Capturing your consumer’s everyday life

This week I’m posting the last few stories that feature in the Where’s the Sausage? book, which launches a week today, on Monday 1st October. Each brand story in the book is developed in more detail here on this blog.

This post is about using ethnography to capture in a vivid way insights about your consumer’s life. This involves filming consumers going about their life. The agency featured in the WTS? book is in fact a real one, called Everyday Lives, who helped get some great insight on a coffee project I worked on with the Kenco brand.

The project in question was looking at out-of-home coffee. Kenco supply roast and ground coffee (the real stuff, not instant) to lots of places such as Tesco’s cafe and also Mc Donalds (I posted on how ground coffee built their business here). Like many companies, Kenco were focused very much on their view of the product, which was the beans they sold. What sort of beans should we sell, in what sort of bags? What sort of different blends could we sell?

Filming coffee drinkers out and about shed a whole new light on this. The mini movies brought to life just how important the whole experience of coffee drinking was. The type of cup, saucer and spoon was just important as the coffee itself. And the foam on a cappuccino counts a hellevua lot! These results had also come through in quantitative research. But seeing real consumers on film talking was much more effective at getting the mutli-functional team to change their approach, and start advising customers on the coffee experience.

Everyday Lives are a very cool company, and a great place to start of you are thinking of using ethnography.  You cant contact head honcho Siamack Salari at siamack@everydaylives.com.