shopping

Intelligences

Shopping as a Modern Quest

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ALEXANDRA MACK Pitney Bowes PechaKucha Presentation As Ethnographic Practitioners in Industry, shopping behavior is a frequent topic of our research. We take on the role of the consumer's advocate, arguing for products that bring value. Or decry the rise of consumerism as the focus of modern life, as exemplified by the drive to acquisition. Recent research on shopping has led me to thinking about quests from a different perspective. While we think of the pursuit of goods in terms of commercialism, in many cases there is an important journey along the way. Perhaps, in some instances, shopping is a quest—a journey toward a goal, in which often the journey itself is as important as the goal, and at others, the true goal is not the object. In traditional anthropological studies, quests that are in pursuit of a “thing” are usually about the basics of survival, and more focus has been put onto those that are spiritual pursuits, leading to a discovery of self and a path into the community. This PechaKucha describes...

Intelligences

The Lifecycle of a Washing Machine: Transforming the Customer Experience for a Home Appliance Manufacturer

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BETH KELLEY Doblin, Deloitte Consulting LLP JENNIFER BUCHANAN Doblin, Deloitte Consulting LLP Case Study—This case study explores a customer experience transformation strategy and development research project run by Deloitte for a multinational U.S.-based home appliance manufacturing company. It explores the shift in strategy and approach for the company based on the team's digital ethnographic research, as well as applying the ethnographic method to a non-traditional data source (digital and social media). Part one lays out the background on the client and the team and challenge proposed by the client. Part two lays out the details of the team's methodology and process of evaluating social data using ethnographic and other qualitative and quantitative methods. Part three reflects on the findings of the research and how these differed substantially from the client's assumptions. Part four evaluates the contribution the digital-based research made in providing a new perspective on the enterprise's customer experience strategy...

Intelligences

Media, Mediation and the Curatorial Value of Professional Anthropologists

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MICHAEL G. POWELL Shook Kelley This paper seeks to broaden the discipline of professional anthropology by considering the role of the anthropologist as a curator and a guide for the mediation of cultural symbols, artifacts and products in and among the organizations we work for or with. It employs two case studies of product curation activities, guided by strategic insights shaped in part by a professional cultural anthropologist. The paper builds on prior discussions and insights within the EPIC community to suggest potential new directions for professional anthropologists to pursue, alongside and/or outside of ethnographic research projects....

Intelligences

Plus Size Fashion: What Happens when Stereotypes, Fueled by Popular Culture, Creep into a Retailer’s Business Decisions?

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MEG KINNEY Bad Babysitter HAL PHILLIPS Bad Babysitter Case Study—This case demonstrates the power of video as a data collection tool and a storytelling approach to the presentation of research findings. Fresh Produce Clothing specifically selected Bad Babysitter as a consulting partner for their expertise in video-based ethnography and narrative style of delivery. The case begins with contextualizing a business with an imperative to evolve and an organizational culture that was not aligned. The locus of the debate was the Plus Sized shopper – a consumer segment that put interpretation of hard data by headquarters at odds with impassioned anecdotal inputs from the field. Video offered a visceral way to get past conjecture and “bring her into the room”. The primary benefit to the brand was the immediacy for translating learning into actionable insights and consensus on the way forward. The revenue impact was dramatic: leadership took a 180-degree turn from phasing the Plus shopper out to investing in her....

Intelligences

Engineering Ethnographic Encounters to Lead to Better Project Results

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JOSHUA DRESNER Claro Partners Case Study—This case study highlights the value of taking clients through their own ethnographic encounters during a customer experience project. It demonstrates how taking key project stakeholders on fieldwork builds their empathy with their sales and service channels and end-customers, and creates a space for reflection and an imperative for action. The case study includes examples from ethnographic encounters and how they led clients to have a new understanding about the customer experience, and take action. It underlines the value of ethnography in business as not just uncovering insights, but as a process stakeholders should be involved in to lead to effective human-centered strategy and direction for a client organisation....

Intelligences

How Consumers Create Value in a Recession Economy

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TIMOTHY DE WAAL MALEFYT This essay examines a conscious shift in the cultural flows of consumption practices. It explores the ways consumers are generating and sharing shopping competence as a new form of value. I argue that a shift in consumer consciousness and resulting open social discourse around shopping practices are creating a new consumption narrative in the recession. This narrative celebrates the resourceful and collective acts of people who transform modes of restriction (cutting back) into a positive social value of thrift. As people are practicing more thoughtful purchasing styles they are also more communicative with others in sharing their shopping strategies and ways of savings. Social changes are thus arising out of these adjustments in shopping behaviors. Such emergent shopping behaviors amplify a new sociability that demonstrates more appropriate ways to spend and save on commodities. This change shows that consumers are not just accepting new attitudes and behaviors towards shopping because they have to, but are...

Intelligences

Harmonizing Human Eyes with Digital Sensors

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HIROSHI TAMURA and TAMAMI SUGASAKA In this article we report on our research that focused on enhancing shopping experiences by introducing new media services in the physical environment of grocery shopping. Since we were interested in situated shopper’s experiences we conducted fieldwork. In particular, we paid attention to the holistic grocery shopping process because a shopping experience is, as we suggest, more than a composition of discrete actions and/or feelings towards a shopping arena. Rather it is a type of narrative featuring various vignettes. In addition to pure ethnographic observation, digital sensors were used as a complementary means to observe shopper’s experiences, since digital-sensor observation enabled us to record shopper’s entire moment-to-moment behaviors with unified metrics, i.e. digital sensors served to complement our perceptions that turned out to be less reliable in terms of consistency; under these conditions of time-space transition, observers face difficulties to become aware of subtle changes...