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My first episode of the Culture Trumps Strategy show with Jamie Gordon, the VP of Anthropology at Northstar, was a great one. Jamie always thought of herself as a participant observer in her own life, which led her to become an anthropologist. She learned the ropes as a consumer anthropologist by working for market research and brand strategy firms.
Jamie uses a framework called the study of context to understand and predict consumer behavior in the marketplace. The study of context consists of understanding what she calls the three C’s, which are the three layers of context that are relevant:
- Client/Category Context – Understanding what happens to them as an organization and within the product category.
- Cultural Context – The large macro cultural trends that are going on in the world and that might affect the space being researched. This is also where they also look deep cultural aspects vs. trendy things that might affect the buying behavior.
- Consumer Context – What influences them in their world, and how do they interact with others in their inner circle.The idea is to find the sweet spot of where those three C’s overlap. This method also dispels the more traditional, but increasingly unrealistic, model where you have companies on the one side that create things and put them out in the marketplace with a target consumer in mind, and the consumer on the other side waiting for the company to produce something. While this model may have existed at some point, it does not lend itself to innovation and evolution.
Companies now need to understand that their customers are human first before they are people who buy and consume things. And as humans we are influenced and constrained by what is going on around us – our cultures. It is that culture which will determine what we buy and how we consume things. And the producers are humans first as well, and while they are in the business of creating trends, they are also consumers. So these days products are the result of a cyclical dialog among humans – both from the consumer side and from the producer side. It is this rich dialog that allows for innovation to happen.
Psychologists would label people who speak to themselves crazy – yet when companies talk to themselves, we call it strategy and marketing. Companies need to start incorporating customer listening and engaging with humans on the inside and the outside in order to be successful.
We closed our conversation on the important topic of storytelling. Unfortunately, most corporate marketers have forgotten how to tell real stories – especially that kind of story that gets passed around. In this day and age when a majority of buying recommendations happen through word of mouth within our tribes, it is imperative that marketers regain the art of true storytelling. The best stories are not the ones about our products and services, but those about the human and cultural aspects of our company – think of the stories making the rounds about Google and Zappos as examples. We need to incorporate our humanity into our communications.
Other things we discussed during this episode include:
- The lessons we can learn from anthropology in strategic market research.
- How ethnographic-based market research works, and how it can be pretty messy.
- How to move away from a demographic/psychographic view of customer segmentation to a more tribal consumer model.
- How to demonstrate hard ROI by understanding human behavior and culture, which many business leaders consider “soft stuff.”
- How your internal culture and what your brand stands for have to be aligned, and how context influences brand architecture.