Digital ethnographies
The problem
Our client, a large music and media company, wanted to understand how it could grow its brand and business to become more resilient in the face of emerging competitors and interactive technologies. It was an incredibly exciting and large project that began with my competitive audit to better understand the landscape, along with deep-dive internal sessions to understand their current state and future-facing business priorities—and would eventually culminate in a large-scale (10K participants) customer segmentation effort to establish core and growth audience segments, and a future roadmap of growth concepts, business moves, and an optimized brand portfolio strategy.
To set the stage for intensive audience selection (the big segmentation), we needed to better understand the audio consumers of today, both in terms of current behaviors and emerging needs. Gaining in-depth, personal understanding of potential customers would inform our segmentation effort—not only to inform the kinds of questions asked, but to help us recognize patterns and real people in the data that came back.
So, we set out to facilitate mobile “digital diaries” that would give us an insight into the habits, needs, and desires today’s audio consumers.
The process
We used a digital diary software to connect with audio listeners engaging with any of an intentional range of brands (both our client’s and their competitors’) asynchronously and at their own pace. We intentionally included “fringe” users who exhibit emerging or extreme types of audio usage, so that we could learn from unusual as well as more run-of-the-mill audio listeners.
Participants completed 15-20 minutes of exercises per day, over 5 days. We had 50 active participants.
Questions targeted behaviors to see how people engage with audio and how they use it in their lives.
Following the week of digital diaries, we selected the most interesting and active 25 participants for 1:1 live IDIs (in-depth interviews) to probe further on the needs, preferences, motivations, and behaviors uncovered in the diaries.
Following the deeper conversations, we synthesized findings in a top-line read-out document supported with participant-generated videos, photos, and text responses from their digital diaries to bring their stories to life.
Each participant story included their first name, photo they provided, age, music brands they engage with, a key quote that represents the core of the story we heard, a few bullet-points each on their:
Psychographics (e.g. “A new mom who values family and connections with others; hosts BBQs with her husband” or “Puts a lot of stock in recommendations from others—strangers (from Rotten Tomatoes to waiters at restaurants) as well as friends”) with a key quote (e.g. “I prefer experiences that make me feel connected to other people. I enjoy sharing the joy of an experience…. to feeling connected to a broader community”)
Role of audio (e.g. “Listens to relax alone as a form of self-care” or “Her most important listening occasion is her sleep meditation, which allows her to feel calm at the end of the day” or “Listens to podcasts to learn something new (from true crime to birthing)”) with a key quote (“Listening is a way for me to get alone time”)
Listening behaviors (e.g. “She tires of the repetitiveness of AM/FM radio, but listens to that when she doesn’t feel like plugging in her phone” or “listens to her DJ friend livestream his sets on Twitch” or “Loves listening to music in the background on her Alexa when she cleans the house”) with a key quote (“If there were a calm radio station that played relaxing sounds like the ocean I would listen to that in the car after a long work day”)
Brand perceptions (e.g. “Defaults to the platform that’s ‘most compatible’ with the tech at hand” and “Uses Apple Music and Apple Podcasts most often because they work with her iPhone so easily”) with a key quote (e.g. “Apple is easy because it’s compatible with my devices…I’ve never had issues with it and it gives good suggestions based on what I’ve listened to”)
Each participant story has a second page completely dedicated to photo, audio, videos, and text snippet responses from their digital diaries, with callouts and edits for digestibility, to bring their stories to life.
(Unfortunately, I can’t share these beautiful participant story pages further in order to protect confidentiality!)
We further synthesized this work to yield five core novel insights about audio listeners today—which we used to structure our segmentation survey, making sure we tapped into needs, preferences, behaviors, and perceptions in each of those areas to better define our segments and how they differed from one another.
My contribution: With two senior colleagues, I helped to craft the sampling screener as well as the questions and prompts posed in the digital diaries (as well as the later IDIs). I monitored the progress on the digital diaries every day and asked asynchronous follow-up questions and prompts for the participants to respond to, for us to go deeper on points of interest. I reviewed all content and gathered video snippets, photos, and text entries of interest from each participant, using the software. I also helped to craft the discussion guide for the IDIs and moderated approximately one third of the IDIs. I later led (with senior review and necessary refinements) the synthesis of top findings and participant story slides, which included cutting audio and video snippets using editing software to be representative and digestible.
Reflection: From this experience I learned the power of STORIES, even (and perhaps particularly) in a very large organization. It was honestly moving to hear colleagues at our client partner’s organization repeat the names and stories of the people we interviewed in the course of business and product development conversations. It showed how stories, viscerally told, can help an entire organization become more truly user-centered.