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Six guys walk into
a bar. They drink, they talk, they laugh. They all seem pretty similar,
except for one guy. He’s loud and overbearing, even for a male in his 20s in
a bar. His contributions to the conversation are labored, or late. Worse,
his high-fiving attempts are embarrassing. While his buddies knock fists to
signify assent, Mr. High-Five hasn’t noticed, and he compounds his mistake
by leaving his palm up expectantly. “We saw rank and hierarchy changing
constantly, sometimes moment to moment,” says anthropological researcher
Emma Gilding as she plays a videotape of the boys’ night out in
Philadelphia. “This assignment was tougher than some. But we got what we
needed.”
What Gilding and
her cameras needed was information that would help sell Miller Lite beer.
Miller believed that better understanding consumer behavior could help make
its product the focus and fuel for a ritual like a night out with the guys.
Researchers with video cameras went along on several boys’ nights out in
Philadelphia and San Diego, saying little and recording everything. Gilding
watched all that videotape — about 90 hours’ worth — identifying patterns
and themes. She edited those hours down to concentrated montages that
demonstrated the stubborn and stunning recurrence of those patterns and
behaviors. “A lot of their conversation was made up of bizarre stories,
anecdotes with punch lines . . . Here’s what that led to,” Gilding says,
cuing up a TV commercial in which a trucker picks up a hitchhiker and pulls
out a ventriloquist’s dummy once they’re rolling. The alarmed hitchhiker
bails out. The spot’s last 15 seconds reveals him telling the story to his
friends in a bar. The anecdotal ad for Miller Lite cheered retailers who had
been grumbling about ineffective marketing, reversed a sales decline and won
favorable notice from advertising folks.
Gilding and Johanna
Shapira run Ogilvy Discovery Group, the only behavioral and strategic
insights unit owned and operated by an advertising agency, WPP Group’s
Ogilvy & Mather. Working out of the agency’s West 49th Street headquarters
in Manhattan, the two women have scrutinized all kinds of human behavior —
including diaper changing and parental bonding, female incontinence, cancer
patients dealing with chemotherapy side effects, Mexican ‘tweens,
small-business owners, international high-end travelers and beer drinkers —
with the same care and attention more commonly focused on the Yanomami of
the Amazon or Papua New Guinea’s Rotokas-speaking people. “Everybody in
marketing has done an awful lot of focus groups,” says Shapira. “After
seeing this, it’s, ‘I can never go to another focus group again,’ because
this is so much different; it’s just such a new kind of information.”
New in advertising,
anyway. Anthropologists study humans and their culture to understand how and
why people do what they do. Advertisers want insight into consumers, and in
this realm, understanding means profit. “There’s no new behavior,” Gilding
says. “It’s understanding what’s actually there. You sit and you live and
you learn what it’s like to be somebody else.”
Advertising
agencies traditionally rely on a couple of methods to figure out what
consumers are thinking. One is polling: select a sample of the population
that typifies the people you want to sell your product to, then ask about
their preferences, habits and what annoys them. Do that a couple hundred or
a couple thousand times and tabulate the results. Or try focus groups:
identify a dozen or so people you want to sell something to, get them
together and have them react to your product, your commercial or your
questions. Do they prefer the chocolaty coating or the pillowy mouth-feel?
Is a second glove box more or less important than a fourth cup-holder or a
second backseat video monitor? Do that a minimum of four times and tabulate
the results.
The problems with
both approaches are similar: people generally try to say what they think an
interlocutor wants to hear. A couple of questions into a telephone poll, for
example, a subject will often form some idea — right or wrong — of which
answers are being sought, and will offer responses that seem “right,” even
if they’re not true. That happens in focus groups, too, where group dynamics
can warp results further. One strong personality can skew everybody’s
answers, either by forcing agreement or intimidating dissenters into
silence.
Anthropology and
ethnography avoid those problems — and yield better information.
(Anthropology is the study of people in groups; ethnography is the systemic
recording of human cultures.) Advertisers can hire academics to study career
women in West Vancouver, say, or people who drink white wine in Winnipeg or
skiers in Saskatoon with the same methods they apply to pre-industrial
hunter-gatherer societies. “Ethnography is becoming a much more important
source of insight,” says Hy Mariampolski. His company, QualiData Research
Inc., with offices in New York and San Francisco, is a pioneer in the field.
“If an advertiser wants to better understand a consumer’s emotional
connection to their brand, it’s better to go to where those brands are used
or consumed or purchased, and discover the emotional connections that
consumers have with those brands in context.” Bell & Howell’s development
division in Canada was one of QualiData’s first clients; it hired the firm
in the mid-1980s to find out more about the culture of record-keeping in
large organizations.
The use of
ethnographic or anthropological strategies in market research has exploded
in the past five years. Increasingly, anthropology researchers consult
part-time for marketers, or leave academe to study consumers for
corporations full-time. A New York firm called Housecalls Inc. does
precisely that, and its founder, Bill Abrams, wrote The Observational
Research Handbook in 2000. Abrams worked in advertising, but moved into
ethnographic research out of frustration with the limits of focus groups.
Gilding alleges
that Abrams and others don’t do true ethnographic or anthropological
research, although they use many of its techniques. Her rigorous academic
background makes her very particular about protocol and procedure, mainly
interfering with the study subject as little as possible. “We don’t do
product intervention,” she explains. “We don’t sit with someone who has
shampoo in their hands and say, ‘Now tell me about the shampoo; how do you
find the shampoo?’ We’re looking at the decision-making process around the
brand. The brand is a symbol, and you have to assess the relevancy or the
potency of that symbol within a culture.”
Gilding, 34,
started doing ethnographic research using videotape in 1990 while studying
performance and culture for a post-graduate degree in her native England. A
friend at an ad agency asked about using the same techniques on consumers.
Gilding wound up working with him for a year, then launched her own company,
BCR UK (BCR for behavior and cultural research). After five years working
for clients throughout Europe, she says, “I started phoning around agencies
in New York, because I wanted to be global, and this is the epicentre.” In
1999, Ogilvy & Mather offered her a job in its Manhattan headquarters, where
she would edit videotape in a converted closet. That’s since grown to three
video editing suites, a full-time staff of six, and assignments throughout
North and South America and Europe.
Gilding’s Canadian
colleague, Shapira, 37, has worked all over the world, often figuring out
how to launch or more effectively market North American products in such
far-flung places as Vietnam. Growing up in Vancouver and working there and
in Toronto helped foster cultural curiosity and awareness, along with her
thorough knowledge of advertising culture. The combination of talents made
Shapira a natural as the Discovery Group’s managing director. “The
difference is Johanna,” Gilding says of their complementary strengths. “It’s
like we’re building a house: I’m putting up the roof — the big-strokes
person — and she’s putting the dots on the curtains.”
Together, Gilding
and Shapira hire documentary filmmakers and anthropological researchers
(rather than advertising folks) on a per-project basis. The field workers
are careful to be as unobtrusive as possible during the time — from a couple
of days to a week or more — that they’re studying and videotaping their
subjects.
Attitudes, answers
and candor evolve through the course of a study. Gilding says the first hour
typically yields “perfect respondent” answers: what the subject feels he
should say. But that gradually gives way to greater honesty. In a study of
patients with heart disease that Gilding conducted, for instance, a subject
initially said she couldn’t figure out why she was stricken. Later in the
same session, she admitted that 20 years of cigarettes and a bad diet may
have contributed to her illness. Getting deeper, more thorough information
demands patience and time that polling or focus groups don’t have — like a
week to move in with each of their subjects. Nor can they uncover the
understanding that comes from listening to a woman talk about the radical
changes in diet that heart disease demands while methodically unwrapping a
meatball sandwich the size of a football. “If we do have specific questions
we can’t get answers to through the course of the research,” Gilding
explains, “we’ll gang them all up at the very end, in the last hour. That
way, at least, the subjects will answer honestly.”
But doesn’t talking
in front of a camera make people stilted and self-conscious? Shapira says
the camera’s effect is positive; subjects are forthcoming to the point of
being confessional. The less the researcher says, the more information a
subject volunteers. Attention to rigorous protocols ensures “clean data,”
says Gilding. The subjects are as unspoiled by market research as possible:
Ogilvy Discovery’s recruiter automatically disqualifies candidates who’ve
been in focus groups, for example.
That kind of depth
and purity comes with a price. Anthropological market research costs more
than other kinds of inquiry. Housecalls charges about US$33,000 for one of
its studies. Other kinds of ethnographic research cost between US$40,000 and
US$100,000, depending on complexity. By contrast, a simple Internet survey
of 150 people costs about US$15,000, with greater complexity pushing the
price higher. Focus groups typically run between US$3,500 and US$5,000 each.
Being part of an
advertising agency means Ogilvy Discovery has to apply what it learns. The
research is merely the first step. “We say, ‘We know this. Now what?’”
Gilding explains. “Nine times out of 10 it’s behavior modification; how do
you get people to do something different?” Ogilvy & Mather offers something
it calls 360-degree branding. For that to work, everybody who works on a
brand needs to know how it’s seen, lived with, thought of, what it means in
the deepest cultural sense.
Critics charge that
advertising eliminates regional and cultural differences; we’re all just
consumers now, regardless of where or how we live. But Gilding and Shapira’s
work shows culture is mutable, shifting and composed of more than just
language, geography and belief. It demonstrates that the mass of consumers
comprises more differences than anyone could have guessed. The deeper the
two women explore, the more differences and truth they find.
They’ve taken
their techniques to Europe and South America. Now, they want to make that
capability permanent and global. “North America’s up and running, so I’m
going to set up what I call ‘trade routes,’ so that around the world we have
lots of Discovery Groups, and all the information should become available,
managed, productive,” Gilding says. “No one’s actually successfully done
that — not in advertising, not in business, not even in cultural studies.
It’s quite a magnificent challenge.” Today, beer drinkers in Philadelphia.
Tomorrow, the world. |
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