Web True.0: Why the Internet and Digital Ethnography Hold the Key to Answering the Questions That Traditional Research Just Can't.

By Ujwal Arkalgud and Jason Partridge

Whether you’re a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a new hire, fresh out of your MBA, Web True.O is a book that will change how you look at the Internet and help you realize that it can reveal the secrets behind why people do the crazy things they do. As the cofounders of one of the world’s fastest growing research firms and pioneers in the field of Digital Ethnography, Ujwal Arkalgud and Jason Partridge use their groundbreaking methodology to scour the web and examine major shifts that have occurred in consumer culture. In these pages you’ll discover: Why polls keep getting politics all wrong Why online shopping isn’t what’s killing mid-tier retail Why patients doubt doctors more than ever before Through this book, you will discover that the Internet holds answers that traditional research can no longer uncover. Most importantly, this book will change the way you look at your customers and their unmet needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Mar 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483465197

Book preview

WEB TRUE.0

WHY THE INTERNET AND

DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY

HOLD THE KEY TO

ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS

THAT TRADITIONAL

RESEARCH JUST CAN’T.

UJWAL ARKALGUD

JASON PARTRIDGE

Copyright © 2017 Ujwal Arkalgud and Jason Partridge.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-6520-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-6519-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901864

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 3/6/2017

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Why you’re looking at the Internet and research all wrong.

Chapter 2

Malcolm Gladwell and Rocky tag team Tony the Tiger.

Chapter 3

Why doctors want to tell us to go F@ck ourselves.

Chapter 4

Nobody’s a saint when it comes to money. And we mean nobody.

Chapter 5

Think all Millennials are socially progressive? That’s interesting.

Chapter 6

Wrist mounted dart guns and how they can save the retail industry.

Chapter 7

How the nonprofit industry is swiping Millennials to the left.

Chapter 8

Assumptions make an ass out of astronauts and automotive marketing

Chapter 9

Identifying the microjobs that matter to your business.

DEDICATION

Thank you to both our parents and spouses for all the love and support.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We would like to thank Simon Sinek and Geoffrey Moore for their advice and encouragement. Special thanks to Clayton Christensen for meeting with us in person to discuss our vision. And lastly, thanks to Grant McCracken for his pioneering work in the space, and for being an ongoing source of wisdom and inspiration over the years.

CHAPTER 1

WHY YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE INTERNET AND RESEARCH ALL WRONG.

In 1961 Henri Matisse’s masterpiece, Le Bateau, was hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since Matisse died in 1954, he was not available to see this particular piece displayed in one of the world’s most reputed and respected art institutions. Which is unfortunate when you consider that the curator of the museum and his staff had hung the picture upside down.

It took 47 days before a museum visitor by the name of Genevieve Habert noticed the mistake. After three visits to the museum, she couldn’t help but feel that Matisse would never have placed his more complex, main motif at the bottom of the painting and the simpler, less complex motif on top. With a little bit of research, she was able to find a catalogue with a picture of the art work displayed correctly.

Once the Museum’s art director was notified, the painting was flipped. When Matisse’s son (an art dealer who himself had attended the exhibition without noticing the error) was informed, he said Habert should receive a reward. But most important, when the museum investigated how this mistake occurred, the person in charge of installing the pictured claimed they simply followed what the labels on the back of Le Bateau directed. Those labels were upside down.

Further in the museum’s defense, the painting also had deep, dominant screw holes on the bottom of the back of the frame, so it was clear that the painting had been hung incorrectly by other galleries in the past. The Museum of Modern Art’s crime was simply doing things the way they had always been done before. It wasn’t until Habert provided a different perspective that the experts were forced to look at the painting differently, and more closely. After a more rigorous and intense examination, they found faint holes at the top of the picture frame highlighting the correct way in which the art was to be hung, and be seen.

This story serves as a powerful metaphor for Fortune 500 companies looking to better understand their consumers – because, much like modern art, consumer culture is a deeply complex mystery that needs to be carefully studied. It is a product of the past, a pulse revealing the desires of consumers in the present, and a window to the trends that will shape the future. Is it complex? Yes. Is it confusing? Yes. But properly analyzed and interpreted, consumer culture can unlock insights that drive more accurate and effective business strategy.

In our present day, the most powerful and most important window we have into consumer culture is the Internet. Because there are 2.4 billion people online every day, sharing their souls with the world.

Consider that in the next 60 seconds consumers will share 2,460,000 pieces of content on Facebook. They will share 347,222 photos on WHATSAPP and 216,000 new photos on Instagram. There will be 277,000 new Tweets, 26,380 new reviews posted to Yelp, and 8,333 new Vine videos shared. Behind every post, every picture, every thought, and every opinion there is a person revealing how they see the world. They are telling us how they see themselves, how they want to be seen, and what they aspire to become. They are leaving a trail of social media breadcrumbs that can guide us into having a deeper, more emotional, and more empathetic view of the good, the bad, and the ugly that make up what we are as human beings.

Whether you are a CEO of a billion-dollar company, a marketing manager at a start-up, a senior executive running an innovation department or quite simply a person who prides themselves on being savvy when it comes to social media, our guess is you are underestimating how much you can learn about someone online.

This book will change that.

Because while many believe that the majority of these shares or posts are simply minutia, we have discovered that the truth, in fact, lies in the minutia. But in order to find the truth, we need to take a slightly different lens through which to view these minutia-type data. This book will turn you into an authority on this new lens.

But it will be controversial.

Quite simply because if you look at how most corporations, organizations, and politicians (and the research firms they hire) conduct research today, they almost always rely on two basic methods.

The first involves asking people to tell them what they think or feel, via surveys, polls, focus groups, or in-depth interviews. This means the consumers they are trying to understand are always interrupted and, in some way or another, their response is consciously or subconsciously influenced by the experience, because they know that they are being observed or, worse yet, judged.

The second method involves looking for patterns of behavior (like what people are talking about or where), by studying consumer conversations and interactions online.

Here’s the problem. Both these methods yield rational information, because they come directly from the mouth of the consumer. And when you take what a consumer tells you at face value, you miss the underlying insight – the real reason WHY someone is saying something or acting a certain way.

This is not to say that there is nothing to learn from these approaches and this book is certainly not meant as a critique of the research industry. These methods are great when you need to determine WHAT someone has done or said, and WHERE and WHEN they did so. But the real question that drives innovation, more effective communications, meaningful consumer journeys, and more powerful business strategies is WHY? Traditional research almost always fails to answer WHY consumers are acting a certain way and therefore fails to reveal unmet and undiscovered opportunities to motivate consumers to change their behavior. No matter the industry or category.

This book is meant to help you change that, and get to the WHY.

Like Genevieve Habert, we are less interested in the way things have been done, and more interested in finding new ways to analyze, understand, and leverage the information available to us, so that we can get as close to the truth as possible. In fact, our interest in writing this book is born out of the fact that over the past six years we have studied almost a million consumers around the globe. We have worked in the most competitive market categories and helped some of the most successful organizations understand their consumers and identify the trends and shifts that matter to their businesses. As a result, we have built one of the fastest growing research companies in the world, and crafted a methodology that today guides many Fortune 500 companies as they look to better understand the culture of their consumer. This book will showcase numerous examples of how the obvious, and rational, answer is often not the right answer and if you truly want to understand what is motivating behavior, you need to change how you look at people, and how they share their lives online. You need to embrace a new philosophical approach to consumer research.

We call this approach Web True.0.

Why do we call it Web True.0? When we tell people that we study consumer culture online, the first question we get is Don’t people lie when they’re on the Internet? To which we reply Absolutely. But guess what? People lie offline, too. In fact, people lie everywhere, all the time. And they most often lie to themselves. One of the key reasons for this is, as human beings, we struggle to articulate the emotions and motivations behind our decisions when asked. As Simon Sinek rightly points out in his book, Start With Why (2009), the part of our brain that motivates us to do something is completely different from the part of the brain that helps us express it in words. It’s biology. Fortunately, looking at consumers through the lens of Web True.0 can circumvent this problem. Web True.0 is based on the philosophy of never asking consumers what they think or believe, but instead observing them without ever revealing the researcher’s presence. There is only one place in the world where that is possible. It’s on the Internet, where we can now leverage publicly available information to look back at several years of people’s lives to better understand the motivation behind the things they do and say, all without ever having to ask them or interrupt them.

This is not entirely new. Those of you who are familiar with the world of consumer research will likely be acquainted with a form of research called ethnography. In its simplest form, it is the study of people and cultures where a researcher finds ways to observe society from the point of view of the subject of the study. In immersive ethnographies researchers will often disguise themselves as a member of a culture in order to immerse themselves into the world of the subject and understand their customs, rituals, and belief systems. The interesting thing is that while immersive forms of ethnographic research have existed for decades they are almost always applied in the physical world. In a typical study, researchers would have access to only a few hundred people at a time – if they were lucky. Which means a lot of the outcomes lack the scale needed in order to extrapolate the insights to larger population groups in order to identify emerging consumer trends in a particular category or even size up a market opportunity.

The Internet presents an opportunity to solve this scale problem – by leveraging publicly available information online to observe and study thousands and thousands of people as they go about living their daily lives, building and breaking relationships, buying things, expressing opinions, reaching life’s milestones, and more. Over the past six years, we have studied almost a million people using ethnographic methods. And we’ve done it all online using a method that has come to be known as Digital Ethnography. In this book, we will share with you some incredible stories of work we’ve completed to prove to you that this form of research can help you solve some of the most challenging business problems facing your organization today. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in our years of working in the field of research and innovation, it’s that the most successful solutions don’t come from brilliant people who conjure up ideas in their heads. The best new products and solutions come from people who’ve somehow managed to understand a consumer so well that the unmet need or the idea just naturally floats to the surface in their minds. They don’t have to pluck it out of thin air. It’s right there, before their eyes. We created the