I’ve been re-reading Anontio Damasio’s wonderful book, Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, when I came across an insightful story about context. Damasio tells the story of the smile. It seems the way you smile in a “staged” situation, like standing in front of a camera when the photographer says “cheese,” activates one section of the brain while a smile created by a genuine experience turns on different section of the brain.
This example made me think about the lack of context that so much of market research contains. We’ve all heard the horror stories of focus groups. Damasio’s smile story can perhaps explain why they don’t work as well as other “in-context” methods, such as ethnogrophy. The problem is that “in-context” methods take more time. In my mind, the time is worth it when you’re relying on the research to make important strategic decisions.
So many times I see people wanting to try and enter a new market and desperetely want to understand a culture, like surfing, wanting to immediately jump into exploring the way a product or marketing campaign might work or be perceived.
It’s great to be excited about going out and getting the story, but without going slowly enough to understand the cultural context, things can go wrong very quickly. One of my favorite stories of such a case is one that I expereinced on the beach in Mexico.
I was getting out of the water after my morning surf session. That morning I was surfing with a friend who had been in the film industry for a long time. It was still early and the light was beautiful. We looked around and saw a photo shoot in progress. It seemed intriguing that such a thing was happening in our small fishing village.
There was a large group of folks including a couple of photographers, a make-up artist, an art director, the director, some assistants and several models. As we walked over and inquired what the photo shoot was for, a tattooed woman looked at us with disdain and said it was for the Buckle, a teen retailer in the U.S. for an instant it felt like we were in L.A.
It was obvious that the Buckle’s creative team decided to be sure their photos were authentic – so they jetted the team off to Mexico to enjoy a little of this authenticity. As we watched, the photographer directed a male model jumping around with a surfboard in his hand. The photographer was yelling out “Rub the surfboard! Rub the surfboard!”
During the action, my buddy said, “Watch this.” He quickly strolled over right behind the producer and said very quietly, “The surfboard’s upside down.” All of a sudden the producer started yelling, “Stop! Stop! The surfboard is upside down!” which sent everyone scrambling.
The creative team for the Buckle thought that they could prove an understanding of the culture by spending a ton of money on a Mexican surf experience. The problem was that the team didn’t know anything about surfing. Obviously they thought surfing was cool, so it became the theme for that year’s catalog. But they could have been way more authentic by really understanding the cultural context of surfing, driving to one of the amazing beaches in Southern California and hiring real surfers as models.
They would have saved Buckle a lot of money in the process – but missed a nice Mexican vacation on the client’s dime.
Appreciating the context is all about understanding what activates the authentic smile that Damasio talks about. There is no way to really understand it besides doing the hard and in-context research upfront.