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In action

The following example shows anthropology in practice. A firm in the spa industry engaged us to help redesign its customer experience and service offering for female patrons. The client wanted to address any unmet customer needs and better differentiate their customer experience. Conventional research techniques regularly produced muted feedback, which led to copycat store designs and products. We wanted to go deeper into the consumer’s subconscious to find unmet needs and drivers that triggers behaviour.

To get there, we employed anthropology to probe fundamental beliefs and values around their body image and wellness as well cultural influences. For example, how do women define beauty? What role does human touch play? And, how can a spa experience help satisfy a women’s intrinsic needs? Our findings upended conventional thinking and led to a revamping of how the facilities were designed and how the services and benefits were communicated, resulting in higher client retention, an enhanced brand image and increased rates of cross selling.

Conventional qualitative research techniques take people at their word. This can be risky for brands. At their core, consumers are often irrational, driven by motives or external influences that are unseen even to themselves. Using anthropology as complementary research can produce a more holistic and penetrating view of the consumer in their real life condition. Likewise, anthropology’s rigorous, academic-driven methodology preempts the emergence of erroneous assumptions around a customers’ behaviour that could have been shaped by a firm’s culture, the bias of its managers, or increasingly, the large but imperfect data stream flowing in.