Anne Truitt Zelenka

Don’t count on mindless consumerism these days. We consumers have so many ways of figuring out what we need and getting it at a good price. When I want to buy some new gadget, I check reviews on CNET and ZDNet. Long before that, I’ve been made aware of the whole landscape of possibilities by reading big commercial blogs like Engadget or little personal blogs that tell me what’s worked and what hasn’t for them. I can go to Epinions for reviews from real world users then find great deals on Clipfire, Froogle, or Woot. If I’m not ready to buy (perhaps I want to give myself time to get over the urge), I can set up a wish list on Kaboodle or Wishlistr. And don’t forget the stories I’ve heard about your company. Web 2.0 makes consumers better informed and more sophisticated. It makes us more mindful of our consumer choices.

The companies that serve us need to be mindful, to meet us where we are. Mindfulness requires fully engaging with the present moment, avoiding premature judgment, and making decisions consciously rather than by default. Mindlessness, on the other hand, occurs when we take action by rote, rely on narrow biases and preconceptions, and let our attention wander wherever it wants, no matter how important the task or person we’re dealing with right now.

Companies are realizing that to be successful, they need to be mindful in the way they understand and approach customers. In The Science of Desire, Business Week writes about how some companies are finding that ethnography, a qualitative research methodology that exemplifies mindfulness in action, helps them develop and improve products:

Companies have been harnessing the social sciences, including ethnography, since the 1930s. Back then executives were mostly interested in figuring out how to make their employees more productive. But since the 1960s, when management gurus crowned the consumer king, companies have been tapping ethnographers to get a better handle on their customers. Now, as more and more businesses re-orient themselves to serve the consumer, ethnography has entered prime time.

The beauty of ethnography, say its proponents, is that it provides a richer understanding of consumers than does traditional research. Yes, companies are still using focus groups, surveys, and demographic data to glean insights into the consumer’s mind. But closely observing people where they live and work, say executives, allows companies to zero in on their customers’ unarticulated desires. “It used be that design features were tacked on to the end of a marketing strategy,” says Timothy deWaal Malefyt, an anthropologist who runs “cultural discovery” at ad firm BBDO Worldwide. “Now what differentiates products has to be baked in from the beginning. This makes anthropology far more valuable.”

Ethnography is characterized by direct, firsthand observation of people’s actions and relationships in the situation and environment of interest. It requires observation and sometimes even participation, a full engagement in the present moment. Ethnography is discovery-based and inductive; with this approach, researchers don’t develop hypotheses before beginning a study. This is mindful: the researcher enters the situation without preconceptions about what might happen or what guiding principles hold. She must discover them as she goes, constructing stories out of the small actions, reactions, and interactions that she observes, ideally, with full attention.

In consumer research, ethnography stands as a mindful example against mindless focus groups. In focus groups, people report how they act and feel and they guess at what they might want or buy. With ethnography, direct observation of people in naturalistic settings (e.g., in their home office, at their laptop computer) tells researchers what people really do and gives hints as to what new products might meet unreported needs.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, recently noted in his blog how typical market research draws simplistic and incomplete answers from people about why they choose what they do:

But in market research, the answers people give sound more like conventions: “It’s a good value”, “my family likes it”, “it tastes good.” And it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.

Answers like these, based on conventions, are unlikely to provide product developers with useful information about what people really want and need and, more importantly, what they’re willing to spend money on. Consumer culture has become too mindful for that. To be successful with the new consumer, companies will need to engage with us mindfully.