Ethnographic stories offer executives an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and play through gritty and detailed descriptions. What you learn from ethnographic stories may surprise you — and change your company’s strategy.
The data from the rollout of the new Mustang confused Ford executives.
After a redesigned Ford Mustang was released in the late 1990s, consumers reported finding the new car less powerful than previous incarnations. That feedback troubled Ford engineers, because the iconic vehicle’s power was objectively higher in this version than in earlier models.
To find out what was going on, Ford dispatched a team from a consulting company to ride along as Mustang owners drove their new cars. From their interviews and observations, the ethnographers — a team of social scientists dedicated to studying people in their natural environments — concluded that power was something drivers experienced viscerally. They sensed it bodily when in contact with the car’s vibrations while they drove. They absorbed it audibly when exposed to the “voice box” of the car’s engine. And they grasped it visually when their eyes took in the Mustang’s look. The ethnographers concluded that car performance was fundamentally a sensory, bodily experience rather than just a set of horsepower statistics.
In light of that information, Ford engineers literally returned to the drawing board. They refashioned the exterior styling of the car so that it “looked fast,” making the new Mustang much more like the iconic models of the 1960s. As Ford Design California chief Richard Hutting said of the redesigned car, “This vehicle has that sense of motion, even when it’s standing still. It captures your eye from 50 feet away — it’s instantly recognizable as a Mustang.”1
Furthermore, ethnographic observations eased the Ford marketing team’s fears that an aging target market was diluting the brand’s equity. The ethnographers discovered that the Mustang, as much as it was a fantastic set of wheels, also fueled fantasies of youth. No matter how old they were, the car’s buyers desired the same thing: the feelings of youth, irresponsibility and assertiveness that the original Mustang delivered. Driving and owning a Mustang gave baby boomers, a core market segment squeezed between work and family commitments, an emotional high. A Mustang was often the only irresponsible pleasure they allowed themselves. This insight allowed Ford to embrace the brand’s heritage and nostalgia rather than “modernizing” it.
As a result, the marketing team’s new brand strategy cut straight to the heart of baby boomer nostalgia for the era of their youth. They started using images of the Hollywood movie star Steve McQueen — who had died nearly two decades earlier, in 1980 — to revisit the Mustang’s history when he was “King of Cool” and baby boomers, like him, were young and restless.
The Mustang example is far from unique. Our research across a variety of companies shows that ethnography — artful in situ investigation into what customers do and feel and how they talk about what they do and feel — is a powerful tool to gain insights into your market. These insights typically emerge through collaborative sessions involving ethnographers and management team members. This collaboration gives rise to cross-functional conversations about customers and the company’s role in providing platforms for value creation. Such sense-making conversations are a necessary precursor to transformative strategic actions.
Ethnography in the Corporate World
Ethnography has often been portrayed as a “fly on the wall” technique, with anthropologists lurking in people’s homes to observe consumers’ unadulterated lives.2 This prevailing description does justice neither to the way ethnography actually works in the corporate world nor to ethnography’s increasingly important role in formulating business strategy.
To arrive at a more in-depth understanding of how corporations use ethnography to their advantage, we conducted extensive interviews with executives in various industries worldwide. (See “About the Research” for a description of the project.) Our findings suggest that ethnographic storytelling — the crafting of stories that takes place after an ethnographer’s immersion in the field — can be indispensable not only to a company’s consumer research function but also in changing the company’s strategic direction, as the Mustang story shows.
Where data analytics and surveys provide flattened snapshots, ethnography contributes an empathic understanding of how consumers live, work and play through gritty and detailed descriptions. Ethnographic stories map customer experience in evocative detail, including aspects of experience that elude the behavioral screens provided by sales data or the inevitable, memory-based biases in survey results. In effect, ethnography illuminates the evolving and kaleidoscopic nature of consumer culture.
Ethnography can also stimulate new strategic directions. Through its attention to the minute details of people’s lives, ethnography can reveal new market opportunities and serve as a catalyst for organizational innovation. Like all good stories, good ethnographic stories can be transformational and inspirational.
Business leaders who are frustrated with research results that fail to stimulate or surprise their teams may respond to ethnography’s empathic wattage.3 For when constructed as powerful stories from the outset, ethnographies engage executives in the worlds of customers and the conundrums they face. These moments of identification are pivotal in spurring corporate creativity by connecting what is meaningful to people with business strategy.
Ethnographic Stories and Consumer Experience
Ethnographic stories are narratives about people’s lives that ethnographers compose from field experience. Whether conveyed in video format, presentations or reports, they describe how people confront and surmount the hurdles they encounter in meeting their responsibilities and fulfilling their hopes in our globalized consumer culture.
For example, only a few years ago, the corporate view of retirement planning at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank tended to focus on dollars and cents — how much an individual needed to invest, by when and for how many years. While ostensibly prudent, this view did not account for context. It overlooked both what are now recognized as routine hazards — unexpected layoffs, industry sea changes, health crises and divorce — as well as economic and cultural factors affecting the U.S. baby boomer generation and its relationship to money. These factors include the disappearance of many corporate pensions, the gap between Social Security benefits and the cost of funding the kind of retirement that boomers want and the rise of self-funded and self-managed investment vehicles such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts. Most self-directed investment vehicles and products, such as IRA accounts and mutual funds, were invented during the last 40 years, highlighting the seismic changes in the financial services landscape that baby boomers have had to navigate.
As part of an ethnographic project commissioned by the bank, researchers had customers walk through a life timeline and recount activities they engaged in that related to retirement planning in each decade of their lives — their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond. The stories revealed that baby boomers were caught between the past and the future. Aging and retirement represented not a simple matter of growing old and kicking up their feet but rather a complex phenomenon of continually negotiated personal travails and marketplace dynamics. The baby boomers had no sooner hit their 30s than they were confronted with an unfamiliar and profound shift in temporal orientation. They were suddenly expected to think decades into the future in preparation for retirement. And while subsequent generations were more versed in the retirement concept, they also had to ready themselves for the financial challenges of investing enough for the far-off future while working toward near-term goals of paying off debt, buying a home and attending to current financial obligations.
The Wells Fargo team combined ethnographic stories from the field to develop a behavior-based segmentation that divided retirement approaches into three primary modes — Reactor, Pooler and Maximizer — that reflected how people felt about and addressed retirement planning. (See “Three Approaches to Retirement Planning.”) Compiling and sharing these stories transformed Wells Fargo’s sense of the retirement planning market.