Why ethnography matters for B2B
In a world where digital insights are so readily available do we really need ethnographic research? We caught up with Breaking Blue’s Kate Anderson to discuss why it matters more than ever.
As a leading B2B creative agency, gyro focuses on bringing human relevance into B2B marketing — we create ideas that connect with people on an emotional level and spur them into action.
In B2B, the brands we work with operate in highly complex markets and often need to engage an extremely diverse range of influencers and decision-makers. Our approach to developing solid strategies that underpin humanly relevant creative, requires us to mine insights on the needs, motivations and pain points of these diverse audiences.
Our strategists use a host of quantitative and qualitative research techniques to do this, which is why we were particularly interested in research agency Breaking Blue’s perspective on B2B ethnography.
We caught up with the company’s joint Managing Director, Kate Anderson, to hear more about why this research practice — essentially observing audiences in their work environment — can be invaluable for B2B marketers.
Why should B2B brands be using B2B ethnography?
As B2B marketers, we all understand that the route to success lies in designing and delivering products or services that meet end users’ needs. We need to identify these needs, understand the business benefits of meeting them and find the most effective way to communicate this to buyers, who of course typically aren’t the end user, and to channel partners too.
With the complexity of B2B value chains, we’re often far removed from this end user commercially, geographically and culturally — sitting at a desk in your marketing department you are a world apart from a welder in Northern Spain or a sole trader in India for example. So how can we begin to imagine the day-to-day lives of end customers unless we’ve actually seen it with our own eyes?
Approximations and assumptions are dangerous short cuts here — there are often general market reports out there, but is this really specific and sensitive enough when it really matters to your business? If we use guesswork we create products or services that only work on a superficial basis. Whereas, if we understand the human element and the processes an end user has to go through, we are much more likely to be able to create powerful products and messaging that people want to buy.
Why is ethnography preferable to other research techniques? Surveys for example?
We do a lot of structured surveys. These provide us with a vital understanding of market opportunities, market size, patterns in the customer base etc., but they don’t provide the granularity that you need to design a product to truly meet customer needs or to message something effectively. In surveys, people edit out the messy bits, the little workarounds they do 100 times a day to compensate for the faults in the products and services we provide. But that’s precisely where the really exciting insights lie that can give you the inside track.
Only through ethnography — by getting up close with end users and observing their workflows, the tasks they have to go through each day, their interactions with others, their daily habits and what role different products and services have within their environment, can we identify those critical unmet needs and pain points that are invaluable to design and creative teams.
Is ethnography a long-term undertaking?
Ethnography, with its roots in anthropology sounds onerous to the uninitiated — it conjures to mind studies lasting months and years with painstaking documentation. It sounds like it has no place in business or in the B2B world.
Marketers shouldn’t be put off. In order to get up close to how products and services are being used, you don’t need to painstakingly document a workers’ every thought and move — you just need to get closer to them and their work to understand what will work and why.
And we’re also not talking about pure ethnography, observing silently and at length to make sure we capture every scenario — we’re really talking about ethnographic interviewing: lots of observation and some direct questioning to shortcut to the context and also to explain what we’re seeing — why this is happening.
What does an ethnography programme typically look like?
The scale and structure of your programme really needs to be designed around your objectives and the structure of your market, and it’s also worth bearing in mind that not all ethnography requires the ethnographer to be present in person at the time.
Much is done real-time and in person — the most traditional method involves site visits and tours, getting up close with workers and observing them at their workstations. Whether in blue-collar environments (we recently donned our steel toe-capped boots and hard hats to observe workers in intense industrial environments), or in white-collar situations (such as watching SMEs completing online forms for a financial services product), ethnography provides genuine insight from the coalface.
But we also use a lot of webnography in which we ask customers to take photos/upload videos to our portal. When we’re trying to capture exceptional or unpredictable events such as an emergency repair, or the moment in a 6-month period when some subtle factor suddenly spurs an employer to pick a pension provider, it’s hard to schedule a visit for the right time. With webnography we can be there in the heat of the moment, whenever that is.
What advice would you give to marketers and agencies looking to start the process?
Some key tips to help you get the most out of ethnography include:
1) Find expert and confident recruiters — if they don’t believe it can be done, then the customer won’t either
2) Consider what’s in it for your subjects — can you share some insight with them afterwards to help them improve their operations for example?
3) Use video playback to help subjects talk through what they’re doing — by freezing and focusing on inadvertent actions, we can learn so much more.
You can visit Breaking Blue’s website here and gyro’s website here.
