Ethnographic Segmentation in Market Research (III of III)

Toward Ethnographic (Contextual) Segments
Too often, the client's segmentation scheme reflect normalized abstractions rather than the evolving needs, tastes, and practices of real people.

For our India mobile phone client we proposed a rather different model.

At the end of the day, we wanted more time in the field than the client was willing to support (at least this time). But we think it would have been time well spent.

We suggested that our team identify ethnographic segments, drawn from observed patterns of practice and meaning within a particular strategic domain--in this case, the strategic domain was “basic” phone users (people who are buying inexpensive phones). We use male or female gender as a major sub-segment because of the continued importance of gender in structuring consumption in India and elsewhere.

Our ethnographic research--observation and secondary contextual research supporting user interviews and participant observation--was designed to identify patterns within a gendered basic-user target. Ethnographic segments would be identified on the ground, not pre-selected from a quantitatively derived market segment as is usually the case. (And as the client really seemed to want.) The contexts of use for both men and women within these segments would add a real-life dimension to our presentation to marketers and designers.

Using ethnographic segmentation (it might be more clear to simply call it segmentation by contexts, but what the heck) would help product design and marketing by discovering patterns within segments that are not static but can be dynamic and context-sensitive. Strategic decisions in our proposal would have focused on two or three broad cultural contexts of use, or to might have included include additional fine-grained contexts. We provided our client with this visual model of what we were trying to convey (Figure 1, above).

(Our prior work in India had suggested that day-parts and days of the week might have been important. Thus, within general culturally recognized use contexts, we might have paid attention to day of the week and time of day, something like 'Taking and making a business call during the day on Saturday' or 'Hanging out with phone in hand at a teashop' might have been our fine-grained contexts. These were examples we gave to the client, but only the fieldwork could have determine how useful these--or others we might have discovered--might have been.)

The moral(s) of all this is, or are:

• Design researchers don't sample only individual people. They sample contexts and people, both.
• Design researchers try to determine the range of contexts in which things are happening, in which products are used, or related needs or activities take place. Sample there.

Within these contexts, anthropologically-leaning design researchers find out what the meaningful sorts of people are who are part of the world in which these goings on are happening.

It makes sense, then to think about people after you have determined where you are going to go, which contexts you want to visit, and, in consultation with your client, which contexts will be the most strategic for the organization to understand and design around.

It isn't people alone. Its people and contexts that provide the meaning behind people's actions and desires.

Designers want meaningful scenarios that are rich in the local complexities of daily life, the complexities that people take into consideration when they decide to do this or that, to organize their lives or their thinking in one way or another, or even to buy a new ring-tone for their mobile phone or not.

Ethnographic Segmentation in Market Research (II of III)

Theoretical Sampling

Theoretical sampling often seeks maximum variation rather than a "representative" slice of reality (Miles and Huberman 1994).

In other words, anthropologists (or any ethnographers, really) are interested in the systematic study of the contexts surrounding a particular consumer product or business practice. They want to flesh out the real-life meanings behind product choice, purchase, and use.
What is this meaning business, anyway?

Its more than words. Just ask a surrealist. (Or Foucault.)

Linguists, who are supposed to know something about meaning, are often asked to explain how one knows what a word means. Usually, their answer is that to understand what a word means, one should see how the word is used in ordinary speech (Ogden and Richards 1952). Understanding the context in which a word is used (and the contexts in which it may not be used) is the key to understanding its meaning(s). The same is true of IT products and services like mobile phones in India. Mobile phones are part of multiple contexts--home, work, family, street, train, and so on. And as they move from pre-sale to sale to delivery to use in a variety of contexts, and, finally, to disposal (or resale), what they mean and how they are used changes quite a bit.

To understand the range of meanings mobile phones may have for Indian people, or for any kind of people, you have to see them used in context.

If anthropologists find meaning in the contexts that surround what people do then why would the individual person be the unit of measurement around which to build a sampling design? Clients may ask, "How many people will you observe? What kinds of sampling frame will you design, and what kinds of people will fit into that frame?" Our answer is often "We don't know." That is hardly a satisfactory answer when one is trying to win a research contract.

Other Problems
So there is trouble in the sort of means-based statistical clustering used for determining market segments and, likewise, trouble in many client's expectations around sampling. The first kind of trouble lies in the selection of questions or question categories for the initial segmentation questionnaire. How can you know that the questions the client used were the right questions to ask? How did the client determine which dimensions of taste or practice to include or exclude, and what did they overlook completely?

The next trouble comes in selecting the factors for clustering. Which were the most significant? Usually they use those that are most significant in statistical teams but is a statistical norm--taken as a moment in time--the most strategic element to select from a moving target like the evolving use patterns surrounding mobile phones in India? Does the norm include the tail ends of the curve--the outliers, the users on the edges of the normal pattern? If the pattern is put into motion through time, the users at the edges--early adopters and adaptors--then the users--and contexts that surround--them who are at the edges of the normal curve most certainly should be included in design research.

Next: Toward Ethnographic (contextual) segmentation.

Works Cited Part II
Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman.
1994 Qualitative Data Analysis: An expanded Sourcebook. 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Ethnographic Segmentation in Design Research (I of III)

Sampling in Design Research: Toward Ethnographic Segments

What people say and what they end up doing is different. It’s not just important to speak to them but you got to spend a day in the life of the customer and observe them.” For understanding the customer better, Jain suggests new methods such as ethnographic studies and tools like calculating customer lifecycle value. — Dipayan Baishya, THE ECONOMIC TIMES (India), July 2005.

Anthropological research teams are more and more often called upon to produce research results for design teams. Usually, the team has to devise some sort of formal research plan for the client. And often, the client is working from a segmentation scheme derived from traditional, questionnaire-based quantitative research. These schemes are usually based on questions that make sense--strategic sense--to the client. Sometimes they reflect the ways that consumers or end-users actually organize themselves. But more often than not, they miss important kinds of variation.

We were working, recently, for a client like this. Actually, we were almost working for them. (They did not accept our bid.) They had a segmentation scheme that they used for their global mobile-phone marketing and design. They wanted to know more about the Indian market. And they wanted us to build our proposal around their segmentation scheme. While we not win the contract, we used the bidding opportunity to think a bit about why we were not happy with traditional segmentation schemes.

Traditional segmentation schemes are means-based, and like other means-based approaches (see Maltz 1994), they don't do a good job of providing the contextual data that help designers imagine design scenarios. And because they are based on what people say, they may be based on lies that people are telling, as Professor Jain suggests in the quotation above.
A psychologists might draw a sample of individual product users or buyers, and study patterns in individual desires, attitudes, values or behaviors about a product. An anthropologist would discover the range of contexts in which groups of people learn about, acquire, transport, store, exchange, use, and talk about a product. Its a significant different.

And more than that: an anthropologist would want to participate as much as possible in product use, and interview the people using it. That approach calls for a rather different kind of sampling. It calls for theoretical sampling.

Stay tuned!

Works Cited Part I
Maltz, Michael
1994 Deviating from the Mean: The Declining Significance of Significance. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31(4):434-463.