Before we experienced a worldwide pandemic and the Great Resignation, employers knew how to keep and retain talent. The focus was on providing work-life balance, exciting roles, improved technology, and better onboarding and training. In this new age, people are requesting flexible work schedules and locations. A report by the Future Forum, a group within Slack Technologies Inc, found that “95% of employees want flexible schedules and 78% want flexible locations.”
While not having to stick to a fixed 9-5 schedule and the ability to work from anywhere can be helpful to workers, employers need to dig deeper to understand how this will play out. These new ways of working come with drawbacks that can sneak up and drag down employee satisfaction and morale.
Because the boundaries aren’t as firm as they once were. We used to have a built-in transition with the commute to and from work. Many of us no longer have that physical and mental transition that ends work time and starts home time.
comes from being online all day, in virtual meetings, without truly interacting or collaborating with people face-to-face. Gone are the spontaneous “water cooler chats” and the conference room banter that happens before and after meetings.
If you find yourself talking to your dog or cat throughout the day, you are not alone. Working from home can create feelings of loneliness and isolation, as people find themselves rarely needing to leave their home/work office. This can be especially true if you started a job during the pandemic and you have never met your co-workers or manager in-person.
Many companies are incorporating new approaches to support employees in adjusting to flexible schedules and locations, such as:
If you haven’t listened to your employees recently, now is the time. We can help you and your organization understand what employees REALLY want, and how to help them achieve the balance they crave in this new world we are navigating.
With SIVO’s Organizational Intelligence Solution, we dig deep via employee interviews and group discussions to understand the challenges and engagement of the workforce. We facilitate leaders in the development of strategies and solutions to help employees cope with the “side effects” that come with flexible work schedules and remote work environments.
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By Marilyn Weiss
Did you know that 81% of consumers say they want brands to get to know them and 66% report that they would be willing to share their personal data to receive more personalized experiences?*
While there are many market research techniques for getting to know your consumers, one of the best ways to understand the intricacies of what they think and do is to “walk” side by side with them in a real-world context. Being with them in the moments that matter, you can discover the underlying linkages to how they make choices about your product or service. This is the essence of ethnographic research; a powerful market research methodology that delves deeply into the lives, habits, and environments of consumers to uncover rich insights that explain their behavior.
What is Ethnographic Research?
Ethnographic research is a qualitative research method that is rooted in anthropology. In the context of market research, ethnography involves observing and interacting with consumers in their everyday environments, such as homes, workplaces, or community spaces. Skilled Research Strategists will immerse themselves in the lives of participants, seeking to uncover unfiltered insights into their behaviors, motivations, and decision-making processes.
When to User Ethnographic Research
Ethnographic research is particularly valuable in scenarios where understanding consumer behavior in context is essential. Here are some situations where ethnography can be highly effective:
New Product Development: Exploring how consumers use existing products or navigate specific tasks or routines can provide invaluable insights for developing new products or improving existing ones.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has gone deep into the lives of senior citizens and how they communicate and interact with their families, living nearby and a far, to inform the development of health tracking devices for older people and their families.
Improving the Customer Experience: Understanding the customer journey and identifying pain points or opportunities for improvement can inform strategies to enhance the overall customer experience.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has spent quality time alongside farmers and hunters on their properties to help clients better understand their experiences with outdoor utility vehicles.
Cultural Understanding: When entering new markets or engaging with unique consumer groups ethnography helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of cultural norms, rituals, values, and preferences.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has explored the lives and rituals of pet owners and how different pet parent styles dictate their dog and cat food buying behavior and preferences.
Gaining Reaction to your Brand: Examining how consumers interact with and perceive brands in their everyday lives can uncover perceptions, attitudes, and emotions that shape brand relationships.
SIVO in Action: SIVO has worked with a national retailer to understand the impact of their new store footprint on shoppers’ overall shopping norms, routines and perceptions of the store brand, as our client developed unique-to-market storefronts.
Best Practices for Conducting Ethnographies with Consumers
1. Establish Rapport: It is critical to build trust and rapport with participants to encourage openness and honesty during observations and interviews. Respect their way of living and cultural sensitivities throughout the research process.
2. Observe without Bias: Approach observations with an open mind, avoiding preconceived notions or biases. Pay attention to subtle cues, behaviors, and non-verbal communication that may reveal underlying motivations or attitudes. Most insights come from observing what they do and not just listening to what they say.
3. Dig beyond the “what” to get to the “why”: It is easy to capture what is happening in their lives but understanding the reasons why and the associated emotions and values is where the rich insights are found.
4. Use Multiple Data Collection Methods: Combine observation, interviews, photography, video recordings, and artifacts to capture a comprehensive view of participants' lives and experiences.
5. Maintain Confidentiality: Because consumers are opening up their lives and homes to us, we need to respect their space and maintain their privacy, ensuring informed consent and confidentiality for participants throughout the research process.
6. Stay Open and Flexible: Be prepared to adjust research plans and methods based on unexpected discoveries or changes in the environment. Embrace flexibility to capture emerging insights effectively.
7. Gather Diverse Perspectives: Engage with a diverse range of participants to capture a breadth of experiences and perspectives. Consider factors such as age, gender, income, and cultural background, as well as product usage, in your recruitment criteria.
8. Limit the Size of your Team: When visiting consumers’ homes or workplaces, you will want to limit the visiting team to 1 interviewer, 1 videographer and 1 client team member per respondent. The idea is to keep it casual and as close to reality as possible. It also helps encourage respondent candor.
9. Bring a Videographer: A high-quality video reel will bring your consumers to life for the stakeholders in your organization. Trust us. It is absolutely worth the added expense to have a professional behind the video equipment!
10. Translate Insights into Recommendations: Finally, give your research partner the time to comb through the notes, video and transcripts to synthesize the data, identify the ethnographic insights and translate the insights into actionable recommendations. This will always take longer than you think it will!
By using these guidelines to fully embrace a holistic understanding of consumers’ lives, businesses can uncover nuanced insights that help build a relationship with their consumers, inform strategic decisions and drive innovation.
SIVO for your Ethnographic Research
As business teams try to navigate an increasingly complex and dynamic marketplace, SIVO’s skilled and experienced research team can lead you through ethnographic research to make sense of the mysteries of consumer behavior and unlock new opportunities for growth. Reach out to the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to schedule a discovery call today!
For more DIY approaches, check out SIVO’s On Demand Talent Profiles to learn more about how an experienced, fractional Qualitative Research Strategist/Expert Moderator can be also an asset for your ethnographic research needs.
Introduction statistics cited from Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/07/18/why-customer-centricity-is-a-key-to-long-term-success/?sh=60917fb67f64
By Kerry Juhl
Growth. Every business in the world wants to grow, wants to live their purpose, follow their mission, serve their customers, and make money from it. But sometimes it is hard to know what to do, where to go, to find that growth. We ask ourselves questions like…
Any of these paths could be the right direction for the business but at some point, teams must put a stake in the ground. That said, strategies don’t come out of thin air. It requires an examination of the world in which the business operates.
Teams need to thoroughly examine their:
The output of this examination can be organized into a framework that inspires growth strategies. Growth Frameworks allow teams to reconsider the world in which they operate – literally putting it into a new “Frame” that will help identify issues and unearth opportunities for growth. The opportunities within the framework offer a “where to play” roadmap for teams, allowing them to pick a path forward and define their strategy for growth.
A Proven Process
SIVO has a tried-and-true process for developing growth frameworks that has been refined over the years and across industries. The SIVO team utilizes a specific process, research approach and expert facilitation to lead business teams to a clear and relevant growth framework. The process can be customized to fit the client organization based on factors such as their existing customer knowledge, the team’s availability to participate in the process and team size. Typically, 5 to 10 client team members work collaboratively, guided through five steps, beginning with the discovery of insights that point to future opportunities and ending with an activation plan that will advance the business.
The 5 Steps
MINE
BUILD
APPLY
The Resulting Growth Framework
The output of this comprehensive process is a framework that provides teams with an inspiring construct that has easily digestible, business-relevant content and a common language for client teams to rally around, so they can clearly see and prioritize a path to growth. These frameworks can take many forms, including:
For more definitions and details on each of these frameworks, see SIVO’s Growth Frameworks: A Path to Action & Growth blog.
Applying the Growth Framework
Applying growth frameworks to the business can lead to growth strategies that span across the 4P’s of marketing.
Product strategies could include Innovation to launch new products that fulfill demand or Renovation to improve existing products to better meet customer needs.
Pricing strategies could include Price Increases that strategically align with consumer preferences or Cost Engineering to improve profit margins by removing attributes that consumers don’t value.
Place strategies (i.e., Distribution strategies) could include retailer and channel distribution strategies or category management negotiations to improve product placement that aligns with customer shopping habits.
Promotion strategies could include new advertising campaigns that focus on key benefits that align with what consumers need and value or in-store promotions to align promotional activity with how consumers shop the category.
Reach out to SIVO to learn more about Growth Frameworks
SIVO wants to share our proven process for elevating your insights into a growth framework that enables your team to set strategies that put your business on the path to growth.
Reach out to the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to discuss the approach and growth framework that will be the right strategic fit for your team and your business.
To Know Thyself is the Beginning of All Wisdom [Aristotle]… and as it turns out, it’s also the beginning of your Brand Strategy
At SIVO Insights, we spend a lot of time helping our clients understand who their consumers are, what they need and why. It is just as important to help our clients understand the competitive context within which they operate, to understand where and how their brands can differentiate and create an ownable competitive advantage.
We work with our clients using a three-pronged approach to set a solid brand strategy:
A simple exercise that teams can use to consider and articulate the market that their brand best competes in, is the “Big Box, Little Box” Model.
In this model, teams define the market, or “Little Box” that they believe their brand currently operates in, and what benefits they distinctly deliver to that market. Next, the team considers a broader market definition, the “Big Box”, to understand who is in the brand’s expanded list of competitors and what benefits their product could distinctly deliver in that broader context. By doing this exercise, the team broadens their view of who they are truly competing with and where they can source volume. This helps teams reframe how they present their brand and its ownable benefits to the world. i.e., the brand positioning, which in turn, impacts future renovation, innovation, and communication efforts.
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Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?
A team that manages a coffee brand might define their “Little Box” as the Coffee category. In that competitive context, the team will likely focus on functional coffee benefits such as richest flavor or best price, to compete with other coffee brands. But when they broadened their view of the competitive context to the “Big Box”, they might find that they are competing with the broader ‘caffeinated beverage’ market. In this context, the key benefits that the team may focus on to differentiate and compete with caffeinated sodas and energy drinks would be things like “warmth, comfort, and enabling your morning ritual.”
The big box, little box model allows teams to…
Discover who they are truly competing with
Reframe their brand strengths within the broader, and likely more accurate, competitive context
Identify which brand benefits are most ownable and distinctive vs. the competitive set
Reconsider who their target consumer is and how to position the brand to meet the needs of this larger consumer target group
Our experts can…
Facilitate a Big Box/Little Box exercise with your team
Execute a qualitative exploration to understand where your brand truly competes
Execute an Attitude and Usage (A&U) study to quantify which competitive products/categories are true competitors
Facilitate a workshop, using the learning above, to rethink and redefine brand strategy
Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com for more information and next steps.
As fall season begins and planning cycles ramp up, most brand teams are juggling budgets, media calendars, and launch timelines. But there’s one question that quietly determines how effective all of that work will be next year:
Ever since your brand was established, your consumers have moved through shifting economic pressures, cultural tensions, new product entrants, and evolving expectations in your category. If your brand positioning hasn’t been revisited with fresh consumer insight, you’re likely planning 2027 with an outdated map.
Q4 is the ideal time to reset.
A clear, differentiated brand positioning is the foundation of an effective marketing strategy because it forces the team to define who the brand serves, what primary benefit it delivers, why it can credibly deliver that benefit, and how it stands apart from key competitors.
Without that clarity, campaigns become fragmented, messaging drifts, and teams default to generic claims that could belong to any brand in the category.
As a reminder, a classic, disciplined positioning statement (your differentiating benefit) looks like:
For (consumer target), Brand is the only (product type) that provides (key benefit), because Brand has (reason to believe 1), (reason to believe 2), and (reason to believe 3).
For example, Peleton’s positioning statement looks something like this:
For people looking to stay motivated with their in-home workout routines, Peloton is the connected fitness platform that delivers an energizing studio experience, with premium equipment, live and on-demand classes, motivating instructors, and personalized progress tracking.
The past few years have reshaped what “value” means in many categories. Consumers are re-evaluating trade-offs between price, quality, health, and convenience; looking for brands that reflect their emotional needs and life stage; paying closer attention to how brands show up on issues like sustainability, wellbeing, and social impact; and comparing more options more quickly across digital and physical channels.
Within that context, positioning can no longer rest solely on functional benefits, i.e., “what it is” or “what it does.” Strong brands are intentionally climbing the Brand Benefit Ladder:
Depending on your brand's maturity and competitive set, you may need to refresh your positioning at any level, from sharpening a functional claim to elevating toward more emotional or purpose-led territory. But you can’t make that decision in a vacuum.
That’s where disciplined, end-of-year consumer research become critical.
Q4 is a valuable time for positioning work because it bridges “what has happened” and “what’s next”:
By investing in brand positioning research now, you give your team the time they need to align on a refined or new positioning territory, translate it into clear messaging and activations and brief your agencies and internal partners in Q1 with a strong strategic foundation.
At SIVO, we’ve spent many years helping brand teams across industries develop and evaluate brand positionings that resonate with both consumers and internal stakeholders. Our approach combines proven frameworks with rigorous qualitative and quantitative research to ensure your positioning is both inspiring and grounded.
In Q4, that typically looks like a two-step process:
1. Qualitative Exploration: Refining the Story With Real Consumers
We start by exploring how consumers currently perceive your brand, your competitors, and the broader category. For example:
We can work side-by-side with you and your agency partners toevolve the statements as we learn, so you’re not waiting months for direction.
2. Quantitative Positioning Validation: Selecting the Strongest Position
Once we’ve refined a set of viable positioning routes qualitatively, we move into quantitative validation to identify the most motivating and distinctive option.
Using surveys and, where appropriate, real-world testing (such as digital ad experiments), the SIVO team will:
The result is not just “a good idea,” but a validatedstrategic choice: a positioning that is clear, unique, credible, and proven toconnect with your consumers across channels all year long, via campaigns,packaging, digital, shopper, innovation, and more.
If you’re already planning for 2027, this is the moment to build a positioning that truly reflects today’s consumer and tomorrow’s opportunity. Let the SIVO team help you develop and validate a brand positioning that communicates exactly how your brand wants to show up in the world, and why that matters to the people you serve!
SIVO Insights brings together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence. Have a business challenge? Let's talk!
We bring together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence
