Ethnographic research is all about stripping away preconceptions about your audience and allowing them to explain their points of view.
It's become a core research method for brands looking to fully understand their customers and realign their products and services to fit those needs.
Ethnography is a research method that stems from anthropology. The idea is that, in order to understand a group, you need to allow it to express itself in its own environment without your input.
It's a hands-off approach to social research. Marketers can take the core principles and weave ethnographic practices into their own research, including social media monitoring.
This guide explains how ethnographic research works and how brands apply it to their customer data collection methods. Learn the key ethnographic methods and see how Brandwatch can help you conduct ethnographic research.
What is ethnographic research?
Ethnographic research – or ethnography – is a branch of anthropology that aims to study groups in their natural environment. Participants provide all the data with no interference from researchers.
Instead, researchers gather information through observations, interviews, visual material, and archival documents, aiming to produce a universal understanding of the group that goes beyond surface-level insights.
The benefits of ethnographic research for brands
For marketing professionals, ethnographic research offers a window into the human behavior that drives purchasing decisions, brand loyalty, and product usage. It's not the only research method available to marketers – but it’s perhaps the purest.
When you conduct ethnographic research, your aim is to collect data you otherwise couldn’t obtain through more proactive methods. You understand your customers within their context – whether it be their homes, their place of work, where they choose to socialize, or their choice of social media apps. You uncover latent needs and pain points in their customer journey.
Ethnographic research also provides a rich source of customer stories that you can collect and weave into a narrative. This is particularly important for brands that seek to establish an emotional connection between their products and consumers.
To this end, it’s easier to spot trends over time when conducting ethnographic studies.
By housing all that data on software such as Brandwatch Consumer Research, it’s possible to develop a complete understanding of your audience. This might give you the insight you need to change your business strategy – whether it be redeveloping products, providing new services, or adjusting your marketing plan.
Key ethnographic research methods
Ethnographic research employs a mix of methods to collect data and build a nuanced understanding of a social group. One method alone won’t provide you with the whole picture.
Some of the below ethnographic methods are more pertinent for marketers than others.
Participant observation
Researchers put themselves forward as participating observers. They engage in group activities and conversations but don’t lead on them. Doing this enables researchers to experience a group from the inside.
Passive observation
Researchers conduct passive ethnographic observation by unobtrusively watching interactions and documenting behaviors without direct involvement. Researchers might document the flow of customers through a store, for example. Or, they could use social listening tools to understand audience sentiment.
Interviews and informal conversations
There's a proactive layer of ethnographic research that brings marketers closer to their subjects. Semi-structured or unstructured interviews allow participants to share personal experiences, beliefs, and perceptions in their own words. Researchers may record and transcribe these sessions for detailed analysis, but it’s important that they don’t apply their own prejudices or biases to the conversations, as this could skew the data.
Archival research
An important secondary research method is to analyze historical records, news reports, internal documents, and social media posts to learn more about your subject matter and contextualize findings. Brands need this level of research to back up what they learn from the group they’re studying.
Visual ethnography
Photo, video, and graphic materials help capture non-verbal cues and environmental details. This can include video diaries or user-generated content. A tool like Image Insights is a great place to start when gathering this data.
Digital ethnography
Also called netnography, researchers study online communities, social media interactions, and digital footprints to understand virtual cultural practices and social interaction in digital environments. You need a powerful tool to conduct this level of consumer research and ensure your data accurately reflects your study group.
Planning and conducting ethnographic fieldwork
Brands looking to conduct ethnographic research need to do plenty of planning. It might not be something you’ve done before, and the difference from traditional research methods is stark.
Remember, ethnographic studies are more about observing than interacting with your participants. Granted, you might ask them questions and provide surveys, but the core principle of not biasing the results hangs over everything you do.
Before you get started, ensure you have a plan in place. This begins with detailing how your studies align with your business goals. Are you trying to understand a new audience in order to develop a fresh product for them? Are you seeking a deeper insight into an existing customer base? Whatever it is, make sure you’re clear on exactly what you want to find out.
From there, you can develop a strategy for your research. How will it be conducted? Will you arrange days for people to socialize and be observed? Are you hoping to monitor people in their own homes? Will you track their social media usage? Do you plan to ask questions?
All this needs to be addressed before you move on.
Next, consider how you’ll attract participants to your study. Ethnographic research is about taking a hands-off approach, so you can’t offer participants rewards for their engagement. Instead, you might need to immerse yourself in the group rather than asking the group to come to you.
From here, you can begin to conduct your ethnographic research. Monitor your subjects and collect as much data from them as possible. Use whatever tools you need to record your data and then bring it all together with Vizia.
Once you’ve collected your data, organize it into reports and pick out the key findings. You now have a fuller understanding of your customers, which can then inform your future business and marketing decisions.
Ethnographic research examples
Here are three ethnographic studies that explore how different methods can produce great levels of qualitative data.
Example 1: Sport England and people’s health
In 2022, Sport England wanted to track the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on normal people's lives. They sent ethnographers to the homes of five people to observe what they did and conduct interviews. Everything was captured on film.
The data revealed how physical, mental, social, financial, and environmental aspects affect people's health. This helped create an understanding of what broad physical and mental issues people are dealing with post-coronavirus.
Example 2: In-store vs online grocery shopping
Researchers at Portsmouth Business School wanted to know more about people's online and in-store shopping habits to determine how internet grocery shopping is affecting the broader industry. Using ethnographic research, the researchers were able to better understand the relationship between where people shop and what they buy.
The ethnographic study took 18 months and revealed pertinent insights into how shoppers feel about purchasing groceries, as well as revealing patterns in their consumer behavior.
Example 3: Kick It Out and social media abuse
Anti-racism charity Kick It Out conducted social media ethnography around the Euro 2016 soccer tournament. Analysis focused on players and managers of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, plus five selected players from other nations.
The ethnographic study monitored posts and found 22,000 discriminatory comments were made during the tournament. The research helped reveal the scale of abuse directed at soccer players and coaches on social media and enabled Kick It Out to spread its message. More than 900 articles were published based on the data collected, which also sparked over 100,000 conversations online.
Ethical considerations in ethnographic research
Ethnographic research’s depth brings plenty of ethical responsibilities. This is not, after all, about secretly monitoring people. You must get informed consent to conduct in-person ethnographic research and explain how your data will be used. Participants should have the right to withdraw without penalty.
Privacy and confidentiality are also crucial because you may be handling sensitive data that is not available in public. If you’re conducting social media ethnography, then users will have agreed to data tracking as part of their signing up to the platform.
Then there are cultural sensitivities and issues of influence to be aware of. Researchers cannot influence the subjects of the study and must not influence the results. Doing so would effectively make the research redundant.
Analyzing and reporting ethnographic findings with Brandwatch
Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to make sense of it all. Using a tool like Vizia – part of the Brandwatch Consumer Research suite – enables you to pull data from multiple sources into one place, decipher it, and present it in an accurate manner. You can then construct a narrative in your reports that explains the results.
Of course, you need to source your data before you can report on your ethnographic work. To do this, plan how you intend to contact research subjects and conduct fieldwork. If you plan to conduct social media ethnology as part of your study, then a tool like Listen is the ideal option for gathering trusted quantitative social data.
It's time to begin your ethnographic fieldwork
Ethnographic research offers a qualitative research method unmatched in its ability to capture the richness of human behavior, cultural practices, and social dynamics.
Whether you’re a marketing professional seeking deeper customer empathy or a social media manager hunting for emerging trends, ethnography provides the tools to uncover unspoken needs, craft authentic narratives, and inspire product innovation.
Ready to transform your understanding of customers? Request a demo to see how Brandwatch’s platform can streamline your ethnographic research process and turn deep insights into strategic advantage.
