What is Digital Ethnography?
Digital ethnography, which involves collecting photos and videos from respondents, is becoming an increasingly popular method of gathering unique insights that are often missed in telephone interviews and online surveys. This approach allows you to see how individuals interact with a product and gives you an up-close view of a product in its natural environment.
Digital ethnography is a valuable tool for understanding customer needs and pain points when using a product, as well as for gaining deeper insights into a particular market. Regardless of the research objectives, firsthand images from respondents can provide additional context to your findings, bringing the research to life and making insights more impactful.
Can Digital Ethnography Work in B2B Research?
The short answer: absolutely. The old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” holds especially true when it comes to digital ethnography. This method is a powerful complement to exploratory qualitative research, particularly when trying to understand and explore the needs, and the challenges of audiences.
Getting a deep understanding of product-related issues or everyday pain points can be challenging through interviews alone. When asked on the spot, participants may struggle to recall all the challenges they face, and they might not even recognize certain issues or needs because they seem insignificant. Digital ethnography allows us to go beyond what’s said in an interview and observe real-life behaviors and challenges in context.
And not only does the collection of photos and videos enrich research reports, making the findings more vivid and engaging for stakeholders, but it also reduces reliance on participants’ memory and self-reporting. This leads to more accurate insights into the challenges, pain points, and unmet needs that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How to Conduct Digital Ethnography in B2B Research
In our experience, there are two effective approaches for conducting digital ethnography in B2B research:
Social Media Scanning
Why it’s effective: In some B2B sectors, there is a wealth of content available online where people share their challenges, frustrations, and experiences. These can include posts, videos, and photos that offer a glimpse into day-to-day working environments.
The benefit: By scanning social media, researchers can uncover needs that may seem small or insignificant but are crucial to users. For example, videos showing how drinks are prepared in cafes can show employees using scissors to cut through packaging—something easily overlooked in interviews but significant in their daily work routines.
Recruiting Participants for Additional Activities
Why it’s effective: After conducting interviews, researchers can ask participants to engage in follow-up activities, like sharing photos or videos that document their challenges over a specific time period.
The benefit: This enables participants to capture more authentic insights as they experience issues in real-time, rather than relying on memory. For example, participants could show how they store materials or stack packaging before use, providing more context than they could describe in an interview.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Ethnography
Traditional face-to-face ethnography requires physically visiting a location to observe respondents. When deciding whether to incorporate digital or face-to-face ethnography in a project it is important to consider the advantages and disadvantages of both methods. Here, we will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of digital ethnography.
You can read more about face-to-face ethnography here: Ethnography In B2B – A Guide On What, When And How.
Advantages of Digital Ethnography
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Increased efficiency – Digital ethnography streamlines the process of collecting insights by removing the need to physically travel to different locations. This allows for faster data gathering compared to face-to-face ethnography.
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Cost effectiveness – Without the need to travel to each location, digital ethnography becomes a more cost-effective method for collecting images and videos.
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Expanded coverage – Digital ethnography enables you to cover a wider range of locations, such as different geographies and customer sites more effectively than face-to-face methods.
Disadvantages of Digital Ethnography
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Reduced control – In digital ethnography you depend on respondents to capture photos and videos themselves. This means you have less control over what they are capturing and the quality of the images.
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Reduced spontaneity – Digital ethnography can lack the spontaneity of face-to-face methods. Respondents could stage their images and videos, introducing potential bias in the content they share.
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Risk of misinterpretation – Without being present, it can be challenging to accurately interpret the significance of an image or video. Interpreting an image taken by someone else can risk misinterpretation of that image.
However, there are some disadvantages of digital ethnography which are important to keep in mind when designing the research.
3 Top Tips to Overcome the Disadvantages of Digital Ethnography
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Provide clear instructions – Clearly explain to respondents what you want them to focus on in their images. Specify the dos and don’ts, such as avoiding the inclusion of people or company branding, and not staging or overly setting up the images.
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Link questions to research objectives – Create questions that align with your research objectives for respondents to answer through pictures. For example, ask them to capture the part of the product they like most and the part they find most frustrating.
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Additional information – Offer a way for respondents to add further explanations for their pictures, such as through open text boxes. This additional context can help in the interpretation of the images during analysis.
A Digital Ethnography Case Study
Our client wanted to gain a deeper understanding of how its products and those of competitors were being used by customers, with the goal of identifying pain points that required product improvements. To achieve this, we conducted telephone interviews with customers and recruited some participants to take part in an additional digital ethnography task.
After an interview was complete, we sent a survey link consisting of three questions. We asked them to take an image of the product in their workplace, an image of what they liked most about the product and an image of what they liked least. These questions mirrored the topics covered in the telephone interviews.
The images provided brought the interview responses to life, allowing us to clearly visualize what the customer had been discussing. By incorporating these images into our analysis, our client could clearly see the pain points customers were experiencing and identify specific product areas that needed to be improved.
To discuss how our tailored insights programs can help solve your specific business challenges, get in touch and one of the team will be happy to help.
