Ethnography Workshop 2009

A day on Ethnography broke new ground for AQR, and met with a warm response, not to mention a full house. Waldo Swijnenburg and Mirjam Paternotte from MARE Research, Amsterdam, reviewed the event, with video provided by Surinder Siama.

The ‘Ethnography: Lessons from the Edge’ workshop, held in June, was AQR’s first foray into this type of topic matter, and was intended to be innovative, practical and aimed at a more ‘advanced’ audience. According to the feedback forms gathered to date, the day delivered on all counts. It attracted not just members who’d never previously attended AQR events, but also enticed four from abroad, and even one client. The overall comment? More of the same please.

We’d wanted to attend this workshop because we are always looking for ways to enrich and improve our product portfolio, and the ethnographic proposition seemed an excellent candidate for this. Additionally, we are familiar with AQR and have had positive experiences with previous workshops and seminars.

On arrival we noticed the relatively small group of participants: a good start to the day. In the past we’ve had bad experiences with big audiences which limit the potential to ask questions and discuss matters in depth.

Siamack Salari was introduced and led us throughout the day. A very good choice: he was involved in the early developments and the later professionalisation of this form of research. He was eminently qualified to talk about its winding journey (without any supporting Power Point slides), and in the process able to inspire the ever critical researchers in the audience.

Just before lunch Greg Rowland took over to introduce the topic and analytic framework of Semiotics. It was a session that offered food for thought and sketched the broadness of the analytical possibilities with ethnographic research but, in our opinion, it could have had a greater degree of focus on practical applications with clients.

After the lunch (and a postprandial dip), Siamack took over again and we started the workshop. In small groups we analysed and discussed a film about consumers having breakfast. We discovered very quickly that this was not as easy as it appears; but that it was interesting and instructive to do.

Watching a film of consumers preparing breakfast was just the beginning: discussing and thinking about the story behind it taught us a lot about a possible and mostly hidden truth! We found this to be a refreshing and alternative approach to simply asking questions.

According to Siamack you have to observe the consumer for at least a day, but preferably two, for a couple of reasons: firstly that the consumer will stop acting and start being ‘natural’ and secondly that it will then be possible to recognise any patterns or routines. Siamack is also a proponent of ‘video Ethnography’ so that after observation you can watch the films two or even three times to really see and understand hidden consumer truths.

An important learning was that the most interesting part of the study is to watch the video with the client in order to formulate relevant questions. Once this has been completed, the final phase is to go over the material (again) with the consumer to actually ask the questions and formulate co-discoveries.

The way forward

For our current client portfolio we feel that this would be a little too much. However, we think that we can (and are inspired to) combine this method with our current way of working to create a refreshing, more in depth yet still ‘workable’, version of ethnography.

The most important take out of the day for us is that Ethnographic research is a time consuming approach, but potentially very interesting. Bottom line: we had an inspiring day and look forward to the next session.