My attraction to anthropology began early. Photographs in National Geographic stimulated my interest in other cultures, especially since I was growing up in a homogeneous community. My undergraduate major at William and Mary acquainted me with anthropology, and the four-field approach, learned as a graduate student at Cornell, convinced me that I could study anything through the anthropological lens.
This holistic interdisciplinary perspective has enabled me to maintain my identity as an anthropologist. It has provided me with the conceptual and methodological tools to utilize in a wide variety of applied projects for Fortune 500 companies, state and federal organizations, and advertising and marketing firms. I began my own consulting company, Cultural Insights, in the late 1990s after years of conducting rich research for others and feeling stifled as an employee at a market research firm. My father, an entrepreneur who started his own business, encouraged me, saying, “Create a business focusing on your cultural specialty. You’ll wonder why you never did it before.”
The transition from an academic to a business context requires translation of scholarly concepts into the language and needs of these organizations. For example, a market is a community that shares beliefs about the usage of a product or service. Advertising is a form of symbolic communication for a consumer market. And innovative marketing includes the discovery and articulation of consumers’ cultural frameworks. Community, symbolic communication, and cultural frameworks are core topics in cultural anthropology. Culture means business.
My theoretical training informs my project development. Conceptualization is key, because the right questions lead to the right methods and guide me where to look for the most relevant findings. I applied my academic background in human sexuality to many projects. For example, one company was considering the development of a new men’s deodorant and wanted to know its market position. Rather than focusing on the deodorant, I undertook interviews to include men’s views about masculinity, attitudes about sweat and cleanliness, and perceptions of their bodies. These concepts led to the research design: open-ended interviews with different types of men (older/traditional, younger/non-traditional) in their own homes and photography of men in spaces they identified as “theirs.” I combined images from men’s real settings with relevant quotes from the interviews to give clients insight into users’ different experiences.
However, the client did not inform me of how the company used the findings.
Many projects are like mini-fieldwork. I ask, “What is the insider’s view”? Key components to answering this are: two-to-three-hour interviews in people’s homes, where they feel safe; observation and mapping the significant aspects of the setting; stories, photos, diaries, and projective tasks.
Observation of details like magnets on a refrigerator and types of décor can express more about a person’s underlying values than a questionnaire. This gives anthropologists an edge over commonly applied methods used by marketers, e.g., surveys, questionnaires, purchase patterns from the Internet, and focus groups. These marketing methods produce limited data that tap public statements or context isolated behavior. They yield descriptions but not what underlying triggers prompt people’s choices. Context matters.
As anthropologists, we realize that culture is implicit as well as explicit, and we can leverage our expertise by articulating key values, underlying assumptions, and deep meanings of products and services. Anthropologist John Lowe and I collaborated on a project for a major ad agency to encourage unmarried fathers to pay child support. Our findings transformed our clients,’ as well as our own, perceptions. Our research shifted from the initial punitive suggestion of wanted posters shaming “dead bead dads” to portraying the value of fathers for children. We interviewed the children’s parents to identify the parents’ shared values and to understand why the fathers did not pay child support. Interview guides included questions about the parents’ own childhood experiences, attitudes toward marriage and family, and the role of mothers and fathers in children’s lives. I attended “Fathers for Equal Rights” meetings to clarify fathers’ needs, often ignored or less respected than that of mothers.’ When we presented our findings, the clients were eerily silent, and then one said, “This isn’t what we were expecting.” Nevertheless, they listened, and the ad campaign took a dramatic shift. The tag line, “Be a Dad,” accompanied images of children’s faces, with bulleted text emphasizing some of the main effects on fatherless children: unplanned pregnancies, drug abuse, and suicide. As with the deodorant project, we knew that our clients valued our findings, but they did not inform us of how they used them. We were one link in a chain of decisions in the advertising and product development process.
The concepts and methods from our academic training are a toolkit for customized use in meeting our clients’ needs. I look for the “true fit,” the intersection between the meaning of products and services in people’s lives with the objectives of the client. Both are necessary to create an outcome that saves money, enhances brand loyalty, and promotes a “win-win” scenario. Anthropologists are resources who enhance the human dimension in research.
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