Intermix: Listening to the Datastreams of Consumer Lifestreams

Robert V. Kozinets, Professor, York University, Schulich School of Business

There is little doubt that much of the momentum of contemporary social life can be found online. We book our travel, our dining, and our movies online. We check our friends and the weather. We find jobs, fellow hobbyists, and even dates (and, in some cases, spouses).

This is important for marketers—and, really, for everyone in business. If business is based on the understanding of people and their needs, then business also needs to understand what is going on online. The flow of electronic “conversation” of all kinds—words, texts, symbols, pictures, movies—provides us with an amazing opportunity to listen to consumers in action, as they interact and do, by sharing, recording, referencing, and evaluating what they and others do. Social media is not only a window into what consumers are saying, but also into what they are doing.

We are getting to the point where you cannot understand the course of someone's day—the way their time and plans, the shaping of their thoughts and goals are laid out before them [what I will call their “lifestream”]—without understanding the interactions and relationships that they are conducting online. We can make this ephemeral notion of the lifestream more applicable and concrete with some business-centered examples:

• A style-forward retail clothing brand building locations on the West Coast
• A manufacturer of children's cribs based in Europe
• A global financial services firm

These companies might seek to understand their consumers in traditional ways:

• Focus groups, where teens discuss their views of clothing
• Personal interviews with mothers
• A major global survey about how people use financial services

While all of these are valid and useful methods to inform listening, consider the knowledge that's left on the table. Think of the Seattle high schooler's all-important social life and the role of Facebook within it. Think of the brand-new mom in London and the role of online mommy forums in helping her deal with her anxiety and answer her many questions. And what about the way the Tokyo stock investor obsessively checks her online trading forums and financial advice blogs?

Could the keen business listener seek to understand the world of any of these individuals—and any of the groups to which they belong—and really, truly appreciate them without referencing the datastreams that feed into their lifestreams? It is likely that their online worlds will be mentioned, perhaps even detailed, in the focus groups, interviews, and (probably less likely) surveys. But it seems increasingly unforgivable that a marketer would miss investigating:

• The series of all-important Facebook updates
• That controversy on the mommy blogs about the risk of sudden infant death
• That amazing new stock prediction tool that everyone was talking about, which turned out to be a dud

To truly understand and empathize, you need to listen to the cultural conversations that take place through the Internet: on the Web, peer-to-peer, via video, and through services like Facebook. You would need to conduct netnography, a term that refers to online participant-observational research. Netnography inhabits the in-between spaces where large sample sizes coexist with rich, detailed, visual, textual, audiovisual, social, and naturalistic information. Netnography is electronic ethnography—cultural research that maintains and revels in the social qualities of social media. Netnography is not the automatic coding of data-mined material, or the semantic search engine by itself, although it can use such helpful tools. Rather, it is full-on human insight, the question-to-answer investigation that considers the gamut of human interaction and researcher intuition.

Exploring online cultural worlds is the very purpose for which netnography was designed, and is what it does well. But listening online exclusively, to the online worlds and interactions, may be insufficient by itself. In this age of social media, this time of digital connection and online advertising, of blind faith in buzzwords and the “next new thing,” it is important for thinkers to also question these new methods. When is online enough? And when is it not enough?

Where is business, relating to the public and marketing, moving? It is moving to those places in between thought and action, imagination unbound and practice constrained. What is important, and where I see netnography and online listening developing, is in the interstices, the places between online avatars flying free and the physical world of gravity-entangled meat puppets.

The art and science of market understanding in the next three to five years should become increasingly obsessed with the relationship between what happens in the sphere of online social interaction and in people's physically embodied lives. That will require astute and rigorous application and integration of existing and new methods of listening. The astute listener would be wise to ask questions like the following:

• How do teenagers’ Facebook conversations affect their sense of style? How do their online photo albums transmit their identity, and how does fashion play a role in this? How do they discuss them in school, face-to-face, over SMS?
• What questions does the new mom learn through her social media interactions on blogs and bulletin boards? How does she mention them in person, with her family, and her personal social circle? What new motivation does she find when online and in-person mix?
• How does the day trader learn about new techniques of valuation, new blogs, or new places to learn about undervalued companies? How does her real-world activity influence her online behavior, and vice versa?

In my recent book, Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online (Sage Publications, 2009), I offer the integrative idea of the “intermix.” I suggest that a good netnography will carefully investigate and take into account the interconnection of the various modes of social interaction—online and off—in culture members’ daily lived experiences. It will do this through the incorporation of various methods.

We can follow the intermix by tracking the trail of consumers’ own words and experiences. If we conduct profound and insightful research that asks the right questions and probes the right cues, then it leans in the direction of integration and of intermix. For example:

• Teens in a focus group may mention seeing clothing in a Facebook profile picture. The interviewer who listens would follow up by investigating which brands were mentioned, how they were mentioned, how the Facebook medium altered the marketing and lifestream message, and how the online medium translated into in-person conversations and action.
• The new mother might mention reading about a new crib controversy on “the blog I read” during an in-home interview. The interviewer would track this by carefully examining this blog, as well as other related online resources that the new mom uses. He or she would then explore the actual social application of this online information.
• Based on investigative qualitative research, a multidimensional understanding of the day trader's world would be formed. It would inform the kinds of questions asked on the global survey to include those about online resources, among them social media forums. Follow-up, open-ended questions would explore the interrelationships between online resources and in-person interactions and decisions.

In the final analysis, truly listening to consumers’ communications—both online and off—becomes a voraciously credible, embedded understanding of consumers' lives as they take place, in multiple social and cultural worlds—both online and off. Cutting-edge netnography contributes increasingly to this understanding. When members of the business and research worlds attend to the intermix, the blending of social realities as communications take on myriad forms. Listening then blends into action, into an engagement with the many roles and worlds of the consumer, so that the deepest understanding—empathy—can emerge.

Following through the traces of the intermix, we lean into the social changes of today and tomorrow. We can listen through others’ ears to the way their worlds combine.

Neo-Tribes: A New Listening Framework for Marketers

John Zogby, Chairman and Chief Insights Officer, IBOPE ZOGBY International, and Joe Plummer, Columbia Business School

We live in a world turned upside down. Old walls have crumbled and old patterns of doing business are vanishing. Consumers are different. Demographics are no longer destiny. Nationalism is no longer the predominant identity. Consumers are reorganizing themselves into tribes, and smart people are learning how to find those tribes.

As countless institutions that have offered Americans safety, security, and stability no longer generate public confidence, new technologies have enabled our country's citizens to reshuffle and reconstruct themselves into new versions of an institution as old as humans themselves: tribes. But our tribes are not due to birth or geography anymore. We are doing—albeit doing at the speed of light what used to take an epoch—what humans have always done best: organize ourselves into groups that reflect who we are, how we think, what we need, and what is most important in our lives. Based on ZOGBY International research, we identify the neo-tribes that exist today, as well as some smaller ones that are also firming, and suggest neo-tribes as a great framework for listening to consumers. Indeed, the notion of neo-tribes can become a robust structure for listening to consumer conversation on the Internet and elsewhere to better understand trends and countertrends, as well as patterns around brand preferences.

Marketers, political consultants, researchers, and people just looking for friends and lovers must understand that old-age cohorts and blue-collar/white-collar identities just don't fit any more. The public is actually creating new clusters of character and new sectors of interest for themselves. As we Americans abandon old individuality borders and lay waste to outmoded demographic models, we are coalescing around discrete common interests, forming ad hoc partnerships, and fitting ourselves (mostly unconsciously) into increasingly well-defined social clusters. Tribes today can come and go, but each one of us has at least one dominant tribe—two at the most. Virtually everyone can be found in the following examples from ZOGBY research:

Neo-Tribal Analytics

Multiple research techniques have been used over the years to connect people's characteristics to consumer decision making and leadership skills and potential. Though the most basic have been simple demographics, these usually don't tell us how people adjust to change. Psychographic profiling, on the other hand, takes polling a quantum leap forward. However, designing psychographics research surveys takes time, expertise, and money. And does it tell us anything about how we find structure and meaning in our lives while living in a world of chaos?

The fact is, we opinion researchers spend too much time within our own four walls, reducing our data to simplistic common denominators. To discover best how people are adjusting to and surviving the disorder in their lives, we simply do what we do best: listen to them to learn what they are asking about themselves and how they are dealing with change or new ideas. If we look for patterns in conversations, we can translate them into online questionnaires, or attempt to form tribes out of shared online content and conversation.

That's the great strength of Tribal Analytics. It doesn't rely on tricks; it gets beyond the surface texture of people's lives. It's built on self-identity—the fundamental questions that determine everything from consumption choices to media favorites to presidential ballots. In the end, it's not about yesterday's transactions or broad demographic indicators; it's about the kind of in-depth understanding that builds relationships. If you get the relationships right, transactions—and much more—will follow.

According to futurist Watts Wacker, one of the biggest trends to pay attention to in the short run is this: Although consumption is never going to go away, consuming as the defining criteria for individuals is. We are now using our media consumption, as opposed to our physical consumption, to explain who we are. You don't ask questions at a party such as, “Where'd you go to college?” “What kind of car do you drive?” “Where do you live?” anymore. Now you ask, “What do you blog?” “What Web sites do you surf?” “Have you read the article in Vanity Fair on terrorism in South America?” “Are you an Imus or a Stern person?” “Have you seen The Departed?” “Did you love or hate Avatar?” “Have you read The Shack?” These are the kind of questions that reveal so much about who we are.

This is what ZOGBY International has done to arrive at our tribe categories. After compiling and reviewing years of previous polling data, and listening to social media conversations, we developed the types of questions that would best help us assign people into tribes.

As important as the tribes themselves are, their borders matter, too, because that's where most people live. True, there's a hard core within every tribe—a group for whom the “greenness” of a product or its domestic content or a preacher's blessing is the absolute essential element. But the rest of us live with our right foot in one tribal zone and our left foot in another, and those border straddlings vary based on the product or service being offered. Clearly, this provides a rich opportunity for marketing products and services that fill the “crease” between tribes and that cross over into adjoining tribal territories. No matter how attractive, Macs are not suddenly going to outsell Dell PCs with God Squaders, just as Harleys won't suddenly make inroads with Flash Drivers.

However, the purpose of understanding and listening to neo-tribes is not to predict future purchase decisions with great precision. The value is to move beyond the simple stereotypes, such as affluent versus nonaffluent, young versus old, or urban versus suburban, which create division and limit markets. The idea is to listen to and interpret conversations at the deeper level of neo-tribes, whose shared values and connections expand opportunities for marketers and advertisers.