Marketers Look Homeward For Consumer Product Research.

The anthropological concept known as ethnography is displacing focus groups at some companies as the main tool for evaluating consumer product use.

Ethnography entails how families interact at home, and how that affects what products they consume and how they consume them. The approach, often led by former anthropologists, has been taken up by several large consumer products companies, including Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G).

While focus groups aren’t going away, industry observers say that ethnography is taking a growing portion of marketing budgets and corporate focus.

The difference can be striking between ethnography and traditional market research, the former giving a completely different picture than focus groups or demographics.

According to published reports, P&G, which recently announced a proposed $57 billion merger with Gillette Co., doesn’t rely as much on focus groups as it did in the past. Instead, they’re interacting with consumers in their homes. Given P&G’s size and marketing renown, it’s expected that other consumer products companies will follow suit in ethnography.

Dave Hirschkop, president of Dave’s Gourmet, a San Francisco-based specialty food company, says big food companies are trying to get back in touch with their customers. And to do that, they’re emulating the relationships small food companies have with their customers.

“Food companies get too big and they lose the ability to see things in a fresh way,” Hirschkop says. “I read and answer all my customers’ e-mail. I doubt a large company’s brand managers are doing that.”

Jane Strong, president of Insight Out, a market research firm in Weston, Conn. that runs focus groups and ethnographic studies, says the big food and consumer products companies are using ethnography as an adjunct to focus groups rather than simply replacing them.

A typical ethnographic study, Strong says, starts by identifying households that are considered target consumers of a client’s products. Strong, a photographer, and oftentimes a client manager spend three to four hours with a family, asking questions and watching a family interact, in return for a fee of $125 to $200.

Prior to going into the home, Strong tries to set the family at ease. “We try to establish a sense of trust in their space,” she says.

Strong says that sometimes the study requires a lot of questions, while other times simply listening to a family as the talk to each other. With permission, Strong investigate personal spaces, such as closets and medicine cabinets. “We get a lot of visual cues for very revealing questions from being right there in the house and taking a tour of their cupboards,” she says.

In one instance, a major food company hired Strong to find out why households were switching salty snack brands within their category. After observing several households, Strong noted that parents bought different brands in regards to their children’s individual preferences.

Not every child liked the same snack, so the parents rotated brands to be fair. “No other quantitative or focus group research was able to crack the code on this rotation,” Strong says.

Strong notes that successful ethnographic studies require that observers don’t overstay their welcome. She also says that it’s important not to have more than one brand manager or associate attend a given study.

“Having a bunch of suits is intrusive and distracting and will skew results,” she says.

Focus groups have long reigned supreme as the king of marketing research techniques. It can give an excellent picture of consumers’ likes and dislikes. But sometimes consumers simply tell moderators what they think the company wants to hear, says John Copeland, a partner in Chicago-based brand research company Prophet.

“Good moderators know how to probe, but companies have to be careful not to influence the consumers,” Copeland says. “If consumers know the company is expecting a particular answer that can influence consumers’ responses.”

Doug Renfro, president of Renfro Foods, a specialty foods company in Fort Worth, Texas, says the idea of doing research into people’s homes is a great idea, but has pitfalls. At the top is the “Hawthorne Effect,” an effect on behavior that’s caused by the fact observers know they’re being studied.

“My family would probably use fat-free sour cream if we [knew] someone was going to watch us eat,” Renfro says.

Renfro doesn’t dismiss the technique out of hand, however: “[It] sounds like a way to get around the problem of people telling you one thing while doing another.”

Demographic information has also been a key tool in product marketing, but its overuse has hindered consumer product companies, says Joe Pilotta, a vice president at Big Research, a consumer research firm in Worthington, Ohio.

Household incomes can be misleading, says Pilotta. For instance, marketers may salivate over high-income households, but not all of those families are doing well. Some may be heavily in debt, have children in college, pay various medical expenses, or some combination, leaving them little disposable income.

“Companies need to allow consumers to tell them their stories, but marketers are afraid of what they’ll hear–that they’ve maxed out their credit cards and can’t spend anymore,” Pilotta says. “We need to figure out the consumers rather than trying to transform their behavior to get them to buy.”

But how does an ethnographic researcher know that a family is in debt? Strong says she learns about family income during a warm up, asking questions about the family’s hopes, dreams, fears and concerns.

“If I just sit down at the kitchen table and listen with compassion and concern, [people will talk],” she says.

By Kathy Kiley, Managing Editor, Consumer Markets Insider
Courtesy of http://www.kpmg.com