When customers make a decision, they make it in the world they live in. They make them in supermarket aisles, on websites, at kitchen tables, on the way to work, while talking to family members, and often while juggling several other priorities. They make decisions within a context.
Context matters because what people say they do can differ significantly from what they actually do.
Ethnographic market research helps businesses close this gap.
By observing customers and communities in the environments where decisions and behaviours naturally occur, ethnography can uncover influences, frustrations and unmet needs that people may not even realise are shaping their behaviour.
For businesses, this can lead to better products, services, customer experiences, communications and innovation. For local government and public-sector organisations, it can provide a richer understanding of how people experience services, places and systems in everyday life.
At Eris Strategy, we use ethnography to understand consumers when the context around their behaviour is critical to the decisions people make and how they behave. Importantly, we do not see ethnography as a substitute for other market research methods. It is often most powerful when combined with interviews, focus groups, customer journey research and quantitative surveys to move from observing what happens and how often, to understanding why it happens.
What is ethnography?
Ethnography is a research approach originally developed within anthropology to understand people, cultures and social behaviour through observation and immersion in real-life settings.
Rather than relying exclusively on people to recall and explain their behaviour, an ethnographer studies what people actually do, the environment in which they do it, the people and systems they interact with, and the meaning they attach to those experiences.
In traditional academic research, ethnography could involve researchers spending months or even years within a community. Market research usually applies the same principles in a much more focused, with less time and in a commercially practical way.
A market research ethnography may follow a customer through a purchase journey, observe how a household uses a product, examine how employees and customers interact during a service experience, ask participants to document their behaviour through a mobile diary, or investigate how residents interact with a council service or public place.
The central principle remains the same:
To understand behaviour properly, you need to understand the context in which that behaviour occurs.
What is ethnographic market research?
Ethnographic market research applies ethnographic techniques to commercial, customer and community research questions.
It goes beyond asking customers what they think about a product or service by examining how people behave in their normal environment and investigating the circumstances surrounding their decisions when they make them.
For example, instead of only asking someone how they choose a product in a focus group, ethnographic research might follow their complete journey: when the need arises, how they search for information, who they speak to, what they notice in-store or online, what they ignore, what trade-offs they make, what they buy and what happens when they eventually use the product.
Consumers are not deliberately misleading researchers when their reported behaviour differs from their actual behaviour. A lot of behaviour is habitual, influenced by context or undertaken with limited conscious consideration, and not something consumers think they will need to remember when later asked.
Human decision-making is complex. Even simple choices can involve many factors that shape the final decision. Factors such as physical surroundings, packaging, online interfaces, family members, social expectations, time pressure, previous experience and organisational processes can all influence behaviour without being particularly easy for someone to identify in an interview.
Ethnography helps bring those influences into view.
This is one reason ethnographic research has been used in strategy and innovation for many years. Harvard Business Review has highlighted the contribution ethnographic research can make to strategic decision-making by helping organisations identify customer needs and opportunities that conventional business analysis may overlook. Marketing Week has similarly explored how ethnographic techniques can provide deeper consumer understanding by studying consumers in context.
Ethnography vs focus groups: what is the difference?
Focus groups and ethnography answer different questions.
| Ethnography | Focus groups | |
| Primary purpose | Understand behaviour in context | Explore attitudes, perceptions and reactions |
| Research setting | Real or closely connected to real-life environments | Moderated group environment |
| Best at uncovering | Behaviour, context, routines, workarounds and unrecognised influences | Language, beliefs, attitudes, social discussion and reactions to ideas |
| Typical participant role | Doing, demonstrating and documenting | Discussing, explaining and evaluating |
| Key strength | Reveals what happens in practice | Efficiently explores multiple perspectives and stimulates discussion |
| Potential limitation | More time-intensive and usually involves smaller samples | Relies more heavily on recall and self-reported behaviour |
A focus group can show how consumers describe a category, what language they use, and how they react to a potential proposition. Ethnography can reveal how the category actually fits into their lives.
Ethnography is often used alongside other market research.
How can ethnography be combined with other market research?
Some of the strongest research programmes use ethnography as one stage of a broader research design.
Ethnography and in-depth interviews
Interviews help researchers explore the meaning behind observed behaviour.
For example, someone may demonstrate a workaround while completing an online application. Observing the workaround tells us what happens. Discussing it immediately afterwards can help us understand why.
This combination is particularly useful for customer journeys, service design and complicated purchasing processes.
Ethnography and focus groups
Ethnography can identify emerging needs, behaviours, and tensions that researchers then explore with a broader range of participants through focus groups.
Alternatively, focus groups may identify hypotheses that researchers then investigate through ethnographic observation.
This can prevent businesses from developing strategies based solely on what sounds plausible in a discussion room.
Ethnography and quantitative surveys
Ethnographic research is generally designed to produce depth rather than statistical representation.
A survey can therefore provide the logical next step.
Ethnography may discover that customers repeatedly encounter a particular problem or behave in an unexpected way. Quantitative research can then establish how common the behaviour is, which customer segments experience it and how strongly it influences outcomes such as purchase, satisfaction or switching.
Used together, the methods can answer three valuable questions:
- What is happening?
- Why is it happening?
- How widespread is it?
That combination can create a much stronger foundation for commercial decision-making.
What types of projects can use ethnographic market research?
Ethnography can be valuable whenever an organisation needs to understand behaviour rather than attitudes alone.
For consumer goods businesses, it can help investigate shopping behaviour, category decision-making, product usage, packaging, product innovation, switching, customer journeys and occasions of use.
For service businesses, ethnographic techniques can uncover friction across customer journeys, reveal how customers navigate processes, identify avoidable service contacts, investigate digital experiences and show how front-line staff and customers interact.
For B2B organisations, researchers can observe how products, technology and processes fit into employees’ working environments and where formal procedures differ from what happens in practice.
Ethnography can also be highly valuable for local government. Observational and contextual research can help councils understand how residents experience community facilities, waste services, transport, libraries, parks, digital services, customer service channels and other public services.
It can be particularly useful when designing services for groups whose experiences are not captured well through conventional consultation alone, like people with disabilities or different language and cultural groups.
Ethnography in a local government setting can help understand why services are not adopted or used in ways that create costs for the council.
Why use ethnography in market research?
The main advantage of ethnographic research is not simply that researchers observe customers. Its value comes from being able to see behaviour, environment and decision-making together.
Reason 1: It uncovers needs customers may not articulate
Customers are usually very good at describing obvious frustrations. They are less likely to identify both the behaviours and their causes they take for granted.
A customer may have created a complicated workaround and no longer perceive it as a problem. Observing the behaviour can reveal an innovation opportunity that asking “What would you improve?” never uncovers.
Reason 2: It reveals the context behind customer behaviour
People make decisions within physical, social, cultural and organisational environments. Ethnography can reveal how those environments shape behaviour.
In retail, this could include shelf position, adjacencies, signage or embarrassment about being seen purchasing a product.
For financial services, behaviour may be influenced by documentation, brokers, partners, time pressure and uncertainty.
For local government, accessibility, physical infrastructure, signage, technology, family circumstances, interactions with others or previous interactions with government may change how a service is experienced.
Reason 3: It reduces reliance on memory
Traditional interviews frequently require people to reconstruct previous decisions.
Memory is imperfect, particularly for routine behaviour.
Mobile and diary ethnography allow researchers to collect information much closer to the moment when something happens. Participants can document an experience using photographs, video, screen recordings or written observations, and researchers can follow up while the experience is still fresh.
Reason 4: It identifies the gap between intended and actual customer journeys
Customers do not have a clearly documented process.
They may skip stages, repeat steps, use unofficial information sources, switch channels, ask family members for help or contact customer service simply because they are uncertain about what happens next.
Ethnography can uncover the actual journey, not the simple stages business and governments think they use.
Reason 5: It can uncover innovation opportunities
Observing compromises and workarounds can be particularly valuable for product and service innovation.
- Where are customers modifying a product?
- What jobs are they trying to accomplish with something designed for another purpose?
- What creates unnecessary effort?
- What needs are poorly served by existing products?
These behaviours can provide a stronger starting point for innovation than simply asking customers to invent new products themselves.
Eris Strategy case study: Family planning — understanding a sensitive customer journey
A family planning client was experiencing declining sales and loss of shelf space and wanted to identify opportunities to reinvigorate the category.
The challenge was considerably more complex than understanding attitudes towards an individual product. The client needed to understand the journey from pregnancy prevention through pregnancy planning, ovulation testing and pregnancy testing, including how decisions were influenced by retail environments and different stages of women’s lives.
Ethnography was particularly appropriate because these decisions were shaped by social judgement, interactions with other people, sensitive personal circumstances, and the physical retail environment. Some influences were also unlikely to emerge through direct questioning alone.
Eris Strategy recruited 32 women across different stages of the family planning journey, from women intending to plan a pregnancy in the future through to pregnancy.
Initial personal interviews established each participant’s circumstances and attitudes. Participants then documented their journeys as they researched, considered, purchased and used products across different retail channels. They captured photographs and video and responded to research questions throughout the process.
The research revealed, among other findings, that merchandising family planning products alongside sexual wellbeing products was inhibiting and shaping customer choices.
The resulting recommendations included moving products towards the feminine care area, increasing training and communication for pharmacy assistants and developing packaging that more clearly explained product usage rather than relying predominantly on marketing language.
The research also helped identify potential new products for further research and development.
Eris Strategy case study: Beauty care and hair removal — moving beyond category clichés
A beauty and hair removal client faced a different problem.
Sales were stable, but the business wanted to generate growth through stronger marketing, new products and new customer segments.
Previous focus group research had produced limited new insight. Participants discussed familiar category themes and repeated established language, but the findings revealed no compelling new opportunity.
Eris Strategy therefore used mobile and diary ethnography with 25 women and men using hair removal products.
Participants documented their normal purchasing and usage behaviour and subsequently switched to a different product or brand. They photographed their shopping experiences, recorded how they searched online, and documented product use. Interviews at key moments allowed the research team to investigate decisions while the experiences were still recent.
The research changed the client’s understanding of the category.
Rather than viewing hair removal primarily through the established lens of summer, fashion, and beauty, the research showed how hair removal connected to different stages of people’s lives, as well as more personal aspirations and anxieties as they aged.
Those insights informed communications designed to reduce the category’s seasonality and helped identify opportunities for products targeting areas of the body where existing solutions were difficult to use.
Ethnography can help clients see the category differently.
Eris Strategy case study: Mortgages — identifying friction across a complex service journey
One Eris Strategy financial services client was experiencing growth in mortgage sales alongside an increasing number of customer complaints. The resulting customer contacts were creating additional pressure and cost within call centres.
Generic feedback said customers found the process difficult but offered little guidance on what needed to change.
A mortgage application takes weeks, not minutes. It involves multiple organisations, people, documents and decisions. Asking customers to reconstruct the entire experience afterwards risked losing the details that actually created confusion.
Eris Strategy recruited customers as they began their mortgage journey and followed them through the process to final choice and delivery.
Researchers observed participants opening and completing documentation, reviewed previous communications, and explored questions and difficulties as they arose. Interviews with mortgage brokers and front-line staff provided another perspective on the journey and the problems customers repeatedly brought to them.
The research highlighted the importance of clear signposting of where customers needed to provide information, why and what other documents they will also need to provide. Giving customers greater visibility and control.
Recommendations included clearly signposting what was required at each stage, explaining why information was needed and what would happen next, providing a visual overview of the complete process and increasing pre-population and automation to reduce customer effort and mistakes.
After these process improvements, customer support calls decreased significantly, helping increase capacity as the business grew. Our use of ethnography illustrates how it can find the operational consequences of customer uncertainty and remove them at their source.
What ethnographic research methods are used in market research?
Modern commercial ethnography is far more flexible than the stereotype of a researcher spending months living within a community. Depending on the research question, Eris Strategy has used different approaches.
Contextual observation involves observing customers while they perform relevant activities in environments such as homes, workplaces, stores or service locations.
Accompanied shopping or shop-alongs allow researchers to follow customers while they navigate a retail environment, investigate options and make choices.
Mobile ethnography enables participants to document experiences through smartphones using photographs, videos, voice notes and written responses. It is particularly useful when experiences occur over time or across different locations.
Diary studies ask participants to record experiences over days or weeks, allowing researchers to understand journeys, routines, triggers and changes rather than examining a single moment.
Digital ethnography investigates how people behave within websites, apps, online communities or other digital environments. Screen recordings and task-based observation can help researchers identify friction that users may struggle to describe afterwards.
In-home or in-context interviews combine observation with questioning, allowing participants to show researchers products, processes, environments and behaviours rather than relying exclusively on description.
Journey ethnography follows participants across multiple stages of an extended experience such as purchasing a home, changing an essential service, managing a health-related category or applying for a government service.
Front-line and stakeholder ethnography examines the experience from multiple perspectives. Customers may be observed alongside employees, intermediaries or service providers to identify where systems create problems for everyone involved.
The right method depends on the business decision rather than the attraction of the technique itself.
What is the process for an ethnographic market research project?
A well-designed ethnographic project starts with a decision, not a method.
Define the business question
We first establish what the organisation needs to decide.
A broad question such as “How do customers use our product?” may be interesting but insufficiently specific.
A stronger question might be:
“How could we redesign the purchase and usage experience to remove barriers, increase confidence and identify opportunities for innovation?”
This clarity shapes everything that follows.
Develop the research framework
We identify the behaviours, environments, moments and participant groups most important to understand.
The framework also determines whether the research needs to capture a single event or follow participants over an extended journey.
At this stage, Eris Strategy considers what should be observed directly, what should be discussed with participants and what other evidence is needed to interpret behaviour.
In creating the research framework, activities and prompts are considered to have participants perform the tasks and make the decisions that are the focus of the study.
Recruit participants and design fieldwork
Ethnographic recruitment generally requires more than finding people who meet demographic criteria.
Participants need to represent relevant behaviours, situations, life stages, customer types or service experiences.
For some projects, unusual or extreme users are especially informative because their circumstances expose weaknesses and opportunities that are less visible among average users.
Conduct fieldwork
Fieldwork may involve direct observation, mobile diaries, photographs, videos, contextual interviews, accompanied journeys or a combination of techniques.
Our researchers remain systematic while also being alert to unexpected behaviour.
One of ethnography’s strengths is its ability to investigate things the research team did not know to ask about at the start.
Analyse behaviour and context
Ethnographic analysis is more than summarising interviews. We use a technique called grounded theory to code and analyse results. An approach that develops and tests interpretation of observations.
Our researchers examine patterns across behaviours, environments, workarounds, language, decision points, emotional responses and interactions with other people or systems.
We distinguish between isolated observations and patterns that have implications for the organisation.
Translate findings into action
Eris Strategy connects ethnographic findings back to the decisions the organisation needs to make.
Depending on the project, this may include customer journey redesign, new product opportunities, service improvements, proposition development, communications, packaging recommendations, customer segmentation hypotheses or priorities for further quantitative testing.
Translating human behaviour into practical business action is a critical part of the process.
How long does ethnographic market research take?
Timings depend on the complexity of the behaviour being researched.
A relatively focused project using mobile ethnography around a purchase or product usage occasion can sometimes be completed in approximately four to six weeks.
Projects that follow longer customer journeys or involve multiple participant groups commonly require around six to eight weeks.
More complex programmes, particularly those following behaviours that naturally occur over several weeks or involving multiple locations and stakeholder groups, may require eight to twelve weeks or longer.
A typical project may involve about one week to finalise the research design, one to two weeks for recruitment and preparation, one to three weeks of fieldwork, and one to two weeks for analysis, synthesis, and recommendations. Some stages can overlap.
What are the limitations of ethnographic research?
Ethnography is powerful, but it is not the right method for every research question.
Samples tend to be smaller than quantitative studies, so findings should not automatically be treated as statistically representative of a whole market.
Fieldwork and analysis can also require more time and researcher involvement than conventional interviews, particularly when participants are followed across complex journeys.
Observation can sometimes influence behaviour, although careful research design, repeated contact and remote or mobile approaches can help reduce this effect.
Privacy and informed consent also require particular attention because ethnographic research frequently takes place in personal or semi-private environments and may involve photographs, videos or observations of other people.
In many cases, the strongest research design uses ethnography to generate deep behavioural understanding and quantitative research to test the scale and commercial significance of the resulting hypotheses.
When should you consider ethnographic market research?
Ethnography is particularly worth considering when your organisation feels it already knows what customers say, but still does not understand why they behave as they do.
It can also be valuable when customer feedback is repetitive, research keeps producing the same answers, a journey spans multiple channels or organisations, customers have difficulty articulating their needs, a category involves sensitive or socially influenced decisions, or a service process works logically on paper but creates problems in practice.
If you are asking questions such as:
“Why are customers still struggling when we have explained the process?”
“Why aren’t customers using this feature?”
“What opportunities are we missing?”
“What happens between the stages shown in our customer journey map?”
“Why do people say one thing in research and behave differently afterwards?”
…there is a good chance that spending more time observing customers in context will provide a different perspective.
Why work with Eris Strategy for ethnographic market research?
Good ethnography requires much more than observation.
Researchers need to know what to watch, when to probe, how to distinguish an interesting anecdote from a meaningful pattern, and how to translate human behaviour into practical recommendations.
Eris Strategy combines qualitative research, behavioural understanding and strategic thinking to help organisations move from insight to action.
Clients use our ethnographic research to understand sensitive consumer journeys, uncover new product opportunities, reposition categories, redesign customer experiences, and reduce operational pressure created by difficult service processes.
We can also integrate ethnography with focus groups, in-depth interviews, quantitative research and other market research methods to provide the level of evidence appropriate to the client’s decision.
Talk to Eris Strategy about ethnographic market research
If customer feedback tells you what is happening but not why, ethnographic research may reveal the missing part of the picture.
Eris Strategy can help design an ethnographic research programme around your business, customer or community challenge and integrate the findings with other qualitative and quantitative research where required.
Contact Eris Strategy to discuss how ethnographic market research could help uncover unmet needs, improve customer experiences and identify new opportunities for growth.