For many ethnographic projects, we also include specific methodological and interpretive exercises that complement and enhance the insights generated from the core contextual interviews and observations.
Projective Workbooks – Projective workbooks not only help in discovering consumers' unconscious, non-linear, and emotional associations to brands, products, and services, but they also are important tools for explicating certain consumer needs that may otherwise resist articulation. Because the respondents complete their projective workbooks prior to the ethnographer's arrival to conduct fieldwork, the exercises are a useful way of "warming up" respondents—prompting them to reflect on key research topics in ways that lead to more thoughtful feedback during the ethnographic research that follows.
Experience Journals – Experience journals provide a critical sense of how specific brands, products, and services fit into the daily and weekly rhythms of consumers' lives. Although ethnographic interviews and observations typically are longer in duration than other qualitative interviews, they still only provide direct access to a certain slice in time of the consumers' lives. When consumers document their activities, thoughts, and moods in experience journals, these data help to contextualize the ethnographic research findings over longer time periods. Data from the experience journals also can reveal patterns that immediately precede (triggers) or impede (obstacles) consumer purchasing decisions.
Narrative Inquiry – Consumers commonly process information about their world, as well as endow it with meaning, through narrative constructs or stories. Brand stories gain a certain directive force as consumers integrate brands into conceptualizations of their own social identities—who they are and how they came to be that way. Thus, narrative inquiry, eliciting and interpreting consumer stories, is a critical component of any ethnographic project.
Consumer Taxonomies – Consumer taxonomies, or classification systems, expose how customers conceptually slice up particular product and service areas. Identifying how people intuitively organize those areas in their minds, as well as pinpointing where a particular brand fits within that framework, has substantial explanatory power for understanding consumer experiences. In delineating these taxonomies, we often integrate certain exercises, such as pile sorting and frame elicitation, into our ethnographic projects. |
