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Design Research is both an art and a science. Copernicus writes this blog as a communal space for exploring Design Research as a method and a topic.

The interview guide is not as important a document as most people think. Most if not all qualitative research would be improved if researchers stopped focusing on the guide, and focused more on the research questions.
Many qualitative researchers have had this very same experience: the client wants to add too many questions focusing too narrowly [...]

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Categories: Blog · Research Methods · brand · ethnography · market research · methods · qualitative research

I recently spoke about ethnography at the Market Research Intelligence Association’s conference. Below are the original slides from my presentation.
Of course, the in-person experience is so much better, so here’s a run-down of the big ideas:

Ethnography is about immersing oneself in a “foreign” context
You do ethnography to really understand your customers, from their own perspective
Good [...]

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Categories: Blog · culture · ethnography

The LA Times is reporting a shocking finding: men are doing the grocery shopping! In other news, they also apparently buy clothes, change diapers, and book swimming lessons. Will wonders never cease. The Times tells us that the grocery retailers are finally waking up to this supposed gender revolution:
The nation’s biggest food and personal products [...]

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Categories: Blog · culture · feminism · food · home · market research · sociology · women

Christmas shopping season is in full swing, but one retail company stands out for its message: don’t buy our stuff. That’s right, Patagonia is telling its customers that they should NOT buy more of its products. From their blog:
What kind of crazy reverse psychology is this? Is Patagonia trying to fool its customers into buying [...]

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Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · ethnography · home · market research · qualitative research

On or around October 7, BlackBerry users in Europe started noticing problems with their email and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. By October 12, the outage had spread to North America. Not all of BlackBerry’s 70 million customers were affected, but a significant portion certainly were.
Copernicus saw an opportunity to understand a little more about the [...]

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Categories: BlackBerry · Blog · home · mobile · quantitative research · sociology · survey

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