Milestone : Ethnography (en)

Understanding how a population decides whether or not to adopt a new solution means going beyond traditional marketing. Rather than looking at statistics and user percentages in a market, you need to look at the reality of how people in that market use your solution.

And understanding how your solution can be integrated into the target market’s habits and uses, i.e. reach a sufficient level of satisfaction among the people concerned, implies that you consider not only demographic or economic data but also psychographic and behavioral data.

The trap would be to limit yourself to declarative market research, based on biased questionnaires. The best way to understand people’s behavior is through observation.

By going to your target market, you will first be able to observe the current practices and business models used by the market players.

By getting a little closer, you can observe which technological or economic criteria of existing solutions are perceived as innovative and impactful by current market users.

By focusing your attention on the people, in situ, you can then observe the pain points and frustrations in the use of existing solutions.

Finally, you could go as far as observing the emotional impact caused by such or such solutions on a market, i.e. the unexpressed feelings of pleasure, fear, surprise or enthusiasm.

It is by making and structuring these observations that you will be able to define and refine the value expected by a project like yours on the targeted market and thus write your own value proposition.