Why use ethnography?
The commercial benefits of using ethnography are that it provides a clear understanding of any given experience from your customers point of view – entirely true-to-life – as well as remarkable richness of data and highly actionable information with long shelf life. The unique value is that it reveals not just what people say or how they think, but also provides a clear understanding of how experiences work so that businesses can see what actions they need to take to support, improve and change those experiences. Ethnography can explain behaviour in ways that more traditional research cannot. It is based on the assumption that people have reasons for what they do, even if those reasons seem inexplicable to the casual observer. Good ethnographic research will uncover the basis of behaviour of all key parties and throw into sharp relief the ways in which they might be misaligned.
