How to be a customer Anthropologist?
Developing the skills Being an anthropologist is not easy – nor it is natural. It takes certain special skills to observe and enquire. If you are a wildlife photographer — you’re almost there. Customer Anthropology is a lot like wildlife observataion. Watch & observe the user behavior. Observe whay customers use, how customers use your products, what they would do with it, what other products they use etc. To be an effective observer, you may require customer permission. Getting permission from the individual user for a consumer product is easy. But for industrial products there may be complications. From experience I can tell you that getting permission from corporate users is tough. To get permission, the customer company managers need to understand the need, its benefits for them and they have to be debriefed after the study so that they can: • Learn something about what’s not working in their own organizations themselves • Learn about Customer Anthropology so they can do it with t
