Ethnographic Research

Including sensory professionals on a team is particularly important, not only for observation and interpretation, but for language skills. A descriptive sensory vocabulary is used to record observations, articulate concepts, bridge project phases, maintain communication and provide rationale for decision-making throughout the project.

If a project objective is to find a truly new idea platform, it is helpful to work with an ethnography specialist. Team members observe ethnographer-led consumer interviews and record the responses. A gifted moderator will probe for deeper learnings as they emerge, and encourage storytelling while still staying on course. Sensory analysts use the ethnographic and qualitative situations to decode consumer commentary into descriptive sensory attributes. The attributes are used to formulate sensory hypotheses reflective of consumer needs. Sensory hypotheses provide foundational strategy for product development.

Ethnographic research requires training. Inexperienced team members sometimes find it difficult to leave the security of the observation window, computer screen or laboratory to have one-on-one discussions with consumers. However, novice ethnographers can be teamed with an experienced partner; the experienced team member leads the interview, leaving the note-taking to the partners. In my experience, consumers who accept research assignments are very easy to work with—ready and willing to tell stories, share their thoughts and feelings, and demonstrate their habits. What consumers reveal, independent of others, often leads to important discoveries. This is especially true with children who are given opportunities to respond or demonstrate their preferences apart from parental overlay. Sensory-trained observers recognize body language cues—facial expressions or ways of handling a product—that lead to product innovations.

Powerful insight

Observing behavior is not the same thing as understanding what it means. “You can’t observe insight,” Lori Rothman, senior marketing research manager, Kraft Foods, Glenview, IL, told seminar attendees in “Design of Products That Will Delight Consumers” at the 2007 IFT Annual Meeting. “A woman only buys items that are on sale because she’s cost-conscious, we note, but this isn’t insight. We have to dig underneath and find out why she’s behaving this way. It’s the ‘whys’ that point to opportunities for new products.”

In the innovation session that follows an ethnographic trek, teams sort and funnel quantities of observation notes, looking for patterns, contradictions, tensions and keywords that will uncover the “whys.” Themes emerge and become “maps” for organizing shapes, colors, sounds, words describing experiences, and emotions that are crafted into concepts. Sensory scientists’ insight and interpretative skills are critical to the success of this early phase of product innovation. Sensory language bridges themes to concepts, and concepts to protocepts. Descriptive sensory decoding of consumer insight identifies form and product features that are emotionally relevant, unique and consistent with core brand identity.

Nancy C. Rodriguez is founder and president of Food Marketing Support Services, Inc. (FMSS), Oak Park, IL, on the web atfmssinc.com. The company provides master-level sensory-based innovation, examination, interpretation and applications for domestic and global food and beverage projects. Anne Hunt, a Chicago-based writer who works with FMSS, contributed to this article.