This document discusses the role of corporate ethnographers and how they can use behavioral observation to help companies. It notes that corporate ethnographers work with many large companies like L'oreal, Nokia, and McDonald's to understand cultural practices and communication styles. The document also explains that corporate ethnographers are able to disseminate their findings more widely through blogs, social media, and online groups while maintaining client confidentiality. Finally, it provides examples of the types of questions corporate ethnographers may help answer, such as how people navigate spaces or how agricultural products move from fields to stores.

1. What can a corporate ethnographer do with
behavioral observation?

2. What do I do?
 My company name is Indicia Consulting.
 During my career, which spans 20 odd years, I moved
from product marketing to academia and back again.
 In the past I worked with companies like Xerox (the
applied arm of PARC), Global Village (Mac Modems),
Caere (Optical Character Recognition).
 Currently, I have worked with, talked with, or know
the anthropologists at companies like Hanes,
Mars/M&M, Microsoft, Omnicom Media, and Intel.

3. Corporate apologist?
“I know it has become fashionable to be derogatory of
corporations, but none of us live off the grid. We all
use corporations to feed, clothe, shelter, and
transport us. The question becomes, do you want
them to accomplish this well, or poorly?”

4. Corporate ethnography
 As I mentioned on the previous slide, many more
companies employ anthropologists than you might
have supposed.
 L’oreal – cultural practices in cosmetics
 Nokia – the emergence of new communication styles
 McDonald’s – foodways of non-Western cultures
 There are also a great many more anthropologists
providing this service than are typically understood.

5. Publishing
 The question arises, if information is confidential and
outcomes are proprietary, how do we share any
information, contributing to the betterment of
society?
 I would argue that, using the same principles of
anonymizing/consolidating/compositing details that
academics use, practicing anthropologists actually
disseminate information faster, wider, and more
publicly through constant use of networks and social
media; including blogs, Twitter, and online groups.

6. What kinds of things do they ask?
 The questions range from extremely sophisticated –
Mars has its own think-tank, and the CIA has
borrowed their weather modeling software – to really
basic.
 Current questions floating around my ‘world’ include:
 How do people think about directions?
 How do agricultural products move around from field to
store?

7. Applying what I have learned
 There was recently a good situation where this would
have been useful:
 The client wanted an understanding of how people
navigated through a relatively limited space and what
was the process of shopping.
 They wanted down to the specifics of, “and then what did they
touch? And after that?”
 They were seeking a very structural explanation of customer
behavior, but we did not have the tools to give it to them.
 Luckily, I was a lowly sub-contractor on that job;-)

8. How is this handy?
 I offer my clients a ‘unique, base-line, measurement’
for their specific situation and business challenge.
 I really appreciated the re-introduction to SPSS as a
tool for managing the kind of data that I had been
handling with Excel.
 I had not even considered using SPSS out of past
miseries, and now I will definitely plan on purchasing
it…as soon as I have a client I can stick the cost to;-)
 I’d like to do more, moving beyond modeling and
description to more sophisticated predictions and
interpretations.

9. Focus
 People often express an interest in what I do, and
wonder about whether it is something they can do as
well. It is important to keep in mind that corporate
clients care less about reliability and validity, and are
more interested in utility.
 Corporate ethnographers need to nimbly sift through
data and provide insightful intel in rapid-fire manner:
 SPSS and coding will allow me to swiftly chart out
graphical interpretations and explanations for clients
who need quick answers to complex questions.

10. Remaining questions
 I don’t want to spend a great deal of time speculating
about future projects (and if I did I would have to kill
you) but:
 If you have any of the following that you think would be
useful I would love to get them from you:
 Readings
 Videos
 Websites
 Software programs
email me at susanmazur@hotmail.com THANKS!