Design Research and Strategy
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 [...]
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 [...]
Categories: Blog · culture · ethnography
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 [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · ethnography · home · market research · qualitative research
I had the privilege to work under Roger Martin when I worked at the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. Roger’s got much to say about innovation, and I find his take to generally reinforce the “qualitative lens” Copernicus takes to its projects. Roger recently wrote for Harvard Business Review that companies don’t get growth from [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · design · ethnography · home · market research
Two of us at Copernicus (Sarah and I) are working on a project, funded through Ryerson University, on smartphone usage. One of the key findings we’ve uncovered so far is that people tend to adopt new communication channels (e.g., text) when they purchase new handsets. This new handset/life change correlation is a symbolic ritual that [...]
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