methodological note: ethnography

from Hardward Business Review


Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy
by Ken Anderson (Ethnographer at INTEL)

Corporate ethnography isn’t just for innovation anymore. It’s central to gaining
a full understanding of your customers and the business itself. The ethnographic
work at my company, Intel, and other firms now informs functions such as
strategy and long-range planning.

Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. [..].

Our goal is to see people’s behavior on their terms, not ours. While this observational method may appear inefficient, it enlightens us about the context in which customers would use a new product and the meaning that product might hold in their lives.
Ethnography at Intel initially focused on new markets. [...]

Recently, Intel ethnographers have veered into strategic questions. [...]

But people often can’t articulate what they’re looking for in
products or services. By understanding how people live, researchers discover
otherwise elusive trends that inform the company’s future strategies.

[...] Our job as anthropologists is to understand the perspective of one tribe,
consumers, and communicate it to another, the people at Intel. Our experiences
in both worlds make this translation possible. Ethnography has proved so
valuable at Intel that the company now employs two dozen anthropologists and
other trained ethnographers, probably the biggest such corporate staff in the
world.

High-tech companies have to date employed the lion’s share of
corporate ethnographers. But I believe that ethnography is so beneficial that it
will spread widely, helping firms in every industry truly understand customers
and adapt to fast-changing markets.

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