The Infinite Dial

I am pleased to see the radio industry starting to take a bit more interest in qualitative research, a subject I am particularly passionate about. That's why I am pleased that Arbitron has funded The Bedroom Project, an honest-to-gosh piece of ethnographic research from our friends at Jacobs Media. Fred wrote about it today, and I am normally not a 'rip-and-read' kind of blogger, but anytime I see radio delving into qualitative research to gain insight, I have to give some props.

Ethnographic research is nothing new--in fact, this sort of in situ consumer observation has long been de rigueur in the consumer products industry. I went to a Marketing Research Association conference a couple of years back that spotlighted some of the ethnographic work done by Tide and other household brands designed to see how people use the product, not just hear them describe it, and the amount of insight they gained into things like no-drip bottles was astounding. I love conducting focus groups (I've done 13 in the past 3 weeks alone!) but ethnographic research is a perfect tool to gain insight into products or services that people tend to take for granted, or use as a utility--products like toilet paper, detergent and--for many--radio. By observing interactions with the product we place less stress on the respondent to articulate product distinctions and to essentially do our work for us by attempting to be specific about behaviors and attitudes ofwhich they may only be partially aware. There is, of course, always a kind of Heisenberg Principle at work in ethnography, but you really can't shake that in any kind of research.

I'd love to see radio do more of this kind of work--especially now with the advent of PPM and the importance of radio in public spaces. Observing a garage, or an office, for instance, would tell us more about how and why radio gets selected and consumed in the workplace than a hundred strategic studies. Edison keeps up on the state of the art for ethnography and other qualitative techniques through our membership and participation in the Advertising Research Foundation. If you are interested in learning more about current theory and past practices of this technique, their Journal for Advertising Research is a great place to start.