Reality Research: Using Ethnography to Uncover
What Customers Really
Do With Your Products

Ethnographic research has been used for years by consumer product companies and other industries to gain deeper insights about their markets and the beliefs, motivations and behaviors that characterize their customers. Increasingly, pharmaceutical companies are seeking the unique insights this form of marketing research can provide.

In brief, ethnographic research is a means by which pharmaceutical companies can gain more detailed and comprehensive insights about their customers than can typically be obtained from traditional marketing research methods. Using a range of data collection techniques that hinge on participant observation, ethnographic research is useful for those pharmaceutical marketers who want to deepen the pursuit of their marketing questions by exploring the often significant gaps between what respondents say they do, in a formal marketing research interview setting, and what they actually do when observed in a more natural environment.

To understand the value that ethnographic methods can bring to pharmaceutical marketing research, and when and why this approach can offer incremental benefits over traditional marketing research techniques, it is helpful to contrast the strengths and weaknesses of both types of research approaches.

In a recent Medical Marketing & Media article, Barry J. Cerf, Ph.D., GfK V2 Executive Vice President and a trained anthropologist, explores the application of ethnographic methods to pharmaceutical marketing research and outlines a number of ideal scenarios where product teams can benefit from the ethnographic “edge.”

To download the full article titled, A Day in the Life of Your Customer, click here.


Want to learn more on this topic? Please contact: