Disruptive Innovations take a wide lens
We’ve come to understand that a wider lens of people is needed to birth the next generation of innovations.
When I interviewed some of the leaders out of Fresno, CA about how they better understand their customers and what is going on out in the world that is relevant to them, they told me they utilise market research methods such as focus groups, surveys, and other forms of this type of research.
So I asked further, how do they look for unarticulated needs? How do they look beyond what people say and more at what they do?
The majority said that we have to go off of what the survey says and we have to expect people to be honest.
I also asked other questions such as what about the context of focus groups and surveys?
They explained that market research data from surveys and focus groups are not full proof but they do help validate.
We’d like to agree. Surveys and focus groups are good for evaluating attributes like what colour should the car be? What do you like better given a number of choices? It helps supplement preferential information.
But it isn’t a panacea.
“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
The Nobel Memorial Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman said this and it helps us better understand why we need to use other exploratory methods to come up with breakthrough insights.
You have to remember when someone fills out a survey or answers a question in a focus group it is from “the remembering self” not the experiencing self.
People, while around others, will usually try to tell you their ideals as a reality. We dig deeper with our experience in ethnographic and anthropologic interviews. We are able to use verbal and non verbal cues to better understand why they are saying things, then we validate what they’ve said with ethnography.
At ESP Collective we specialise in ethnography and human centred insights.
Ethnography is the naturalistic observation or study of how humans behave in their actual context. Stemming from anthropology it combines descriptive data recording and a meticulous analysis to give you a more complete snapshot of how people live and work, and utilise the objects in their lives.
This photo of a tiger in a cage can resemble how people feel in a focus group when searching for unexplored areas, it can be the wrong tool to use for the job, because if you want to understand how a tiger hunts you don’t put him in a cage and throw a bunny in. The conditions of that cage can be highly offset to their psychological state, and what is salient to them while in the cage can be misleading in the results you record from it because they are not in the context of “real hunting”. Therefore it’s getting a very partial view of the human experience.
We go where the action is.
By observing the tiger in context you have a much better chance of understanding the dynamics of it’s worldview. How social dynamics play a role, you are able to see the rituals and cultural behaviours that you would not see else where. This is the insightful data that you want to get.
This paired with contextual interviews and day in the life experiences with customers allows us to see what’s really going on within the complexity of people’s live.
Context is king. Context can elicit triggers that you just don’t get when you take them out of their context. Helping people see their memories more viscerally while allowing all of their senses to be engaged. The smells, the traffic, the cultural rhythm of the place. When we did a study in a sandwich restaurant, it was the sandwiches and the location that had triggered our participants to open up and tell us about their family, and how they’d been eating a certain type of sandwich since they were kids.
“2 pieces of ham, 1 piece of turkey, half a slice of cheese, because dad was not supposed to eat dairy but he did anyway as long as I didn’t tell mum.”
In this little insight, Cindy explains to us about her family and history of sandwiches.
We see a ritual (the same sandwich over and over again), a behaviour that goes against what he may have put down in a survey. You get the cognitive dissonance of the father by only having “half” a slice of cheese it is possible that he feels good or lowers the guilt of his decision. You understand that mum might be the leader of health and diets in the house. Now given our client was focused on health, we would dig deeper into why he hides it from her mum, how mum decides on what to buy and so on.
By understanding a community’s lifestyles, rules, rituals, culture, ideals, realities, we can better align products and services around their everyday behaviours that fulfil or seem to fulfil their needs. A large part of what we do is look for latent needs. Latent needs are the needs that cannot be easily found by just asking someone what they want. Because we are asking people to look into their unbearably complex minds for an answer, our neocortex handles the work of explaining a line of reasoning that might or might not be the underlying problem. We dig deeper in our insights to better understand what people mean when they say certain things. When I say “I want new shoes every 3 months”, it doesn’t have to mean that I literally want 3 shoes every month, we dig into why I want that many shoes every month, what are the social dynamics or physical issues that are driving that. Maybe he is investing in shoes that don’t last long. Or maybe it’s a symbol of status. We can only understand what he means by looking at the context around why.
We are experts in ethnography and design thinking, our team of social scientists allows us to help clients find those unmet needs in people’s lives while matching that to our clients core competencies, creating services that are aligned with human needs, and remapping the ideal customer journey through our clients touch points.
We believe that Fresno businesses will breakaway from the pack by investing in corporate ethnography and anthropology. It’s vital that businesses better understand their customers and context, to better service their needs and wants. The future is highly personalised, so the understanding continues to bring a great amount of business value to companies utilising these type of services.
We see companies such as P&G, Fannie Mae, GE, Windows, Wells Fargo, Petco, Ford, HP, Virgin, Redbox, NorthFace, Intel, Clark Realty Capital, Nemours Children’s Hospital, Walgreens, Converse, among others are using corporate ethnography and inherently anthropology to explore better innovations grounded in deep human understanding that we can deliver.
If you want to get people right, you have to open up the lens and take a wide angle view to get those details that will define the social, economical, and cultural makeup of a person’s life. It’s vital we understand the bigger picture to better create the products and services that will support that picture. It’s key we see the human experience in as pure a form as possible.
From here.
To here.
This is where our expertise differentiates us. Where other forms may be too zoomed in to see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Vuwxoet1fA
Where I work
global Social Scientist @ ESP Collective
Sociotechnical Researcher @ Aregacy Technology
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Currently doing research in Philadelphia, feel free to email me for tea if you are in the area!
