Corporate Ethnography:

Ethnography has a long and storied history as a cornerstone of cultural anthropology, but in the world of corporate anthropology it refers to a research method, a level of access, and an analytic mindset.

What ethnography does best in the corporate setting is organize complexity, showing you not just what people are saying or how they are acting, but helping you understand why they think and act the way they do.

Ethnography achieves this by going in-depth and in-context and by always striving to understand people on their own terms first. This gets you closer to your customers and provides you with a deeper understanding of their behaviors.

So what does it look like?

WER researchers go into patients’ homes, doctors’ offices, hospitals, pharmacies, etc. and spend time with people in-context and with a view to understand their behavior in relation to their own values and systems of logic. Along the way, we take in not just their words, but also the unspoken information, their beliefs, values and frames of reference, their relationships, and the meaningful objects with which they surround themselves.

By using video to record these interactions we get you closer to your customers, bringing you into their homes and exam rooms and seeing them at their most vulnerable and unfiltered moments.

Key Elements of WER’s Ethnographic Approach:

• Empathy: Respect participants as experts and allow their views to help guide the lines of inquiry
• In-Context: “Live with the natives” approach focuses on what people actually do and not just what they think they do or what they say they do
• Holistic Mindset: Consider the participant’s entire world and not just that part of it that is directly impacted by disease, medication, or treatment
• Material Culture: Beyond what people say, we consider the meaning of the objects with which they choose to surround themselves
• Be Visual: Use of video and visual exercises help to uncover hard to articulate perspectives and allow us to share field experiences with clients

Empathy:

Trust and empathy are essential components needed to develop strong relationships with the participants of our research, (traditionally called informants in the anthropological world). This trust may take a little longer to develop than traditional market research, but the pay-off is that it allows us to go deeper and it ensures that we keep the participant’s value and frameworks in the foreground. As we move forward in the research process, this empathy can help us to identify key patterns and understand new data in ways that would not be possible without having first made a concerted effort to see the world through the eyes of the participant.