Where do brands live? Ipsos Mori head of ethnography will surprise you with the answer.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. With me here today, Jim James, I've got Oliver Sweet in London. Oliver, welcome to the show.

Hello, thanks very much for having me. It's great to be here.

Look, it's fascinating because you are the head of ethnography at Ipsos MORI, which we all know is a global research and market intelligence company. You work obviously with polling but also with corporate research, and we're going to talk today about How the brand doesn't live in the mind of the owner of the company, the entrepreneur, but actually lives in someone else's mind and what we can do about that. We're going to talk about some case studies of how people's businesses have been impacted by COVID and what they've had to do differently and why you need to have games in places so that girls go so that the boys will go to get the customers in. So, Oliver. Tell us, what is ethnography first, for those of us that are not into the great semantics and reading thesauruses about what is ethnography?

Well, it's a good question because I think it's a terrible word for a brilliant research technique. Ethnography literally means to document people. Ethno is people and graphy is to write about. But what it means in practice is that I go out and I go and spend time with the people that we want to understand best. And it sort of sits in the spectrum of research. You've got surveys and data, which takes up a lot of research. And then you've got some of the qualitative research techniques like focus groups and interviews. And then at the far end of the spectrum, you have these ethnographic techniques and ethnographic interviews where we are not just reliant on what people tell us in a survey or in a focus group, but we start to watch what people do as well as what people say. And there can be a discrepancy between what people tell us in a very well-intentioned manner and what they actually end up doing, and that might be different.

I think that's absolutely right, because what people say and what people do are not always the same thing. Can you give us an example, Oliver, of How you and your team have uncovered, if you like, the truth of where a brand lives and how behavior can be changed that might have been different to what the organization thought they needed to do.

Yeah. To be honest, there are many examples, but one of, I think one of the most interesting ones was one of the first projects I ever did, actually, many, many years ago. I did some work for The Tower Hamlets Local Authority in London, which has got a very mixed borough. And one of their problems was that they had a lot of antisocial behavior committed by boys in the borough, boys on the street causing a bit of a nuisance. And they'd set up lots of different youth centers around the borough to try and attract these boys in, to give them something to do, essentially. Great idea. And in those youth centers, they'd put video games, they'd put pool tables, they'd put stuff that they thought young boys would want. And they said to us, people aren't coming. Why aren't they coming? So very well-intentioned. And we went and asked, did some interviews with some boys who were hanging out on the streets. And we said, there's a youth center around the corner. What do you want in that youth center? And they said, I'd go to a youth center. That'd be fine. Okay. As long as it's got fun stuff like video games, pool, table tennis, stuff like that. And we went back to the youth center and said, well, They say that they want these things, and you said, we've got them. We've got these things. So what they're telling us isn't right because we're already providing this. So we went actually and spent some time with these young groups of boys out on the street. So we went out with them on Friday nights and Saturday nights or any other time of day, and we just followed them through to the parks, around the streets, hung out in their houses, but they generally didn't want to hang out in their house too much. And went where they went. And we slowly started to realize that the reason that they were out on the street wasn't because they wanted to play video games or anything like that. It's because they were essentially following the girls and they were going where the girls were going. So they were on their phones going, oh, there's a group of girls over there. My friend says that we can go and hang out with them for a bit. So they go off and hang out with them. That was quite exciting. And then the girls would be like, yeah, whatever, these boys, I'm not into you anymore. They'd go off and find something else to do. And then the boys would be like, oh, what are we going to do now?

Right.

What the youth center didn't realize is that if they actually, uh, you know, put things on that the girls wanted, the girls would go to the youth center and then the boys would follow. Right. So we went back to youth centers and said this, and then they started to change a lot of their activities and a lot of their staff and a lot of their comms about actually this is for girls and for boys. You know, you can learn other stuff here. It's not just about playing video games and having a bit of rough and tumble or something, or playing pool and being competitive. It's actually about giving people a safe space to go and spend time together, to hang out and to learn things online and those kinds of things that actually the girls were more interested in.

Oh, fascinating. So why was it that the initial research kind of missed that point? Because it's interesting that somehow that didn't come up in the questioning, but did come up in the observation.

Yeah, it's a good point. I think because And this applies, I think, to a lot of entrepreneurs as well, is that a lot of the time you can go and design the best product or the best service that you can based on what you think people want. So the youth center thought, we need to get boys off the street. What do boys want to do? They want to play video games. They want to play pool. It's true, they do. But that's not the thing that's going to get them off the street. And if you go and ask them what will would boys like to do? They will tell you something that's different to what they actually understand about themselves. The boys weren't lying to us. They just, you know, it was just a different thing between what they actually did and what they said.

Isn't that fascinating? So there's a sort of a— there's a level of behavior that is driving, or a level of motivation rather, that's driving behavior that's not almost sort of conscious. There's another level as well, right? Um, any other examples then, Oliver, of then where you've seen how the— an entrepreneur then can get into the minds of their target client? So rather than think about what they want to sell them, they actually observe what the client needs and build something for that person.

There's, um, there's, I think there's, there's, I've got some very interesting work examples of this. I actually think that a previous podcast that you did with the lady called, um, Jan Cavell, I think her name was. Um, and I might get the details wrong, but essentially she had set up a furniture distribution, um, service and she was a single mom working at home.

Amazing, amazing story. Jan Cavell's furniture business. Yeah.

Absolutely wonderful. But one of the things that she did is that she didn't try and sell people the best furniture. She didn't try and say that this was going to revolutionize their lives. It was something that they really, really, really needed. What she did is that she recognizes that the purchasers were working in a slightly difficult and stressed environment, and her service Through supplying furniture regularly and essentially en masse, but what she was able to do was supply furniture regularly to different people at different times, and they knew that they would need to come back. She took the stress out of their lives. So the job to be done, which is actually something else a guest of yours referenced, the job to be done wasn't to give them the best furniture. It was to remove stress from their lives. which I thought was a wonderful example. I did a project about a year and a half ago, actually, for a drinks company. They are a very large drinks company, enormous. They make multiple different spirits, whiskies, gins, liqueurs, everything. And essentially, what they're after, what they do as a business is start parties, right? a cocktails company, essentially. I mean, they sell bottles of spirits, but fundamentally in terms of their brand, they're Deadstock brand. So you imagine pre-pandemic, they were always out in bars watching how people were making cocktails, the latest cocktails. If you imagine pre-pandemic, you've got a packed bar, lots of people there. You've got a cocktail bar person who's shaking their cocktails, mixing it all together.

Yeah.

It's performance, it's art. It's a moment which is something there to enjoy. It takes a long time, actually, to pour it, to make a really good cocktail, but you get to watch it. Part of the joy of the cocktail is watching the performance as well as the consumption. So you're happy to sit there and wait for 5 minutes while these people, this guy or this woman does this thing, but you're there to watch it. The pandemic hit, the bars shut down, and when the bars started to reopen, People weren't ordering so many cocktails. So drinks company had to go out and go, well, this is a problem for us. Why? The bars are open, the fancy bars are open. Why aren't they doing it? So they went and spent time with the bar staff. And what they realized is that you don't have the packed bars anymore, right? People have to be at their tables. They get table service. Many of those tables are spread out. A lot of them are now spilling out onto the street. So actually it's quite It's a very slow process to get your drink and there's no performance involved. So these sort of wonderful moments where bar staff were able to perform their cocktail-making moments, shaking their cocktail shakers, just was irrelevant to people. And actually people were just getting annoyed with having to wait a long time for their drink. So the bars ended up trying to push and promote drinks that were much quicker to serve. Bottle of beer, glass of wine, or, you know, a simple spirit and mixer. So actually what was happening is this drinks company, because they were mainly selling spirits, were getting cut out of the equation. So what they realized they needed to do was to come up with some very quick-serve, interesting cocktails, something that a barman or anyone, to be quite frank, you didn't need to be that skilled. You could bash a few things together, put a little trolley on top or a piece of fruit in there, and it still felt like an interesting cocktail. So they pivoted and they started promoting those kinds of cocktails. And then the bar— what you're doing is you're helping out the bars because they're spending less time creating their cocktails, and you're getting a greater share of consumption because more spirits are going into the drinks. So I thought that was a great way of kind of showcasing that even though they have the best product, and this may happen in many, many cases, particularly with entrepreneurs, you may have the best product, But that's not the job that people are trying to do. They're trying to relieve stress in their work, for instance.

Oliver Sweet, Head of Ethnography at Ipsos MORI. That's fascinating, and how a change like COVID can fundamentally alter the distribution of a drink. And yet, if the company was still just intent on producing drinks the way they'd always done. The surveys might not have shown that the number of people in a bar had gone down, actually, so they wouldn't have understood at all. So that going in and watching— Um, how difficult is it to do what you do? Is it something that someone like me would need training on? That an entrepreneur says, well, that's great, you know, big companies can afford to do this, but I couldn't possibly do ethnographic studies. So can you just give us an idea of, you know, how can someone that's got a smaller business do what you're doing for big companies?

I'm a big, big believer in making ethnography accessible to everyone. And the basics of ethnography are that you go and meet people where they are, And understand their life from their point of view. So, you know, explained like that, it's very, very straightforward. You go and find some people who you are interested in because they may or may not be buying your product, and you go and look at their life. But the problem we often find is if you've got an agenda, i.e., you want them to buy your product, you often start asking them very, very quickly, Hey, do you like my product? What do you think of it? Is it good? Would you buy it again? Would you tell your friends about it? That's not understanding them in their place, right? If we went and asked bar staff, do you like cocktails? They love cocktails. Would you like to sell more cocktails? We'd love to sell more cocktails. But what's going on in your life? Pretty stressed, actually. I'm on my feet 24/7. I'm having to run tables a long, long, long way. The tips have gone down because the number of drinks served, you know, If you ask them what their problems are in their life, what's their commute like, right? Do they get on with their colleagues? Do they— like, all of these other questions about their real life will give you answers to why and how they might buy your product. There are so many products out there that are amazing, but they just haven't been marketed in a way or understood in a way that can fit into people's lives. And that's what ethnography is there to do on a very basic level.

No, that's fantastic. And although it's got a very complicated-sounding name, you know, ironically enough, it's a very simple— not meaning to undermine the value of it— it's a detective role, observational role, isn't it? When people then are working from home more and more, As entrepreneurs, and we're relying more on Zoom and AI. What dangers do you see for business owners when we're getting sort of increasingly separated from the people that we're serving?

I think one of the things that's happened with remote working from the pandemic is that we've gone sort of deeper into our echo chambers. So the idea that we rely on people's thoughts who are actually very, very similar to us, people who live nearby us, people who we hear about online, because we don't actually meet people who are different to us. And I think that that is one of the biggest dangers, is that we end up with this kind of groupthink that happens quite quickly. And ethnography is fantastic for doing that. And the reason I think it's super important for entrepreneurs to start thinking about this is because what does that mean for your brand? So if you live in a place with people who are very similar to you, they will probably think in a very similar way about the products that they buy and what those things mean. But that's only a tiny part of your market. A brand actually doesn't— So there's a philosophical debate within the world of qualitative research about where a brand lives. And I work with many large companies, many large corporates who have brand managers, and their role is to manage the brand. It has an emotional element to the brand, a functional element to the brand. It's distributed in certain ways. You need to see it at different points of day. It can become very technical, brand management. So they think they own the brand. My personal belief is that a brand exists in the minds of people who buy it, right? So your brand has a story attached to it. It's got provenance. It's, you might have, you might be pushing ideas around ingredients and you might have a logo which has certain brand assets to it that is quite distinctive. You might have a big green circle, for instance, or you might have brown shoots coming out of it or whatever. And that, that image and that story has a meaning to people in their minds. And that meaning, I think, is something that we, or entrepreneurs, or anyone in the world who's interested in brands needs to go and investigate. You need to go and investigate what that brand means to people, because that way, you are tapping into what they need and what they want. I think there's a very interesting example of that with, obviously, a huge brand, Jägermeister. Jägermeister is a, I think, a German sort of mountain drink. It's got lots of herbs infused into it, and it was originally created as a digestif, something you drink after your meal to help with digestion. A lot of Germans actually drink it as a sort of pseudo-medicinal drink. You've got a bit of a stomach upset or you're feeling a bit down, actually a little shot of Jägermeister is actually really, really good. It's good for the soul. The medicinal elements are good for you. You go to a bar at 11 PM in London, it's not consumed for medicinal purposes. Well, maybe a different kind of medicinal purpose.

I don't know.

That's right. But it's often consumed as a Jägerbomb, as a shot of Jägermeister mixed in with a Red Bull, quick down the hatch, and it's like rocket fuel. It kind of charges you for your night. And if you think about that as a brand, it's a completely different brand. Completely and utterly different brand. And Jägermeister, to their credit, saw this and went— they didn't say, it's not what my drink is supposed to be. It's not how my drink is supposed to be consumed. It's not how my brand is supposed to be thought of. We are a sophisticated drink that helps with people. They went, no, fine, let's lean in, let's go for it. And they went with this idea that people are using it as Jägerbombs. They created machines in bars that you can do a quick shot from. You've got sort of slightly neon lighting. They've kept the same kind of brand assets because it needs to be recognizable, but they've recognized and encouraged this new consumption and this new meaning in the minds of consumers. And it's, you know, gone through the roof as a result.

Yes, it's fascinating, Oliver. So in that sense, the product can take on a life of its own, which is kind of liberating as well, isn't it, for entrepreneurs? That if you build something almost as a prototype, put it in the market. Oliver, if there is one piece of advice— I mean, I know you're working with big corporates, um, but as you talk to my fellow, I notice, entrepreneurs— there's a piece of advice, what would you say entrepreneurs could or should do to use this sort of study of people and customers for their businesses?

I think the most important thing is just to Stay in touch with people. And I think the easiest way to do that, or the most productive way, would be to create a small community of super users or people who you are particularly interested in, and talk to them regularly. Talk to them regularly where they are, about what they're doing, and go back to them again and again. Make them become your investigators. If you are in the world of juicing, ask them about all the sorts of juices they're doing or what else could they be using that blender for. What are the other ways? Do they start talking about it with other people? But keep it as a regular, informal conversation. Don't talk about your brand. Don't talk about your product necessarily. Talk about what they are doing. And if they do become kind of super users or juice lovers, if you like, if you want to go with that analogy, then have a chat.

Yeah.

help them talk to each other, help them bounce ideas off each other, but keep it away from your product, your brand, your agenda, and keep it to their agenda.

That's fantastic, Oliver. And I think the founder of Patagonia used to do that. I think he used to spend like 40 or 50% of his time doing the activities, didn't he, in the outdoors that his products were for, and built a wonderful community around the brand as well. Oliver Sweet, if people want to find out more about you and Ipsos MORI, how can they do that?

We are a very large and innovative research company in, I think, 89 different markets. We're around. Our website is—

You should be findable.

Our website is very navigable and you can find out what we do. We're mostly doing surveys, qualitative research like focus groups, or my team is quite small and niche doing ethnography. If you want to contact me directly, I'm very, very open to that. The easiest way is often through LinkedIn, and you'll find me there as Head of Ethnography at Ipsos.

And that's Oliver Sweet, and I'll put his details. But sweet as in like to eat a nice sweet, and it has been a sweet conversation. Can I use that pun? Oliver, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks very much, Jim. It's been really interesting.

Well, it's been interesting for me, and, you know, I've tried not to interrupt, although I wanted to jump in a few times because it's such a fascinating topic, but you've really reminded me of the need to get out and be where customers and users and the community is rather than, you know, sitting at home and, and just doing everything online. So thank you so much, Oliver, for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show today.

It's a pleasure. Thanks.

So you've been listening to Oliver Sweet, who's the head of ethnography, which as we've heard, whilst got a complicated name, actually has a very basic premise that we go out and spend time with the people that we want to serve, which I think is just a really wonderful and reassuring message that in this day and age of AI, Actually, it's being with people that's going to be the foundation of the success for our business. So if you've enjoyed this episode, please do share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur and review it on the player of your choice. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to, I guess, keep on communicating, but also do communicating with the people that you want to serve and where you want to serve them. Thanks for listening.