respond promptly to people’s real needs, based on a profound understanding of what consumers essentially think and want.

On-the-ground Experience

SolutionSync has been recently engaged in helping a renowned food giant draw a roadmap for translating an innovative idea that has the potential of revolutionizing current practices and in which it invested considerable resources, into a unique initiative, based on the integration of a culturally-sensitive perspective that draws on an in-depth understanding of consumers’ views and needs.

Our team was contracted to assess and evaluate possible ways for launching a new system combining a food product and delivery system for home use. This entailed not only probing consumers’ views on the product and delivery system, but also their appraisal of a prototype system placed in their homes. The objectives were to validate hypotheses drawn by the marketing team, develop a value proposition based on grass-roots consumers’ insights and identify key triggers and motivations that can drive the acceptance of this novel system.

To achieve that in a most time efficient manner, SolutionSync designed and conducted a qualitative field research over a period of 10 weeks. With an experienced anthropologist, a carefully selected representative sample of consumers and a blend of established socio-anthropological research methods, SolutionSync was able to generate a rich pool of data that was meticulously analyzed to highlight key consumers’ perceptions, views and lifestyles which influence their assessment of and preferences regarding the product/delivery system. Insights deducted from the study were then used to craft a culturally-sensitive value proposition that would make most sense to the target consumer segment.

Collaborative Approach and Methodology

Working closely with the client, SolutionSync engaged all relevant stakeholders (technical, marketing, R&D and business development) in articulating the study objectives to ensure that existing gaps in knowledge are clearly identified. Following desk research of relevant data and a comprehensive review of available documentation, SolutionSync’s research department developed the field research methodology. The study was carried out over a period of 10 weeks utilizing 3 primary tools; namely, In-depth interviews; Contextual and behavioural observations; and Diaries.

In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with research participants at their homes. The interviews were split in two sessions, each lasting 2-3 hours and planned to allow tracing patterns which could occur over time. A detailed interview guide was followed to ensure comprehensive coverage of key research questions, while allowing ample flexibility for participants to express their feelings and views and to follow the rhythm of the household. The interview guide included numerous open ended questions which provided participants with the chance to reflect on their emotions, experiences and dimensions of their lives which enriched the study’s overall understanding. With permission from participants, interviews were audio taped and photos and videos were also taken when allowed.

Observation of the contextual and behavioural aspects associated with product use was carried out. Lengthy stay at the households allowed for observation of the physical environment where practices and rituals took place as well as research participants’ habits and gestures. Research participants were also asked to keep a diary of their day-to-day product use. Diaries were intended to shed light on participants’ practices and routines and to augment data obtained from interviews and observations.

In order to methodically address the study’s dimensions, research participants’ background attributes were explored, examined and interpreted. Some of these attributes –such as education, profession, values and beliefs- are related to socio-cultural factors which shape people’s perceptions and attitudes. Other attributes include life experiences and acquired information which similarly influence preferences and choices with regards to product use and preferred delivery system.

These tools were complemented with a thorough review and integration of key findings and lessons learned from previous studies and other related research. They were also augmented by incorporating the views of key stakeholders such as family members, retail partners and authorities.

Tangible Outcomes

A rich pool of qualitative data was analyzed by SolutionSync to identify the following:

• Key emotions associated with the introduction and use of a new product in the household, highlighting how these emotions are influenced by participants’ perceptions and attitudes.
• Participants’ key concerns, highlighting attributes which enhance and/or undermine confidence in the product, delivery system and the prototype.
• How research participants’ and households’ lifestyles are associated with the perceptions of and attitudes towards the product, delivery system and the prototype.

In-depth understanding of people’s perceptions, attitudes and needs enabled SolutionSync to provide its client with a set of valuable insights which it shared and brainstormed with all stakeholders; technical, marketing, finance, risk management, R and D, public relations and communication agencies.

Key findings and insights were illustrated by people’s real quotes and gestures, photos and videos. This helped bring the study conclusions and recommendations to life, in such a way that enabled all those involved to land on the same page despite their diverse backgrounds, agendas and interests.

The study successfully culminated in:

• Positioning a product offer based on an understanding of people’s needs and expectations.
• Crafting communication of a system’s value proposition in a way that makes sense to target consumers.
• Management support and approval of funding for next steps towards a global product introduction.

Open-door Policy and Knowledge Transfer to Stakeholders

To ensure smooth implementation of research and effective collaboration with clients, SolutionSync adopts a participatory approach and an open-door policy, whereby the research owner and its collaborates are encouraged to take an active role in the various stages of the research, from conception throughout its conclusion. This approach is intended to ensure a common comprehension of key issues, an effective transfer of consumer insights to relevant stakeholders and management of various parties’ expectations.

Needless to say, field research similar to the one outlined in this case study face various operational, organizational and communication challenges. Squeezed time frame, difficulty in recruiting research participants, respecting participants’ availability, responding to clients’ emerging needs, reconciling expectations of different functions within a given company and bringing diverse background on the same wavelength are only a few. However, hurdles that are bound to occur need not stumble a transparent, collaborative process. SolutionSync had learned that challenging situations are best addressed through free-flowing communication and cooperation with clients. Transparency, regular interim meetings and updates and orchestrated workshops for team members are means that we use to enhance collaboration and common understanding.

The Power of Fieldwork

Fieldwork is central to SolutionSync’s approach, where exploration, discovery and making sense of people’s perceptions take place. To be in the field means to have direct, personal contact with people in their own environments. It allows for contextualizing research questions in their natural settings. The natural setting becomes the direct source of data and the skilled researcher is the key instrument.

SolutionSync’s qualitative data analysts thoroughly worked on largely descriptive raw data from interviews and observations to generate major themes, categories and case examples. By paying close attention to detail, descriptive vocabulary and direct quotes which people actually use, a sense of a story emerged. Constant comparison, deduction and thematic organization were carried out to better understand the underlying meanings of expressed ideas, beliefs and attitudes and to extract key findings from a wealth of detailed data about a defined number of people and cases.

The results and effects assessed through this approach are difficult to capture through standardized quantitative methods, which typically fits people’s ideas into predetermined response choices. Making sense of a given situation without imposing pre-existing expectations on the setting allows observations, comments and expressed views to drive towards the construction of general patterns and a picture that takes shape as the parts are collected and examined.

Using Details to Construct the “Bigger Picture”

SolutionSync adopts a holistic approach that strives to understand situations in their totalities and to explain people’s viewpoints not only in their socio-cultural context, but also in light of local and global trends, economic and technological changes. We move beyond the telling details to create an embracing perspective, through which a product, service, innovation, or an opportunity could be seen with a new eye. Our anthropologists and qualitative data analysts combine efforts with multi-disciplinary expertise to generalize details in a broader context of competitive and strategic factors which influence today’s consumers and businesses.

Conclusion

This case study illustrates how field data, generated from interaction with “real” people in “real” life situations, was interpreted, correlated and leveraged in relevance with a concrete issue that a business is attempting to address; i.e. crafting a culturally-sensitive value proposition. Contrary to a prevalent perception that qualitative research, including ethnography, consumes a lot of time and resources, this case study shows how a rapid, focused and well-articulated appraisal of a current situation resulted in generating insights about consumers’ needs and preferences, which promptly fed into a giant company’s product offer and communication package.

Today, socio-cultural understanding of consumers’ immediate needs and preferences is inevitable for grasping emerging consumption habits and patterns in a world that suffers from an unprecedented economic downturn. More than ever before, there is a pressing need to comprehend how social and cultural drivers come into play to shape new models of consumption. This entails a comprehensive understanding of how people manage their limited resources, spending and prioritization process within the broader context of revolutionary means of communication, trends, concern for the environment, lifestyles and social standings.

EER

SolutionSync hires Social Scientists

We’re looking for candidates to fill in positions of Researchers working internationally from our base in Switzerland:

Researchers should have the following qualifications:

• A University or postgraduate degree in a social science discipline or at least five years of practical experience as a qualitative research practitioner.
• Experience in qualitative research methodology, which entails excellent interviewing and observation skills.
• Skills in data gathering, recording and reporting. This requires the ability to compile, review, decode, classify, organize and integrate different types of field data (such as written notes, audio tapes, photos, video) into summarized templates, detailed accounts, and other required reporting formats in a consistent manner.   
• Excellent skills in qualitative data analyses.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Willingness to travel, work flexible hours and ability to deliver under time pressure.
• Multilingual and good English writing skills.

Candidates send their C.V. to eman@solutionsync.com

 

How will students learn in the future?

A short video that summerizes how today’s students learn, what their goals, hopes and dreams are. Created by Michael Wesch and 200 students.

 

 

A few interesting quotes:

My average class size is 115.

18% of my teachers know my name.

I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. 

Only 26% … relative to my life.

I will read 8 books this year,

2300 web pages and

1281 facebook profiles.

I will write 42 pages for class this semester.

And over 500 pages of email.

 

The Rules of the (Retail-) Game are Changing

In an overly crowded commercial world, where diverse products are more in abundance than ever before, big retailers are setting a new trend which is bottom-up and basically consumer driven. The relationship between retailers and manufacturers is taking a new turn, as retailers no longer want to only negotiate prices with manufacturers and choose from an existing range of finished products, but rather to have a say in what manufacturers are to produce for them.

“Big retailers want to be more in control”, says Frank Tyneski in an interview with BusinessWeek Innovation chief Bruce Nussbaum. Retailers want to differentiate products for their retail channels in order to address their customers’ unique needs. To achieve that, they are setting up their own research and design departments to gain better understanding of their customers’ needs based on observations, ethnography and other qualitative research techniques.

This acquired knowledge of consumers’ needs is then used to put pressure on manufacturers to create unique products especially for them. The rules of the game are surely changing!

[Watch Video ¦ click here]

When in Doubt – Observe and Ask

With times becoming tougher and the environment more competitive, it’s now more important than ever for marketers to focus on their customers or consumers, and to remember to make business decisions in the context of the effects those decisions will have on them.

One leader at asking and listening to consumers is the marketing giant, Procter & Gamble. In recent years, under the leadership of A.G. Lafley, P&G has refocused itself to the idea that the consumer is king — -and that the role of the company is to find out what consumers really want, and deliver it to them. In their new book The Game-Changer, A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan describe how multinational corporations such as P&G have transformed their approach to innovation and to deeply understanding consumer needs in a multi-cultural world where low-income families in fast-growing countries now have significant purchasing power. P&G did not merely adopt “The consumer is the Boss” as its motto, but as its real driver for innovation, product development and its quest for growth. The book illustrates how the principles of innovation need to go hand-in-hand with in-depth comprehension of consumers’ needs at the grass-roots level. It also highlights the importance of engaging multiple stakeholders in this process.

Here are two quotes:

On the structure of innovation:

“Long known for a preference to do everything in-house, we began to seek out innovation from any and all sources. Innovation is all about connections, so we get everyone we can involved: P&Gers past and present, customers, suppliers, even competitors. The more connections, the more ideas; the more ideas, the more solutions.”

On the old regime of research:

“P&G was talking to a lot of people, but not listening to them. The company also tended to narrow in on only one aspect of the consumer – for example, her mouth for oral-care products, her hair for shampoo, her loads of dirty clothes for laundry detergents (most P&G consumers are women). P&G had essentially extracted the consumer (and at times a particular body part as well!) from her own life and focused on what was most important to the company – the product or the technology.”

ER

Test Institute’s Focus Group

Video length: 1:58 mts.

Wear Your Coffee

Photo: xsmommy

Notes from Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference – EPIC 2007

EPIC is the premier international forum bringing together artists, computer scientists, designers, social scientists, marketers, academics and advertisers to discuss recent developments and future advances around ethnographic praxis in industry. Keynote speakers this year were Intel-Social Anthropologist Genevieve Bell and Brenda Laurel of California College of the Arts.

Jeffrey Bardzell, an assistant professor of HCI/Design and new media at the School of Informatics in Indiana University, reviews some of the topics that were discussed at the conference in Keystone, Colorado, USA. Jeffrey’s blog is OTOinsights.

 

“There was an interesting tension that many of the researchers seemed to be facing. On the one hand, their work was being used to help develop models for complex business practices. On the other hand, as ethnographers, they wanted to focus on concrete situations and contexts and the real, flesh-and-blood people within them. From my perspective, one way that this tension got addressed was to work proactively to improve communication between managers (who want the models) and employees, on whom the models are ideally grounded and in any case who will have to live with them once they are developed. Stated more abstractly, the ethnographers seemed to want to make a distinction between managing complex processes (which is seen as good) and implementing rationalist control schemes (which are seen as inhuman and bad).

 

Another major issue is one of legitimation. How can ethnographers convince managers and marketing leaders to take them seriously? How do they justify their work both intellectually (methods, data, etc.) and also from a business perspective (actually leads to better business processes or products)? Complicating this argument is the perceived conflict between the reductionist, abstract models that managers and marketing professionals want and the rich, individual “thick” and nuanced descriptions that ethnographers value and provide. Another way of saying this is that there is a lot of thinking about how ethnographic research can, should, does, or fails to connect to business cycles, that is, there is a lot of thinking about ways that ethnography can have real business impact.”

 

[Get the full story ¦ OTOinsights]

Notes found via BuzzTracker

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, EPIC 2007, to be held in Keystone, Colorado/USA

Seven Rules For Observational Research

When a product or service needs testing for customer reaction, companies traditionally turn to the classical market-research mainstay, the focus group. A focus group is a guided discussion in a meeting room or lab whose intent is to gather open-ended comments about a specific product, service, space or issue.

However, it’s widely acknowledged that people can’t always tell you what they want, what they like, or give true opinions on something. I wonder why so much research continues to ask people to state a preference regarding their favorite product, service, package or ad, or to explain their decision making process. What we like or want is not fixed. It is often context-dependent. And, we’re not very good at explaining what we do. Making people think about their choice unconsciously changes their answer towards cautious, safe, familiar choices because they are easier to explain. This means that people are often highly skeptical of new ideas the first time the see them.

Asking people to reflect on their preferences or behavior can change their answers away from the truth, towards the conservative and the familiar, because they lack the language to express their real feelings.

“US$ 400 for an MP3 Player? It won’t sell, and be killed off in a short time…it’s not really functional.”

“This isn’t revolutionary. I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player?”

“Steve’s mind is starting to warp if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.”

Former senior marketing executive at Nike and Starbucks, Scott Bradley pointed out in a recent article for Advertising Age:

“Overcoming the desire to test everything under the sun is probably the greatest hurdle for any company seeking brand reinvention. Look past what they say and get deep enough to know what they really mean by what they say and by what they fail to say”

And Roger Schank, the former head of Yale’s computer science department puts it:

“Market research is the worst way to learn what customers want. Surveys can’t determine the real demand for products or services that don’t yet exist. Observation is everything!”

This, of course, is tricky. You need to know what you’re looking for. That’s were an article of industry colleague Walt Dickie comes in handy: Seven Rules for Observational Research. Despite Walt wrote this 10 years ago it is still very valid.

Here are a few bits:

“Start noticing the regularities. Nothing people do is natural. You may watch people walking into a retail environment. The’ll walk in, look around to get their bearings, walk over to a display or proceed down an aisle, maybe pick up an item or two or compare prices. ‘Of course,’ you’ll say to yourself, ‘that’s just what I’d do in their shoes. It’s just common sense.’

Whatever you saw, could have happened differently. Your shoppers could have taken more time to get their bearings, or less time. They might have gone down a different aisle. They might have picked up more items, or not as many. Look at the “rule breakers.” Why are they? What regularities are they defying?

Once you recognize that everything people do is the result of something, you can begin looking for that something.”

 

Comments on MP3 Player from: macrumors 2001

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