Question: for whom are you designing and developing your services, products, sales, and brand? For customers, of course, is likely your answer. The term "customer" often means slightly different things to every company, and beneath the resulting image lie various definitions, studies, and profiles. But how deep does your understanding of this decision-making human being truly go?
We make a huge number of choices every day. Preferences, habits, culture, values, emotions, and social norms guide our decisions actively and subconsciously. However, how we think and say we act is not always in line with what we actually do – and this is usually where customer understanding comes to an end.
Developing human-centric brands always requires a deep customer understanding. Among qualitative research methods, ethnography helps to observe people in their own everyday environments and reveals even hidden needs that would go unnoticed with other methods. Ethnography provides the opportunity to delve into what really happens in people's daily lives: why choices are made, what kind of authentic reactions are formed in context, and what kinds of emotions arise in situations.
While interview and survey studies offer excellent data and provide a good foundation for customer knowledge, ethnography allows us to go even deeper in customer understanding – to genuine human insight. That is why it provides an exceptionally good foundation for holistic brand development.
When you know your customer's everyday life and understand what things guide their actions and how, you are also able to implement solutions that genuinely meet their needs. Human-centricity is customer-orientation in its best form.
Do you want to strengthen your brand's customer understanding? Book a 30-minute chat with us – we'll tell you how we utilized ethnography in shaping the business models of Oppi&Ilo and in designing the brand concept for HSL, for example. You can see the available times here.
