Ethnographic research in homes, in store and on people’s phones.
See how people live with your category: where they keep it, how they choose it and how they use it from day to day. Your team can see it firsthand.
When asking isn’t enough.
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People can’t tell you what they do on autopilot.
We see habits and routines where they happen, at home and in store, so your plan starts from the routine itself.
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The decisions play out over weeks.
You see how a decision unfolds from day to day, on people’s own phones, and what finally tips it.
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The people you need rarely use the product.
We make the routine around it the subject, so light users and non-users can show you what would make room for something new.
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Your leaders want to hear customers for themselves.
We take them into homes and stores in small groups to listen, and turn what they heard into a shared record to plan from.
Everyday life, up close.
- Shaping a bank’s offer for people moving between countries A proposition presentation and written report. What happened next The bank’s stakeholders began acting on initiatives from the research.
- Planning a better layer for people who work outside Opportunity areas for innovation. What happened next The company later launched a new garment.
- Reaching households that rarely use a cleaning product A report on cleaning behavior and innovation opportunities.
Planning an ethnography.
Should ethnography come before a survey, or after one?
Either. Before a survey, it shows what matters and gives the questionnaire people’s own language. After one, it shows the people and routines behind a result.
When is ethnography the wrong choice?
When the question is how many people do something more than why, when the behavior is too rare to find by watching, or when being watched would change it.
How long has antedote run digital ethnography?
For more than a decade. In 2014 one of our founding partners wrote for Core77, the design publication, about building it around what people’s phones do well. Ours is individual and fully moderated.
Our thinking on these questions
Want to see how people live with your category?
Tell us what your team needs to understand. We’ll suggest where we would go, in homes, in store or on people’s phones, and whether a survey should follow.
A partner or director will reply.