How Thick Data Gives Your Business a Competitive Edge
The year was 2009 and Nokia ethnographer, Tricia Wang, began to see a new trend emerge after years of conducting observational fieldwork in China.
In her research, she discovered that low-income consumers were ready to pay for more expensive smartphones, and promptly reported her findings back to Nokia.
But instead of heeding her advice and beginning to produce affordable smartphones for low-income users, they did what many companies often do when faced with a similar situation: they looked at their measurable datasets.
And the data wasn’t buying it.
In writing about her experience for Ethnography Matters, Wang attempted to explain that Nokia’s “notion of demand was a fixed quantitative model that didn’t map to how demand worked as a cultural model in China.”
In other words, they focused on what the numbers told them, and failed to see the larger picture in how consumer behavior was shifting. “What is measurable isn’t the same as what is valuable,” Wang concluded.
While relying on quantitative data wasn’t the only reason for the company’s eventual downfall — it ended up being just another nail in the coffin. Nokia went from being a dominant leader as a mobile phone maker to having only three percent of the global smartphone…
