EPIC 2007 - Being Heard
The third international Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) recently took place in Keystone, Colorado. Representing Yahoo! Research at the conference was Elizabeth Churchill, who served on the EPIC steering committee and was a curator for workshops.
EPIC is the premier international forum bringing together artists, computer scientists, designers, social scientists, marketers, academics and advertisers to promote the integration of cultural perspectives, theories and methods into business practice.
“For me the highlight was hearing about projects that illustrate the profound impact ethnographic research can have on strategic thinking in organizations,” Churchill says. “Ethnographic work tells us about what is changing (or not changing) in a culture. We can use that knowledge to drive innovative designs and new features for products that already exist. But this kind of knowledge also helps companies innovate strategically by helping to predict trends, and to distinguish fads from lasting practices.”
The theme of EPIC 2007 was "Being Heard". The conference focused on the growing ability of people worldwide to give voice to themselves, their culture, their issues and their ideas. This theme was reflected in the many workshops and sessions, including “Getting Noticed, Showing-Off, Being Over-Heard: Amateurs, authors and artists inventing and reinventing themselves in online communities” and “Not Lost in Translation: Maximizing Impact in Marketing Ethnography”.
Ethnographic research aims to understand people’s behaviors in their everyday context. Although detailed in-situ observation is a research method used in many social sciences, ethnographic research is most closely associated with the academic discipline of anthropology. The result of such research is a focus on the culture of the group under study, not simply on individuals in that group.
Conducting customer-centric ethnographic work for a corporation means “understanding the people and cultures the company serves and contributes to. But it also requires looking at the company itself to understand its own core values and competencies. That way, when we are designing services and products, we know how to most effectively align the company’s potential for innovation and the satisfaction of customer needs,” Churchill explains.
Yahoo!’s presence at EPIC signals clearly the company’s commitment to understanding the interests, needs, affiliations and activities of its customers. “We can deepen our understanding of customers’ values by artfully combining quantitative, large-scale general data with qualitative data that helps us understand why people do what they do,” Churchill says. “Events like EPIC provide an invaluable discussion forum for how to do this crucial interpretive work.”
