Ethnotale: Up Close and Personal

Social scientists and philosophers have been arguing about ‘reality’ for a while now.  There are generally two approaches to how reality is understood and measured by social scientists.  Those taking a positivistic approach believe that although people may ‘see’ things differently, there is an objective reality.  On the other hand, those taking a phenomenological approach assume multiple realities to any given situation.  As an ethnographer, I generally skew toward the phenomenological viewpoint.  I realize that not all versions of reality hold up equally well, but I have seen many instances of people creating their own reality around their experiences and around products/services.

I usually use the classic film ‘The Gods Must be Crazy’ to help illustrate this concept.  So, in the film, there is a pilot that is flying over the Kalahari Desert and he drinks a coke and then throws the bottle out of the window of his plane.  A man named Xi finds the coke bottle and assumes that it is a gift from the gods and he and his tribe find TONS of uses for the bottle—it is a tool, it is a toy, it is a musical instrument, etc.  In other words, they construct an alternate reality around the bottle.  And so the movie is a parable to illustrate how one man’s trash can become another man’s treasure.

This is one way in which the social construction of reality comes to life in my work.  I do see many instances of people finding all kinds of interesting (but unintended) uses for products.  They might fashion an expensive piece of electronic equipment into a workbench or they might use a medical device in ways that are not consistent with instructions, but which fit better into their particular needs.  In these situations, my job becomes one in which I help my client understand not only WHAT they are doing, but WHY.  This often requires me to walk a delicate line.  Generally, my client has given a lot of thought to design and they have created a product that does what it is designed to do pretty well.  However, sometimes I have to help them understand that it isn’t all about what this product does.  Sometimes it is more important to understand the social world in which the product lives and how their vision of what the product should be might not be consistent with the reality in which the product lives.

For example, many years ago, we were hired by a manufacturer of high-end electronic equipment.  This company had given A LOT of thought to their product line and were really, really proud of all of the bells and whistles their products had.  But after spending a few weeks in the field, observing and talking to the people who used their products, I realized that the bells and whistles were not only NOT appreciated by the customers, they were often feared!  Many consumers lived in constant fear that someone else would change some of the settings on this device and then they would have to spend hours trying to figure out how to reset it.  There was clearly a disconnect in the ‘reality’ of what this thing was and especially around what the expectations of it were.  For my client, the real VALUE of their product and what they believed really differentiated their brand from others were the bells and whistles (this was evidenced by their advertising, but also by the angry response we got from designers and engineers when we presented our findings)!  But for the consumer, the value of the thing was that it turned on when it was supposed to and allowed them to do their job without being too complicated or distracting them from their real task.

As I said before, not all versions of ‘reality’ are tolerated equally, but it does pay to try to understand how your product might fit into the reality of daily life and how your customer might be constructing their own story about exactly what your product is and especially how (and for what) it is valued.