What can a corporate ethnographer do with behavioral observation?

What do I do? My company name is Indicia Consulting.

During my career, which spans 20 odd years, I moved from product marketing to academia and back again.

In the past I worked with companies like Xerox (the applied arm of PARC), Global Village (Mac Modems), Caere (Optical Character Recognition).

Currently, I have worked with, talked with, or know the anthropologists at companies like Hanes, Mars/M&M, Microsoft, Omnicom Media, and Intel.

Corporate apologist?

“I know it has become fashionable to be derogatory of corporations, but none of us live off the grid. We all

use corporations to feed, clothe, shelter, and transport us. The question becomes, do you want

them to accomplish this well, or poorly?”

Corporate ethnography As I mentioned on the previous slide, many more

companies employ anthropologists than you might have supposed.

L’oreal – cultural practices in cosmetics

Nokia – the emergence of new communication styles

McDonald’s – foodways of non-Western cultures

There are also a great many more anthropologists providing this service than are typically understood.

Publishing The question arises, if information is confidential and

outcomes are proprietary, how do we share any information, contributing to the betterment of society?

I would argue that, using the same principles of anonymizing/consolidating/compositing details that academics use, practicing anthropologists actually disseminate information faster, wider, and more publicly through constant use of networks and social media; including blogs, Twitter, and online groups.

What kinds of things do they ask? The questions range from extremely sophisticated –

Mars has its own think-tank, and the CIA has borrowed their weather modeling software – to really basic.

Current questions floating around my ‘world’ include:

How do people think about directions?

How do agricultural products move around from field to store?

Applying what I have learned There was recently a good situation where this would

have been useful:

The client wanted an understanding of how people navigated through a relatively limited space and what was the process of shopping.

They wanted down to the specifics of, “and then what did they touch? And after that?”

They were seeking a very structural explanation of customer behavior, but we did not have the tools to give it to them.

Luckily, I was a lowly sub-contractor on that job;-)

How is this handy? I offer my clients a ‘unique, base-line, measurement’

for their specific situation and business challenge.

I really appreciated the re-introduction to SPSS as a tool for managing the kind of data that I had been handling with Excel. I had not even considered using SPSS out of past

miseries, and now I will definitely plan on purchasing it…as soon as I have a client I can stick the cost to;-)

I’d like to do more, moving beyond modeling and description to more sophisticated predictions and interpretations.

Focus People often express an interest in what I do, and

wonder about whether it is something they can do as well. It is important to keep in mind that corporate clients care less about reliability and validity, and are more interested in utility.

Corporate ethnographers need to nimbly sift through data and provide insightful intel in rapid-fire manner:

SPSS and coding will allow me to swiftly chart out graphical interpretations and explanations for clients who need quick answers to complex questions.

Remaining questions I don’t want to spend a great deal of time speculating

about future projects (and if I did I would have to kill you) but:

If you have any of the following that you think would be useful I would love to get them from you:

Readings

Videos

Websites

Software programs

email me at susanmazur@hotmail.com THANKS!