Finding The Right Audience For Ethnographies

Entertainment space built by homeowner to have a place for family and friends to gather. It had become the place for his daughter and her friends to spend time.

Your client wants to conduct ethnographic research. You have given them the confidence that people are going to let you into their lives allowing you to discover the undiscoverable. But now they want to know how you can ensure you are talking to the right people.

For any successful qualitative research, this is the critical question, and here are some steps you can follow to make sure you have the best interviews possible.

Step 1: Define your audience

Step 2: Recruit through the right screener

Step 3: Interview before the interview

DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE

Start with defining your audience. This is not just choosing the right demographics. It is about honing in on what you want to learn and who you want to learn about.

Here are some sample questions to get clients and researchers on the same page regarding the goals of the research. The answers to these questions will help define who you should be recruiting for your research study.

• Do you want to know more about your best customers to understand what makes them tick?

• Do you want to know about your competitor’s customers to identify opportunities to get them to try your brand?

• Are you looking to better understand a specific audience segment identified from a segmentation study?

• For consumer package goods, are you trying to get a richer understanding of category users (high CDI) in a low brand user market (low BDI)?

• For new products or disrupting products, do you want to understand how your product may fit in someone’s life and what it will take to change inertia?

• What do you want to observe?

You can also look at it from a different perspective – what questions can’t you confidently answer. What do you want to know more about? Who do you want to know more about?

Research is a big expense so you want to make sure you get the most out of it. Taking time to define who you want to learn from will ensure that.

The other two steps are a bit more involved and we will cover them in future posts, but this is a great initial conversation.