This document discusses the importance of understanding culture for gaining customer insights. It begins by describing Clifford Geertz's concept of "thick description" to deeply understand a culture, using the example of observing Balinese cockfights. Culture is defined broadly as the shared ways of thinking, feeling and behaving within a group. Ethnography is introduced as a tradition of writing about people to gain understanding of different social worlds. The document emphasizes experiencing aspects of a culture rather than just collecting facts. It outlines a process for making sense of observations by framing the problem, collecting data, finding patterns, and creating insights. Finally, it discusses techniques for observation without interfering or using participant observation, and how to document observations in the field.

1. Deep customer insights
Observation as a way to study culture
Taneli Heinonen
mail@taneliheinonen.com
www.taneliheinonen.com

2. Why did we make you read about a cockfight in Bali?
What does it have to do with customer insight? Or
restaurant business? Or business in general?
Photo credits: Rene Bastiaanssen. Flickr.com.

3. Clifford Geertz – Thick Description as the aim of ethnography
• Rich and nuanced way of describing life in a
given culture – winking vs. twitching.
• Balinese cockfight as an arrival story – getting
into a community.
• When in Rome…
• Micro – macro connection
“As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a
golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table,
much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only
apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it
is men.”

4. What is culture?
Not just high arts in museums, theatres
and books
It’s around us, so close that it can be hard to
see. Shared phenomenon – invisible and
tangible.

5. What is culture?
Different notions:
• The total way of life of a people
• The social legacy the individual acquires from his
group
• A way of thinking, feeling and believing
• How a group of people behave
• A storehouse of pooled learning
• A set of standardized orientation to re-current
problems
• A set of techniques for adjusting both to the
external environment and to other men
(Kluckhohn in the Mirror for Man)
”Believing, with Max Weber, that
man is an animal suspended in
webs of significance he himself
has spun, I take culture to be
those webs, and the analysis of it
to be therefore not an
experimental science in search of
law but an interpretive one in
search of meaning.”
Clifford Geertz
Different kinds of cultures:
National cultures – sub-cultures – Multi-culture – Western culture – Eastern Culture

6. Tradition of ethnography
Ethnos = People Graphos = To write

7. Ethnography in modern settings – studying different social worlds
Photo credits: National Eye Institute. Flickr.com.

8. Studying the experiences in different worlds: properties vs. aspects
• Data points as facts vs. experiencing the aspects
• Biological sex vs. cultural gender (masculinity – femininity)
• Properties of entities vs. relationships between people and brands/people
• Correctness vs. truth
• Detached vs. embedded
• Object vs. subject (reflection of assumptions)
• Believe in conclusive facts vs. doubt in “near truths”
• Ethnography as making something familiar strange – and strange familiar

9. Process of sensemaking
1. Frame the problem as a phenomenon
2. Collect the data
3. Look for patterns
4. Create key insights
5. Build the business impact
(Madsbjerg & Rasmussen, 2014)

10. Observation: How to
collect data
Taneli Heinonen
mail@taneliheinonen.com
www.taneliheinonen.com

11. Observation without interfering vs. participant observation

12. Observation without interfering vs. participant observation

13. Attention is finite – plan what you are observing in the field
SOURCE: A DATA COLLECTOR’S FIELD GUIDE
NATASHA MACK • CYNTHIA WOODSONG KATHLEEN M. MACQUEEN • GREG GUEST • EMILY NAMEY

14. Documenting the observations
Photo credits: Niftynotebook. Flickr.com.
Photo credits:: See-Ming Lee. Flickr.com.
Photo credits:: Susanne Nilsson. Flickr.com.