In the era of information explosion, time fragmentation, and impetuous mentality, "planner Zhu Jinke" adheres to a solemn attitude towards truth, thought and writing, and understands the macro layout and micro subtlety of marketing creativity from a strategic perspective.
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Let's start with a case study of the significance of milk in Indian culture. "When I'm hanging out on a bike or practicing karate until I'm tired, I need to drink milk, I need to replenish my strength, it's to strengthen my memory, I need my memory to learn. Usually I have to help my mother, I love her very much." — A 10-year-old boy from Bangalore, India. "Today's world is full of competition, they will succeed, they will be brave and positive, full of living strength. With so-and-so brand of milk, the child will become stronger. Mother of a ten-year-old from Mumbai, India.
Food and beverage brands can evoke deep emotional and cultural connections in consumers because food is a necessity for survival and a social and emotional bond. One of our customers in the U.S. is introducing a delicious chocolate product with added milk that can add hot or cold milk to the chocolate powder, and the product is positioned to provide interesting nutrition and target the target audience of adolescents and children. The cultural symbol of milk in the United States is the nurturing of the mother. However, when children in the United States enter elementary school, especially older children, they want to replace milk with juice drink soda. Fun is therefore a necessary element of brand positioning and can strengthen the status of milk as children grow up. In India, however, functional milk products are known as milk food and beverages, with the main competitors being the British traditional brands Bournvita and Horlicks Holicks. They are positioned to provide nutrition to children while adding vitamins as functional products. Our clients see opportunities in the Indian market, but first they need to figure out the theme of their marketing strategy, which is how to be competitive and position their brand in the Indian market. So they embarked on an interdisciplinary research project, hoping to grasp the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of Indian consumers before starting to promote the market. Strategists conducted a strategy learning journey and obtained some results that exceeded expectations to change their local brand positioning and competitive strategies.
Our research methodology allows the strategy team to understand the cultural place of milk in Indian households, and to explore brand positioning and product formulation concepts. The study was divided into two phases, conducted separately, but the team of experts in the United States needed to complete most of the immersive research work. The team's work began with interviews with a pediatrician, followed by three-hour ethnographic interviews in Mumbai and Bangalore, followed by three-hour creative workshops to explore ideas. We recruited middle-class mothers under the age of 10 who were major buyers of milk, food and beverages, based on a socioeconomic stratification characterized by a husband who had at least a college degree, worked as a middle and senior manager in a business organization, or was his own boss and was responsible for earning money to support his family. Before the interview, the mothers used pictures and text to make a memo to show what milk meant to them. We don't use digital means because these target customers don't always touch computers. The first surprise to the strategy team was the cultural importance of milk to Indian mothers. Milk for children is a daily early morning routine that is rooted in a long-standing emphasis on the health of family members. Traditionally, cows are sacrificed livestock in Hinduism and are an important food source in vast rural areas of India, where milk is made into curds, silk and ghee. These dairy products are the food base of Indians, and even in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai, some urban people still raise cows, and for other families, the unpasteurized milk produced by buffalo or cows is provided directly to them, and they make it according to traditional techniques. However, this is changing, and packaged dairy products offer more styles and flavors, which are gradually becoming accepted by children and are welcomed. The milk is heated at a high temperature in the early morning to ensure safe use, while the milk is separated for further processing. Milk can be made into condensed milk after adding active ingredients, which can be made into curds, similar to yogurt heating and filtering, milk can be made into shreds or ghee after milk, it is a soft cheese that can be added to vegetable foods to supplement high-quality protein. When you serve your child a cup of hot milk in the morning, part of your diet can provide them with protein. So for Indian mothers, milk is tied to household nutrition. For mothers, the health of their children is an important indicator of their success in parenting. Pediatricians use growth forms when children are very young, let mothers know various health indicators, and the school will help children do physical examinations, measure their height and weight, and so on. A pediatrician from Mumbai said: "The mother is concerned with her child, is he as tall as a child of the same age, is he the shortest in the class?" So I would use a graph to show them that the child was growing. "Pediatricians tell mothers that milk can provide the calcium and protein children need to grow, so for them, there is a cultural connection between milk and being a good mother, but it is not always easy for children to drink milk, so a variety of flavored milk drinks can make milk appear more delicious, and thus become part of the unbreakable dietary traditions of many families." Historically, functional milk drinks have been positioned as body growth products. For low-income families, small packages make them affordable. In modern India, where there is no longer a food shortage for middle-class families in emerging cities, the physical and mental health of children can win in the competitive emerging economy, which has become a new focus of attention for parents. Just like in the western United States, the number of middle-class Indian women is decreasing, and raising 1 or 2 children to grow up healthily is their new focus, which they admit can make them happy when they are old.
In india, where the economy is rapidly evolving, education is seen as a ladder to future success. Children face fierce competition to win in primary and secondary education, and to enter prestigious universities, they must get near-perfect scores. Parents also want their children to participate in extracurricular activities, additional learning coaching, sports and dance lessons, etc., which can give them a competitive edge. Outstanding athletic performance, for example, may be an important way for them to enter excellent schools with lower scores. Mothers in India now set their parenting goals to help their children win in an ever-changing competitive world. Their focus on raising children has shifted from a single growth to an overall winner on the physical and mental levels. A mother from mumbai, a 9-year-old, told us: "We want our children to be better than us, to study more and to do more sports. If you're an athlete, you can have a place in college. Because athletes now enjoy a variety of priority rights. "In India's new parenting system, milk still plays a central role. Children generally start school life from the age of 5, they may be mischievous, reluctant to eat before school, and milk for breakfast is seen as the best substitute for food. Milk, as a complete food, is used to fill the children's stomachs at breakfast before school, and milk regards the mother as an indispensable food for children to start their school life, ensuring that children gain physical and mental strength before lunch and can perform better in class. "We as mothers believe that when our children drink milk, they can be full of strength, and their children who are full can be happy and perform better in health," a mother from Mumbai told us. Because milk is still at the heart of the new parenting system, the role of functional milk drinks remains important, not only to convince mothers that their children will grow up healthily, but also to meet their needs to cultivate their children's strong mental strength. The evolution of the brand positioning of milk drinks has reflected this new cultural state. In Cadbury's Bournvita milk product advertisement, a mother sprints to train her son to run as hard as she can. The mother said, "When my child beats me, he can realize that victory is a habit, and in training after training, the child's crying is full of vulnerability and frustration." But in the end he overtook his mother in the race and crossed the finish line first, and her mother said that today he beat me, but in fact I won."
When it comes to breakfast milk products, the market faces stiff competition from traditional brands like Bournvita, and the strategy team believes that opportunities should be looked for every day after school. For the time after school, mothers are more open to new brands and more accommodating to their children's hobbies. They will encourage children to choose individual breads, frozen or packaged snacks, and other products, such as yogurt, so that children have independent preferences for products, which is very important for children's food or beverage brands. Because once the child's choice is finalized, the product will accompany them through the juvenile stage, and even extend to the adolescent period. In any culture, enterprising children's brands differ from those chosen by mothers in that they reflect the emotional needs of teenagers who want to be detached from their infancy. Back home from school or extracurricular activities, Indian school-age children generally drink milk, not static, because children have eaten a lot of things during the day, so mothers will be more relaxed, at this time their parenting purpose is more to treat children, let children relax and happy, but energy is still important for children to participate in evening activities, which plays a bridge between lunch and dinner across the energy gap. A different mother from Bangalore, aged 9 and 11, said, "The children have already drunk milk after practicing tennis at 7 p.m. and after practicing tennis or dancing lessons at 7 p.m., but they will still be hungry, and there is not much food I can prepare for them before dinner at 8:30, and they need extra energy to meet their learning needs." A mother of a 12-year-old from Bangalore told us: "They have had juice or drinks in the afternoon, and they have also eaten ice cream and cheese low-fat milk from cheese or low-fat milk from milk angular isolation or hot chocolate, and it is okay to eat anything before dinner." OK. Because the seasons vary, it is mainly up to the children themselves to choose. These findings provide an opportunity for our brand experts to immerse themselves in strategic learning, allowing them to learn about the Indian market and explore new markets with local marketing colleagues. We mentioned earlier about conscious learning that strategy teams share together, which is the basis for developing a marketing strategy. We call this proactively designed team learning journey. The purpose of learning design is to generate insights that inspire strategies. So action comes from learning, a strategic learning journey that requires collecting as many forms of data and opinions as possible to support learning, the core of which is immersive consumer research, so as to form a deep understanding of consumers or users, so that brands can be more relevant to their lives. This article explores the immersive research methods that can be used in the first stage of the empathy strategy process. The reporter improves his learning within the strategy team to achieve the purpose of formulating a marketing strategy. The methodology discussed in this article has strong applicability in both academic theory and in the practical operation of consumer insight consulting. With the advent of new technologies and the evolution of new insight tools, these approaches can still play an important role. Many of the new approaches, such as portable ethnographic research or the Market Research Online Community, build on existing theoretical approaches and consumer research practices and promote some of the latter's advances. Eye-tracking technology, for example, has been used for decades, but due to the emergence of a large number of inexpensive technologies, these methods are undergoing new changes by merging with other research methods. By their very nature, none of these new technologies can be game planners. However, many new technologies are absorbed into the tool library of empathy, brand marketing strategy processes, and through the use of interdisciplinary research methods, deep insights into consumers' thoughts, feelings and behaviors can therefore be formed. The methodologies discussed in this article, whether long-established or emerging, should be useful tools for students or related practitioners to learn. By applying these new methods, new insights can be brought to research. The main content of this article is to explain how to design immersive research research through an interdisciplinary approach to strategic learning.
First, immersive research, what does it refer to specifically?
What exactly does immersive research refer to? Whether in academia or marketing consulting, immersive research, there is currently no widely accepted definition, and some people define immersive research as understanding the experience of consumers using a product or service at a certain time, that is, the difficulties encountered. Others define immersive research as the act of a researcher purposefully immersing himself in a particular subculture for in-depth study. There is also a narrower definition of immersive research as the use of virtual mimicry to test shoppers' responses to new packaging or promotions for new products. For the purposes of this article, I define immersive research as an interdisciplinary research approach that allows teams responsible for developing marketing strategies to build a deep understanding of target consumers or customers by observing and analyzing consumer behaviors, deep ideas, emotions, and cognitions in relevant scenarios. We will parse this definition below. (1) Observe the team in the relevant scene, so as to see how and where the consumer experiences the product or service, which can happen or at a certain time, which can happen at a certain moment, and go out to find a place where the consumer experience occurs. At some point, however, it's an expensive way of research that's not always necessary because it allows consumers to provide some information for remote observation. (2) Analyze researchers and consumers in relevant scenarios to explore the deep ideas, emotions and cognitions held by consumers in a specific scene. (3) When designing appropriate immersive research methods and tools, it is very necessary to choose relevant scenarios. If the scenario is too narrow, it can cause the team to miss the necessary avenues of understanding. For example, in the research case of preparing family meals, if we only limit the scene to the customer's product, without expanding the cultural and emotional background that extends the wider scope, we will carry out product development when carrying out marketing activities, and measures to enrich the details of the experience, understand the background of product use, and provide integrated solutions to help enterprises find profit opportunities. For example, before the launch of the Sonicare brand, Philips studied all the oral health care problems of consumers, not only limited to toothbrushes and teeth, and found that people need additional assistance when flossing their teeth, so they designed an electric floss to make up for the shortcomings of existing electric toothbrushes, which made Sonicare quickly become an advanced oral health care brand and win the trust of consumers and oral professionals.
Deep insights are about understanding consumer thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, so immersive research methods are often qualitative, but they can also be new technologies for quantification that can improve the responsiveness of analyzing complex quantitative samples. Below we'll see many immersive research methods and tools, and how teams can use them to develop marketing strategies that build a deep understanding of the target consumption or customer by observing and analyzing consumer behaviors and experiences in relevant scenarios, deep ideas, emotions, and cognitions.
Ethnographic research methods in the field of business
Methods of democratic research in the field of business. The first immersive research approach we discussed was in the business context, where we know that ethnographic research is rooted in an anthropological approach that does field research and documentation of human behavior in the context of local people. The object of study is socio-cultural systems and routines in everyday life. Through this definition, many of the approaches we describe can be taken from an ethnographic perspective, but many ethnographic scholars emphasize that researchers should immerse themselves in the daily lives of their subjects to observe and record first-hand information, which is the definition used in this paper. Ethnographic research has been widely used in business for at least 20 years, and in the past 5 to 10 years, online and portable ethnographic research tools have been more widely used, researchers do not have to be immersed in the observation, and the research can be more extensive on the basis of considering the economic and time costs. Typical ethnographic research is a longitudinal observation of situations that occur over a period of time, distinguishing between different scenarios, sociocultural dynamics, and product or service experiences depending on time and place. In business, however, researchers are rarely given weeks or months to stay with respondents. In general, ethnographic research societies for consumers last from three hours to one day in the relevant scenario, and many customers interested in longitudinal research methods also ask to be in contact with consumers for as long as possible. Choosing a scene is crucial. In a narrow period of time, in order to observe the specific product experience and consumption behavior of consumers, ethnographic research content can be called shopping together at home or driving together. Clients familiar with consumer ethnography research are generally soliciting comments. The book routinely proposes 10 3-hour interviews, one of which requires interviews at shopping malls where consumers shop, however, this scenario is not enough to reflect the breadth of the consumer's life scene, so ethnographic research and interviews should be conducted as naturally and broadly as possible. Therefore, the ethnographic research of the fee must be both planned and natural in terms of methodology, reflecting planning at the recruitment stage and reflecting naturalness when respondents have face-to-face or online contact. Designing and planning ethnographic-related projects Compared to other quantitative studies, ethnographic research programs are more complex, requiring at least 4 weeks of ethnographic research planning and recruitment in the commercial field, depending on sample size and scenario complexity. If consumers are more difficult to recruit or involve more areas, the market research time will be longer. There are many approaches involved in ethnographic research projects, so it is necessary to spend time on creative planning, and some preliminary exploratory research may be considered. Examples include symbol scanning, small-scale online ethnography or network systems, especially considering the scope and scenario of the study. For example, a clothing company wants to understand the changes in consumer behavior that affect the sales of jeans, so the scope and scenarios that need to be studied will be more extensive, in addition to the consumers of this clothing brand, the scope must also be expanded to non-brand customers, but consumers with fashion-leading effects, these people make style choices can affect market trends, and can trigger mainstream consumers to follow, thereby affecting product sales. The ethnographic research context for this design is also richer, running through all scenes of consumer clothing, not just the occasion where jeans can be seen. Ethnographic research can take place in homes and social activities to better understand personal style and social scenes. Advance work includes a detailed record of work and occasion clothing choices, and the use of tools to explore the culture and emotions of jeans, denim clothing. This kind of research is important to understand the complex factors behind the decline in jeans sales. In general, in our ethnography research program, we use online ethnography as one of the content, which allows us to collect more data and review and select more insightful and engaging candidates in advance. Usually there are the following kinds of online ethnographic tools: (1) Online diaries, participants record their thoughts through words, pictures, videos, videos, food, clothing, housing, and so on. (2) Mobile phone video, the video taken by the participant through the mobile phone, recording the activities of a certain moment, including the shopping process. (3) Mobile phone memos, which record the touchpoints that may affect behavior or cognition each time they encounter a certain brand or product. We use this approach in our computer game research to understand what consumers think about computer games before the holidays and how they impact the market. (4) Online community participants are exposed to the product multiple times over a month or more, which allows longitudinal data to be collected, and the contact with the product can be either personal, social, or both. In a clothing study, we asked participants to make an electronic puzzle of its T-shirt, publish it publicly, and ask other participants to comment, which allowed us to observe which type of design was more favored in this fashion subculture. Researchers often commission online platforms to conduct online ethnography studies, followed by presentations of research results and data analysis to marketing teams. Our online platforms have been around for 12 years, but recently we've also commissioned short-term research on commercial platforms like Recollective, which allow a wide range of observers to log in, and the strategy team can conduct online ethnographic research and even include face-to-face individual ethnographic interviews, which is important because it can generate a wealth of data, both ethnographic and unlearned, and the data team can also agree on the issue of individual interviews by participants. After designing a project to decide who to interview, you can conduct a screening and then start recruiting. We'll go into more detail about the screening and recruitment of quantitative studies later, but special emphasis needs to be placed on the recruitment of ethnographic studies, observing the context may require participants to do something private or personalized, such as changing clothes, shaving, brushing teeth, or even showering in front of the team. In addition, participants may be required to wear glasses so that we can track and record eye movements, which allows for an in-depth analysis of what attracts shoppers in a live sale. When conducting ethnographic research, it is important to ensure that recruiters are fully aware of what participants should complete, and provide written instructions to recruiters if necessary, so as not to cause displeasure among participants in later interviews, which is a great discount to the results of research. Implementing an ethnographic research project previously mentioned the limiting factors for conducting a three-hour ethnographic study with participants alone. I've found that the best way to overcome these headwinds is to develop a semi-structured research program that involves asking different ethnic knowledge questions in sequence, plus contextualized research and unstructured interviews, which can be conducted simultaneously to form key insights. Another reason for developing a structured approach is to ensure that the same data can be collected from all participants with a single study, ensuring that the results of the analysis may cover all interviews. James Spradley raises three main types of ethnographic questions in his ethnographic book Ethnographic Objects. The following is illustrated by an example of an ethnographic study on the theme of a weekday lunch. (1) Description questions, in which participants are asked to describe in their own language a picture of their culture or daily life. Spuri recounts different types of descriptions, class questions as follows,- macro questions, such as telling me how you spent your average workday. - Specific macro issues, focusing on specific times or places, such as telling me what you eat and drink during the day. - Guided macro questions, which are very important and allow participants to present content relevant to the topic, providing us with the opportunity to observe. For example, "Tell me what you eat for lunch on weekdays." - Macro questions related to the task, allowing participants to elaborate on the topics related to them. For example, show me the invoice for your lunch purchase on a working day, the consumption record, and then say everything you ate. - Micro problems, a specific approach to a topic. For example, describe how you heat food at work? Experiential questions, asking about specific, relevant experiences, such as talking about where you're not satisfied with lunch at work, personalizing language questions, and exploring unique vocabulary languages in marketing communications, such as what to call lunchtime. (2) Structured questions, asking participants to show how they are conducting activities related to the topic. This is important for understanding the post-consumer classification method. For example, how do you classify the food or drink you eat at work? Are there other ways to classify it? (3) Compare class questions, ask participants to describe the differences between different titles, such as telling me the difference between temporary and formal meals for you. In the initial stages of an ethnographic interview, participants should be given a clear idea of what to do next, build a harmonious relationship with them, and let them relax. I usually start by introducing myself and all the observers to give some hints, confirm to start the conversation, and let the participants slowly familiarize themselves with the rhythm of the conversation with us, which helps capture the highlights that the participants are showing. Especially when he is well prepared for the interview. I would ask participants when and where they would like to be interviewed, choose a contribution that would not be disturbed by other family members, and make sure the participant was seated in a position he preferred, which would make him feel comfortable and comfortable. I will tell him in advance of my professional status as a visitor, which reminds me to protect the privacy of the participants, I will seek the consent of the other party, record and photograph the interview content, and ensure that all records and photos are used only by the research team and not in public. If the video is made, a specific plan is developed for the interview. I've always thought of interviews as informal conversations, moving from general questions to specific descriptive questions, allowing participants to describe and narrate as much as they can in their own language without prompting. If the participant is stuck in a topic, I don't dwell on it, but move on. Back to the topic itself from a different perspective. Because as the interview progresses, participants become more relaxed and more able to express their experiences, thoughts, and feelings more clearly. Spranli points out that the importance of expressing interest is very important to encourage participants, and we can reshape their speech to encourage them to continue to expand and deepen from the initial expression. Spuri also suggests ignoring some of the minutiae of descriptions, usually that an Englishman doesn't need to understand everything an American does, and I liken ethnographic interviews to unraveling a mess of ropes that are intertwined and need to be unraveled one by one, and it's hard for us to find relationship information along straight lines, so it's important to adopt a semi-structured approach to asking questions, which allows specific topics to come back and forth and find the core of the problem. Having discussed the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in immersive research, I often use a variety of tools to explore a topic from multiple perspectives. In that sense, I can rightly start a nation's day interview for a hybrid study. For some practitioners, however, they do not yet have the ability to master this research method. I believe that ethnographic interviews in the field of business studies should not be rigid, and it should be understood that the core of democratic interviews is still descriptive questioning and observation in cultural contexts. Ethnographic Interview Example (3 hours per regular interview) Serial Number Phase Time Objective Operation 1 Before the interview begins
Building harmonious relationships with participants gossip is commonplace and makes conversations easier. 2 Opening remarks 5 minutes to exchange the content of the process to be interviewed, ask participants to relax, explain the time of the interview, participants' expectations, and ask for permission to record, video or take pictures. 3 Understand the participants 25 minutes Understand the participants' personal background, values and purposes, and ask descriptive questions about the individual. For example: Tell us a little bit about yourself and talk about your life. Tell me about your experience growing up, what are some things that make you remember deeply, and how you became what you are today? What will your best friend say about you? Which evaluations are most important to you? Personally, what is the most important thing in life? What is your philosophy of life or belief in life? Give you 5 years, where would you like to live? 4 Ask descriptive questions 50 minutes Understand culture and behavior in a specific situation through descriptive questions and descriptive questions. Start with macro-descriptive questions such as: Tell me, what did you do/how did you do it? Explore specific topics with micro questions, such as a detailed account of what you do and how to do it? Ask specific experiential questions. For example, tell us about a pleasant/bad mall shopping experience. Use structured and contrasting questions for further clarification. For example how do you classify these products and operate the difference between the various types of products in each category? 5 Guiding Questions 90 Minutes Observe culture and behavior in specific scenarios through guided descriptive questions. Ask guided descriptive questions at the right time in the interview, and ask guided descriptive questions at the appropriate time in the interview, and observe and ask questions about the scenes. For example, let me look at your car, where do you store food, how do you install the router? This part of the observation may be longer, such as driving a car with the participants, observing kitchen cupboards, refrigerators, or recipes, and observing the process of oral care. If an experience or situation, such as family vacation life, is not observed, the participant's response can be stimulated visually or metaphorically. 6 End Phase 10 minutes End Interview This phase can be asked like this. Is there anything else you want to tell me? Thank the participants, let them know how to pay them, and then say goodbye.
3. Design research
Design studies Ethnography studies are commonly applied to create empathy between designers and users of products or services, allowing designers to directly observe the user's performance, the experience of the product or service, and the difficulties encountered and the solutions being used. In this way, not only new ideas can be generated to improve the design, but also the overall product concept can be deepened to meet the needs of customers who have not yet been discovered. When making ethnographic observations for the purpose of activating a design, what writer James Carlopio calls activation analysis is very important, that is, listing all the tasks performed by the user related to the product. To do this, we design research protocols to observe each stage of using the product. For example, in an ethnographic study, customers were redesigning the packaging of the Coke brand, so we walked into stores with consumers, bought products, accompanied them home to observe how they stored the products, how they drank them at meals or parties and threw away the bottles.
We observed several problems, storing in the shelf table or refrigerator, difficulty in products, inconvenience of pouring out bottles when full, etc., which eventually prompted customers to redesign bottles. We also develop a set of packaging size classification methods for different products based on the use of different occasions, which are provided to marketing and packaging teams in innovative courses for discussion, so that they can design new product sizes and multiple shapes of packaging. It is useful to observe user behavior over time. IDEO cites the example of the U.S. State Agricultural Insurance Company, which opened a café in Lincoln Park to invite Chicago-area next-generation door coffee and offer free consulting services so that companies can understand the perception and consumption of insurance services by this ethnic group. User experience research is a sub-area of user research that involves user observation, experience feedback, and testing of website design.
Record the process of ethnographic research
Recording the process of ethnographic research and routinely recording the research process is the core task of ethnographic research. In the process of analysis, the original text of the interviews of the commercial democracy system, the live recordings, the photos and videos are very important. Original text. It is very important that this is translated from the preservation of electronic recordings that preserve the consumer's original language after the interview. Because content writers who record our own cognition and language in writing tend to filter out some things, they will deviate slightly from the original language.
Field records. Handwritten recordings by researchers during interviews, including observed physical, verbal, behavioral scenes, and other details that cannot be captured by tape recorders or cameras, make a lot of connections in the process of participating in consumer contact. Usually I record this content on my computer during the interview, and it is very difficult to record the details of the interview, which is very difficult and uncomfortable for the participants, so I usually record the most important parts, and quickly listen to the recording or watch the video after the interview, so as to expand and supplement my record and share these contents with the team members. Photo. This is an important way to document interviews, so take as many photos as possible. If the content is sensitive, we will ask each other for consent many times, it is very useful to make a list of photos that need to be obtained during each interview, you can make a horizontal comparison between different participants, we always take a photo of the owner and his car, and through the posture of the owner, you can find the intimacy between it and the car. In front of the off-road pickup truck, the men stood firmly in front of the car grille and crossed, with a confident smile on their hands. In front of the sports car, the men pose in various poses, with one hand leisurely resting on the hood. In front of small cars, men always want to shrink into the background and not be discovered, and in this way they can discover the mystery. Some researchers have suggested sharing field records of ethnography on social media, arguing that this would make participants more engaged in the study. In a casual dining survey for the new generation, we opened up a personal digital diary to all participants and found that this group enjoyed commenting on other people's dining scenes and dining venues, but this was inherently social. If the open is the painful experience of everyone's meal, the same result will not be obtained, because the pain is a more personalized experience, and the willingness of consumers to share is not high. The prevalence of the Web, especially the development of various mobile portable technologies, has led to the emergence of new social behaviors and ways, making consumers more connected to brands, and these technologies have also provided new directions for the study of ethnography. New developments have emerged in ethnography, such as online ethnography, social media ethnography, and electronic ethnography. (1) Networked ethnography, a term first coined by Robert V. Kozinest, refers to the use of the web for ethnographic research that allows participants to empathize with consumers' online conversations.
Researchers are allowed to enter the online community Just as ethnographers enter a geocultural environment, the online community can be a brand community or an independent user community, and it is important for researchers to disclose their identity and purpose in a sincere and respectful way to be allowed to enter the community. Much like ethnographers approaching and treating participants first-hand, cyberattrithy has been shown to be both creative and efficient, often with three notable characteristics. First, get specific feedback from users through the brand community. Second, work together to create a new product design style or name. Third, by focusing on a theme, such as charisma, we can get deeply involved in the community and uncover potential needs. However, a study we did found that the research method of online ethnography is also flawed compared to the hands-on ethnographic research approach, mainly including the following shortcomings. First, positive content is generally expressed in online communities, while in-person field research is about observing and soliciting negative content. Second, expression in online communities is predetermined, and in in-person field research, researchers and participants can build rapport and get more authentic feedback. Third, feedback on issues in online communities is controlled or restricted. Due to the thinness of the correlation on the network, it is difficult to collect the details of the participants' feelings. Fourth, there was a misunderstanding of the feedback to the problem because the participants' voices or body language could not be observed. (2) Social media ethnography. It's a fast-growing field, driven by academia, and its definition and practice are still expanding, based on consumer satisfaction, that is, the identity that consumers set for themselves on the Web, discussing and interacting through social media, conducting online network analysis, and portraying the most influential user images. In practice, companies use corporate social media monitoring and services to track consumer attitudes. Other search engines, such as social social media, public tools, can also be used by independent researchers. (3) Electronic ethnography. The electronicization of online community media will have some linguistic confusion. Some scholars argue that electronic ethnography focuses on emerging cultures built on the web, with both quantitative and qualitative technology The definition of electronic ethnography seems to cover digital, social, media, ethnography, and online ethnography, but does not go beyond online ethnography, which refers to a method of obtaining offline ethnography online data. In practice, practitioners will use three words of electronic virtual and online ethnography to obtain consumer ethnography data using online platforms, but it remains to be seen which one will stand out.
Fifth, conduct in-depth interviews with consumers
Conduct in-depth interviews with consumers. Consumer in-depth interviews are informal, individual conversations between researchers and several consumers, with the aim of uncovering the beliefs, cognitive motivations, and behaviors that consumers hold, both innerly or unconsciously. Therefore, when certain topics can trigger complex emotions and need to be explored in depth, such as on physical health issues, this kind of in-depth interview is very effective. In-depth interviews are also a very important approach in the field of commercial or professional immersion because it satisfies confidentiality requirements. In-depth interviews often take place in a concentrated area, such as a research institution, rather than in a scene environment, because this kind of ethnographic interview generally does not take 1 to 2 hours, but if the participants are far away, they can only conduct remote interviews, for example, as part of the design study, we decided that the interviewers will generally conduct it by telephone or network audio, and will also rent some platforms to record the interview content through online photography. In general ethnographic interviews, the number of observers is limited, and in these interviews, observers can see the same interviews, such as through the glass windows of research institutions or the network audio group telephone function. Because this interview is not conducted in a contextual setting, it is important to understand the context of the participants and the research topic, and an online prior contact can be made before the interview begins to ensure that the content of the discussion remains relevant to the scene. In a project with a limited budget, we conducted in-depth interviews with obese young girls and asked them to upload some photos of their friends while wearing their favorite clothes on our online platform so that we could observe and analyze their mood when shopping, as well as how they felt when wearing large clothes and taking photos with fairy friends. In-depth interviews can be part of longitudinal studies, such as with menopausal women to understand how they feel after entering menopause, applying a supplement that can slow the physical symptoms of menopause, recording the body's reactions on a weekly basis and transmitting them to us via the Internet. Finally, we gathered these women to do a panel discussion to let everyone exchange their experiences and discuss the packaging of the product. Compared with general ethnographic interviews, because the interview scenarios are known, in-depth interviews can be more structured without having to explore or face any environment that exceeds expectations. However, when discussing topics, sufficient time needs to be given to ensure that the interviews are sufficiently in-depth. Interviews also require the use of many immersive research tools to help participants convey difficult-to-express ideas in a non-verbal manner, revealing their mental state when they are unconscious. Standardized images and text can also be used for structured in-depth interviews to compare data from different participants. The interviewer's goal is to lead a deep, differentiated conversation in which participants feel supported and free to express their personal emotions. The most common encounter in my experience is that after the in-depth interview, the participants thank me and tell me that it was too much fun, or that no one has ever listened to me like this before, in order to do this, the interviewer must be involved, in order to do this, the interviewer must build a rapport with the participant, maintain mutual trust and respect throughout the interview, there are several ways to achieve this. -At the beginning of the interview, the participant is seated in a chair with an armrest, facing the interviewer, but not directly face to face. If you sit at a desk, the chair should be arranged at a certain angle, not face to face, to avoid giving the impression of a formal interview or making the informal interview dull. - Maintain eye contact with participants, but maintain a moderate amount of space to make the other person feel comfortable. - Interviewers should listen more and talk less, and silence can encourage participants to talk more. Body language and facial expressions are the best proof that we are listening without verbal communication. - Interviewers should use reflective listening. Psychologist Carl Rogers calls this Accurate Empathy. The main point is that the interviewer gives timely feedback on the participant's narrative according to his own understanding, helping the participant to explore his or her own experience and cognition more deeply. People often have words that don't meet their expectations, and there are words in their words, so the interviewer must continue to decode the words they hear, which is similar to guessing riddles. - The interviewer should not use the question method when responding, but should use a statement. This is because the questioner makes the participant question what he or she says and thus becomes cautious. The statement is neutral, which encourages the other person to evaluate their behavior more sincerely.
Below is an example of reactive listening using decoded narratives, from a study that sought to find out why patients always overtake over-the-counter painkillers, and to find rationalizations that could be used through safe communication. Participants said, "I took the medication according to the recommended dose. The researchers said: "Take the drug according to the recommended amount stated in the instructions." Participants said: "I don't think I read the instruction manual every time, I'm not sure, maybe I know it now." The researcher said, "You just understood how much of the drug is right for you." Participants said: "Indeed, I am heavier and need to increase the dose. As I can see above, in my experience, reactive listening, being able to move the interview forward, can be fine-tuned at any time during the interview, allowing me and the participants to understand each other's conversations better and have deeper conversations. From time to time, I will also say, please tell me if I have misunderstood, so as to confirm that everything is going well and correct it in time so that the interview can continue. Psychologists Willian Miller and Steven Rollnick recommended other interview methods that I found very useful, summarized below, - asking open-ended questions and letting each other give long answers. Because closed questions only need to be answered shortly or with no. For example, tell me that your daily diet will get a longer answer than if you ate vegetables a few times a day.-affirm or encourage participants to continue the conversation. For example, thank you for such a great description, the information you provided is very useful, and we can continue to discuss some other issues.-giving feedback to participants from time to time.-summarizing what participants said and confirming that they understand the implications. Is there anything else we haven't mentioned? Summarizing is also an encouraging way to indicate that the interviewer has listened carefully. Paired interviews In addition, paired interviews are also a kind of in-depth interview, which refers to the interview of two pairs of stranger participants, which can be similarly paired according to demographics and other screening criteria, or two people of opposite types can be selected. If it's a pairing, we expect the two to show some consistency in the conversation. If it is the same performance, it is hoped that a conflict of opinion will arise in the conversation. Paired interviews are less effective than individual interviews because the two participants are mutually constrained, and this problem does not exist when the interviewer establishes a rapport with a single participant. One of the exceptions is friendship pairing, where participants get to know each other and two people get to know each other's habits, a type of pairing that allows for more insight and cognition to be discovered through conversation and discussion. For example, in a study we conducted on young gamers of computer games, we recruited several pairs of girls who knew each other and played games together. From the perspective of understanding the social motivation of the game, this pairing method is richer and more effective than traditional one-on-one interviews. In this study, we also used parent-child pairing to see how parents manage their children to play games and which games parents allow their children to buy. These interviews reflect both conflict and consistency.
6. Panel discussion
Consumer group discussions, often referred to as focus groups, focus interviews, focus research is not suitable for the immersive research method of ethnographic in-depth interviews, whether it is live group discussions or online online discussions, for the following reasons: 1. It is very difficult to carry out informal conversations with 4 to 8 people at the same time, and it is impossible to achieve the depth of information exchange during individual interviews. 2. The deviation from social expectations in group discussions is more obvious. When participants expressed their actions and opinions, the acceptance of the community did not exactly match their inner expectations. 3. The limitedness of memory. Many people don't pay much attention to the usual consumption actions, such as buying everyday household items, and they can't remember their own behavior or decision-making process, which is why ethnographic research is useful at a certain point. 4. Limiting self-behavior will make the participant's performance lack of authenticity or continuity. But group discussions also have advantages: 1. The small number of members of small groups can reduce the bias of social expectations and the bias of social expectations, such as gender income and behavioral matching. This approach is widely used on sensitive topics, such as health care. 2, the practice before the online interview can be carried out in a group way, although as we have seen, at the level of the online community, different kinds of deviations will always appear, but participants often prefer to share personal feelings online in a private way, and the practice can be carried out in advance, which can help to understand the research scenario. Asking focus group members to buy merchandise and document the process using portable photographic equipment not only provides more useful insights, but also reduces the lack of memory limitations before actually engaging in group discussions. 3. Before privately performing sharing with group members, record in writing the attitude of group members to specific problems or marketing stimuli. 4) Use indirect research techniques instead of asking questions directly, e.g. - expression techniques that allow participants to use pictures or physical objects to help express some sensitive content. - Storytelling in a narrative manner that allows participants to tell their own things naturally without having to passively limit their behavior. Avoid the question, "Why do you buy a branded product twice a week?" ”。 - Tell a story in a projective way, allowing participants to imagine the reaction of another shopper. For example, if I am told who will buy the brand, the imaginary shopper can project the unconscious cognition of the participants. 4. Use reactive listening. In the early stages of the group discussion, I record in detail how each participant performed. Later, in the group discussion, I will often ask questions to see if it is consistent with the previous participants' own statements, and adjust the previous impressions. Sometimes I get a red-faced shrug or a confused shake of the head, and more often it's involved in giving me a lot of useful details, telling me why they feel the way they do, or confirming that their initial reaction was right (or wrong). Despite the shortcomings of group discussions, he remains popular in supporting the development of marketing strategies because it is a quick and effective way to gain broad insights into a topic, and because the strategy team can observe focus groups as a team at an early stage, and iteratively integrate implicit knowledge, which is absolutely necessary for shared strategy learning. If only two people observe a specific ethnographic interview, it is difficult to integrate the learning. I guess this explains why the online focus group approach is used in a relatively low way, because the cost is significantly higher, and the cost of the field is significantly higher than the live group discussion, I can have 5 group discussions a day, I can reach up to 50 consumers, which can focus on a marketing problem and quickly agree, and it takes longer to observe a separate interview sample. Now it usually takes 2 to 3 days for group discussions, and then the strategy team spends 1 to 2 days summarizing to ensure that the entire strategy development process can be carried out quickly. For researchers, this increases the stress of their analytical work and requires spending their entire night sorting through records and summarizing the insights found with field teams. In my experience, group research is most efficient when used to study deepening topics, including cultural situations and unconscious emotional cognition, and we often use the format of expanded creative workshops with 8 to 12 participants at a time, involving such work visits to minimize the bias in the expectations of engagement, so that participants can show unconscious reactions as much as possible, while maximizing the expression of social and cultural situations The group discussion uses a variety of immersive research tools to guide the unconscious reactions of participants. At the same time, by using abstract methods to express cognition, the participants are stimulated to think creatively. These cognitions are rooted in the participants' own culture and memories of emotional cognition, each operation will last 30 to 40 minutes, which will push the participants to continue to move forward and look forward to the next task, so that they always remain highly active. To reduce cognitive bias, participants should be held individually or in pairs before starting a group discussion, and creative workshops can be used for basic research to capture as many consumer thoughts and behaviors as possible in a short period of time. The same approach applies to innovative research, as its expressive technique allows us to understand the unconscious response of semiotic exploration to new concepts. Case: An entrepreneurship workshop for artisanal food. A foodservice company wanted to gain fundamental insight into the preferences of a new generation of consumers for artisanal foods as a basis for product and brand innovation. Etsy is the first online sales platform to promote handicrafts and has become the first choice for a new generation of consumers. Today's U.S. retailers, from full-time supermarkets to North Storm, generally put on the shelves some local handmade products, which represents a major cultural shift for brands from mass production to personalized selection. The strategy team has the existing data and hidden knowledge to show that the new generation of target consumers who eat out at least 5 times, they are moving away from fast casual restaurants, and instead with a clear purpose to find those nutritious foods, with humanity and sincere emotions of local consumption, the identification with craftsmanship has become the most prominent symbol of the new generation of food and beverage brands.
Our first step was to start a three-hour creative workshop to understand the scope of craftsmanship, before some consumers completed an online practice of symbol opposition, creating a puzzle of their own artisanal food impressions, listing which belonged to artisanal foods and which were not asked the same questions at the beginning of the creative workshop, asking them to come up with new product ideas and setting standards for this. Participants then worked in pairs to categorize and prioritize the new product ideas on the cards and come up with their favorite ideas. Brand design firms will summarize and enrich these ideas, design the appearance of the product, and then set up mini focus groups to discuss and further revise the brand concepts of these products before quantitative testing.
7. Expert Group
The expert group is one of the forms of consumer groups, which observe the performance of the consumer group in a room and can ask questions at any time. For these experts who work tight hours, this form of centralization is more efficient and, more importantly, the opinions of stakeholders can be collated and systematized. The case study below shows two different approaches. In the non-interventional approach, the expert observes the progress of the consumer group, organizes it immediately after the group's task is completed, and summarizes the results. The intervention approach begins with the synthesis of the strategy team's opinions as a script for the consumer group, so that the expert group's opinions can be unanimous. Case: Two ways to design expert groups. 1, non-interventional approach, for the purpose of integrating opinions, our customer is an imported car brand company, hope to target from two foreign markets, hope for the middle managers from two foreign markets to conduct an immersive study, so that they can ask their own desired questions to target consumers as much as possible. We recruited 8 young and conscious participants with our eyes 8 young and willing to buy sports cars, and before starting a full day of immersion studies, we asked them to complete some online surveys to reveal their lifestyles and preferences. At the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, I asked 20 experts to observe the entire group's operation, and 8 consumers discussed their lifestyles and preferences, which would affect their choice of automotive products, and answered questions from the product design team about future design concepts. The expert group is divided into several small teams and accompanies the participants individually on a test drive. Finally, the panel discussed what they saw and heard and summarized the day's harvest. These comments are helpful for customers to design the future of the U.S. market These opinions are very helpful for customers to design new sports cars that will be sold in the target market in the future. 2, the intervention method is to systematize the opinion, the customer is a fashion seller, they want the company's design and sales manager to listen to the voice of consumers about the core marketing strategy. That's why we design the event before the consumer can give an opinion. We first looked at the shopping environment in the mall and conducted interviews in the rooms in the store, and the strategy team spent a day distilling important knowledge and insights that they thought management should hear. Secondly, we invited some ladies to the hotel suite for afternoon tea, and during the 4-day discussion, the female participants spent an hour each day discussing key issues. We'll restate these questions that day, asking the ladies to tell us about their shopping experiences and telling us why they chose these products. Finally, these executives had afternoon tea with these ladies and customers, had an informal conversation, listened to what management wanted, and gathered opinions that would be used to help customers develop new sales and product strategies.
8. Online communities
Through a pair of online communities, a sample of consumers within a certain time frame can provide long-term feedback on marketing issues. Many organizations use online communities, from rapid testing of new packaging to joint research and development of new products. Case Study: Online Communities for Artisanal Foods In the first part of this case study, we developed a new product idea through a creative workshop, so the strategy team decided that they would further study the architecture of product positioning, and we re-recruited participants from the creative workshop and mini focus group to the online community for a 12-month study, during which a number of research projects, such as online ethnography studies, were conducted to understand the stickiness of the new generation to specially positioned artisanal food brands. Based on the R&D concept, we also collected a series of feedback recipes and tastes, preferences, product positioning elements such as personality, values, emotions and self-expression, as well as the stories behind them, to help complete the product packaging design and promotion. The advantage of using the same players is that they are already deeply involved in every aspect of product development and therefore have the most say. In addition, since we already know a little about these players, we can have a deeper understanding of the good and bad in consumer feedback on product ideas. After quantitative testing, through long-term online community research, a detailed product concept sample was finally formed. Summary 1: The core of the strategy learning journey. The strategy learning journey covers all forms of data that are available, but at its core is immersive consumer learning, which can deeply understand the consumer and understand how a particular product fits into the consumer's life. 2. Immersive research methods, ethnographic research in the field of business, including user research, online ethnography and electronic ethnography, in-depth interviews, focus groups, creative seminars, expert groups, online communities. In short, using an immersive research method can make the entire strategy team go deeper into the minds of consumers and understand what consumers are thinking. This is the practical basis for empathy brand marketing planning.
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