Few weeks ago at an investor meeting I was asked what I thought the size of the mobile ethnography market was, leading question I thought, so not being sure I decide to plead the 5th and take the question away.
I am partial to great questions, think questions are more important than answers. Quite often they start as one-liners, which take on a life of their own. For me this was one of them.
So when I started to look for number, even looked to work it out from our clients it became apparent that this was not going to be easy. What is mobile ethnography? What types of research do people put in this category? Well anything they want to. It is what it is in the eye of the beholder.
Ok, So taking a step back Ethnography in its truest sense is Ethnographers visiting houses or people filming, cutting audio, text, making their own observations of other people lives. Ethnography is a labour intensive, specialist subject; therefore projects can take up a lot of people time, which can lead to a project incurring a high cost. A highly used though not mass market solution, not met a client yet running 10’s of ethnography projects on a monthly basis. You could observe that the largest users of formal ethnography are those with the largest global research budgets. Though informal ethnography does exist in most businesses, most connected business leaders take some time to go observe their own business and its customers.
So is mobile / self-ethnography different, well it is in that you remove house visits / store visits but not the analytics so the difference between the two in cost terms is what, between 20% and 50%, self-ethnography being cheaper. Yes it faster, you may get different results, people I am told being observed do act differently so the change in methodology can bring additional benefits.
So in the end what did I conclude, what was my response, well there is no market number, the market is there, it is regardless, what ever people want to define it as, what people believe it be. The market is getting bigger, end clients are beginning to value more highly the visual medium and would they buy more if you could reduce the overall project cost, yes.
The answer, to get ethnography to the masses, in all its disguises, you have create a system which supports ethnography by the masses, the small to mid, the mid to large companies. Be they clients or research companies.
Be interesting to see what the investor thinks of the response.
