Sometimes the best way to let consumers communicate with us is to get out in the world and look at what's happening. Certain problems demand it - the ethnographic approach.

How do you learn what goes on when a young mom feeds a little kid? You could ask – and learn what she thinks. But, if you watch, you’ll see things she never "thinks about" or is conscious of. Things that may drive her buying decisions without her ever "thinking about" them.

Watch several groups of people coming into a fast-food restaurant. Where do they go when they come in the door? Do some groups stay together, while others break up? Who walks up to the counter right away? Who hangs back? It won’t take long before you see patterns emerge – patterns that consumers probably can’t tell you about because they haven’t stood around watching and taking notes. Patterns that hold clues about how the architecture, signage, lighting, and traffic patterns of the restaurant affect the customer experience.

InVision™ takes three distinct approaches to ethnographic research:

• Whenever the questions are about a process, an interaction between people, or an interaction between people and something in their environment, we know we can learn valuable things by observation that cannot be learned by talking. Our researchers go where the action is — a store, a service station, a home, a mall —and observe, looking for the unexplained behaviors that can lead to a better designed or a better positioned product.



• With a mature product, the marketing team may need to be energized to move the product forward. In this case, we can take an "ethnographic bus trip" in which the researchers and members of the marketing team go out on the home turf of their customers to understand how consumers are actually using the product.



• A picture can be worth a thousand words. So, we can bring the environment to us by asking consumers to take pictures or videotapes of whatever behavior or setting will clarify the relevance of a product to consumers.

Over the years, we've shopped with people for many kinds of products, watched runners running, drivers pumping gas and getting their cars fixed, watched homes get messed up, then cleaned up. In one memorable year, we lived through the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season with a half-dozen families as their hopes for perfect holidays met the reality of their real lives and families. Sometimes the way to communicate is by keeping quiet and letting people show you the answer.