By Research Guru | October 25, 2014 at 02:57 PM EDT | No Comments
The best way to listen to your customer is often Ethnography. Some pros and cons of ethnography are given in the following article. The authors interviewed 20+ ethnography users (not necessarily practitioners) to form some of their conclusions.
Do not forget that expert research users use many research tools and ethnographic interviews or "in context" observation of customers where you share the experience is a "qualitative" research like focus groups. And like focus groups, one should nearly never make conclusions about price, market share and other "quantitative" conclusions with ethnography. Quantitative research involves quantitative tools such as phone surveys, web surveys, etc. The key with ethnographic research and qualitative research is to include all interesting segments as they may have very different cultures, beleifs and attitudes. For example excercise equipment may be different for different segments. A treadmill for a 20 something may be used to tone and be attractive, a 50 year old male for heart health, a 50 year female for diabetes sugar control....so don't do too few ethnography interviews.
More on ethnography at this link:
http://www.quirks.com/articles/2009/20090204.aspx