Case Study—Opiate addiction is a significant public health crisis. In the past year, it has become a hot topic at all levels, including the political realm ahead of the presidential election. Triggers, treatment options and restrictions, the criminal justice system, and costs to society are all...
Genre: Case Study
Have You Heard? Using Place-Based Ethnography to Construct a Word-of-Mouth Campaign in the Bottom of the Pyramid
Case Study—The “bottom of the pyramid” concept has promised companies that they can simultaneously create wealth and social impact when serving the world’s poorest customers. In reality, companies have faced multiple challenges when trying to acquire and retain customers in the “bottom of the...
Strategy as an Unfolding Network of Associations
Cast Study—This case explores a business strategy development project run by Stripe Partners for a London-based online healthcare company, Dr Ed. The first part lays out the details of the process: an intense four-day ethnographic research programme called the ‘Studio’ involving the Dr Ed senior...
Engineering Ethnographic Encounters to Lead to Better Project Results
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...
Building for the Future, Together: A Model for Bringing Emerging Products to Market, Using Anticipatory Ethnography and Mixed Methods Research
Applied ethnography practitioners are often charged with learning from existing or potential customers, for a product that is either familiar to them or close in nature to what they have used before. There are particular challenges for emerging technologies, where the market is much less defined....
Reconnecting with the Public: Participatory Research and Co-creations within and outside a Public Institution
Despite constraints on face-to-face meetings and social distancing policies under COVID-19, with the help of online tools, Brandnographer successfully conducted a series of online activities to facilitate...
Scaling Experience Measurement: Capturing and Quantifying User Experiences across the Real Estate Journey
Zillow is undergoing a major evolution, transitioning from serving as the world's largest digital marketplace for real estate advertising into an end-to-end platform to support customers across the phases of buying, selling, and renting homes. As Zillow expands into more transactional spaces, the...
Using Ethnography and Narrative Analysis to Uncover Customer Agency: Intrepid Travel’s Online Booking Project
This paper draws on a discovery research project focused on the customer experience of Intrepid Travel's automated booking system. The Data Analytics team initially investigated customer behaviour when booking and found problems with high exit rates on the first and second steps of the 3-step...
Bringing Attention to Problem Solving and Meaningfulness at Work: How Ethnography Can Help Answer Difficult Business Questions
A local division of a multinational manufacturer was experiencing declining enagagement and perceptions of leadership (measured in employee satisfaction surveys). In anticipation of coming waves of organizational change, they asked the research team to explore how “nostalgia” may be contributing...
A Tale of Two Frictions: Building Ethical Software Solutions by Challenging Tech’s Obsession with Efficiency
The enterprise technology ethos of efficiency biases corporate software development towards seamlessness. What...