Is Immersion Ethnography?

Is immersion ethnography? The answer: "sort of." Does it matter? That depends, too.

Our pal and colleague, Hy Mirampolsky, has written quite a good book that introduces ethnography to marketers. He calls his book Ethnography for Marketers: A Guide to Consumer Immersion (Sage Publications, 2006). For Hy, immersion means ethnography. P&G, which uses ethnographic methods (as do most major globla players in the FMCG sector), gets their researchers to interact directly with their consumers, and it has helped. Nigel Hollis, at the mega-research shop, Milward Brown, offered this candid and thoughtful assessment from a market researcher's perspective:

An article in Strategy Magazine on the turnaround led by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley reports that as part of the “internal revolution” at P&G, research methodologies were re-examined along with operational structure and processes. Much of P&G’s traditional research, in which the marketer plays the role of objective witness, has been replaced with programs which bring marketers directly in touch with consumers and their everyday lives. Jim Stengel, global marketing officer at P&G, calls these programs “consumer immersion experiences.” In the name of consumer immersion, P&G marketers are spending time working in shops in Mexico and conducting in-home observations of U.S. pet owners.

He suggests that some think this approach threatens "traditional" research approaches, and he debunks that idea quite well. Furthermore, some of the folks at P&G, he says, don't like talking about consumers. They would rather talk about (and talk with) people. You count things consumers do, you conduct surveys about them, you observe them. But you don't interact with consumers. You interact with people. Immersion is people focused. That's great.

This discussion seems puzzling for cultural anthropologists, for whom people-centered research, participant observation, and being present in people's lives across a variety of contexts has always been at the core of their research methods, for more than 100 years already. An anthropologist would wonder what the fuss was all about. Then they'd wonder why anthropologists haven't gotten their methodological messages across to the business world as well as they might have.

Some folks—perhaps most—in the marketing world conduct immersion by starting with an agency. The agency does the recruiting. The agency finds the people to hang out with. They make the appointment and pay the respondent. The client shows up,hangs out for a day, interacts, and learns. But starting and stopping there limits the learning that could be had. It may limit the marketer's ability to generalize or to understand the wider context in which people live. And it is not the kind of thing that ethnographers (usually) do.

The limitations start with recruiting. No anthropologist would ever separate the recruiting process from the field research process, unless they are really under the gun for a rapid-assessment kind of field trip.

Anthropologists want the first-hand experience (and often, frustration) that comes from meeting new respondents in person, on the phone, or on the Internet. They visit the respondent's neighborhood, workplace, or school first. They make sure that people see them, ask them what they are doing, hanging around. They look for opportunities explain their research interest, and to find out what people think about it. Often, design ethnographers and applied anthropologists engage their respondents quite directly in the research process, as collaborators (see Stull and Schensule, 1987, Collaborative Research and Social Change, or any of the many articles on collaborative design).

The other limitation to watch out for is timing. Is the immersion on a weekday? During a long weekend? Does the pre-recruited sample allow the serendipitous participation in special times, when grandmother comes to visit, during a birthday or an anniversary? After all, special times bring things to the surface that are otherwise hidden. Screenwriters know this; just watch The Wedding Planner or Father of the Bride. So-called normal daily life is a great start but there should be a space for some interviewing during special, ritual times and some space for unexpected discoveries and unexpected meetings, comings, and goings, too.

Ethnographers hang out and interact in real contexts, but they seek natural contexts for ethnographic interviews, as well, just as Jo Yung is doing at a Chinese Starbucks, above.

The immersion that Hy talks about, and the immersion that design ethnographers and anthropologists conduct, do indeed follow from the same idea that drove P&G to (re)discover immersion as a way to understand consumers: get as close as you can to someone else's reality, stay experience-near, and don't rely only on data like surveys that are, as they say, experience-distant.

Being systematic about immersion in this way is what anthropologists do, and there is a hefty body of literature to guide researchers to a better understanding of the lives of people that we ordinarily don't get close to. Use immersion as a start. But follow up, take some time, and explore the possibilities of doing some of your own recruiting. The usual concerns of any researcher—questions about sampling people and contexts, the trustworthiness of the findings, and all the rest, matter a great deal. Just dropping in on a pre-selected respondent for a day is a great start but the research will matter more if the fieldworkers have a bit more time, can assess on their own their sampling needs as those emerge from the field encounter, and if the fieldworker includes some focused interviewing in the mix.