GETTING INTIMATE
Living in and adapting to a culture of exposure
Anita BlackJon McNeill
Mitra Martin
Abstract
In our world, the boundaries are shifting between the public, the personal and the private. Now that it is so easy to share aspects of our inner life with the rest of the world – up-to-the-minute, multi-media, deeply exposing or personal revelations – we, as qualitative researchers, need to review whether our own practices should change in the wake of this cultural shift. When is it still relevant to promise the people we speak with that their footage “won’t show up on the Internet” – and, on the other hand, when is it more appropriate to incentivize respondents by the promise that it will? This is just one example of how dramatically the culture of exposure affects our craft.
Drawing from our work with a fascinating array of people ranging from superbloggers to hermits, we’ll share our learning on this broad cultural trend, and then go on to highlight what this means for qualitative research – how we need to adapt our methodologies to yield intimate dialogue with people in this new world, and evolve our interpretative models to maximize learning for our clients.
Anita Black
Anita has over 20 years experience in brand and communications research, mostly on the qualitative side (in many diverse categories, from tech to alcohol, baby products to pensions) but she has also worked as a client, a planner and a quantitative researcher. She enjoys working with smart clients and planners to shape strategy and inspire creativity. Her team focuses on helping clients uncover and develop breakthrough ideas, bringing clarity and direction to great strategy and working closely with agencies to develop engaging and distinctive creative work. She’s proud to manage and be inspired by a team of 40 qualitative consultants who travel the globe getting to know people for the benefit of such wonderful brands as Microsoft, UPS, eBay, Pernod Ricard and American Express.
Jon McNeill
Jon McNeill joined the Hall & Partners qualitative team in 2006 after leading product design and brand strategy research studies for Fiori Research in Portland, OR. Jon is a trained ethnographer, with a background in visual anthropology. Jon thrives on the diversity that his work affords, from spending time in the corn fields of an elderly Iowan farmer talking about the Internet’s impact on American politics, to trying to understand what it means to be “just one of the girls” in a week with teenagers in Boston, to just trying to hang on in a sports car going 115 in the streets of Miami. Jon’s clients include Yahoo, Porsche, The Sharper Image, Quiznos and eBay.
Mitra Martin
Mitra has been exploring the phenomenon of communication from many perspectives since 1997: as a brand strategist, account planner, qualitative researcher, community organizer, and artist. As a qualitative consultant, she loves to help clients see the world fresh through the eyes of their constituencies. Her recent strategic achievements include helping a major search engine understand conscious consumption and a financial institution better understand borrowers’ struggles. She has used qualitative to find new ways to reconnect a world renowned medical center and a county art museum to its local community, and to increase energy consumers’ environmental sensitivity. She has been with Hall & Partners since 2003. Mitra also teaches and performs Argentine Tango professionally in Los Angeles. She has been exploring the role of online media in connecting people since 1998.
KEEP ME INFORMED |