Interview with Gavin Johnston of Two West

I am starting a whole series of conversations with my peers from around the globe to better understand how they think and how they work. Starting with Gavin Johnston of Two West who have offices in Kansas City and Los Angeles.

Siamack: Hi, Gavin! What shall we talk about?

Gavin: application vs. academics

Siamack: Can you please start by introducing yourself...

Gavin: absolutely. I'm Gavin Johnston, chief anthropologist at Two West Discovery & Design.

Siamack: Can I have a link to it? What kind of explorations do you specialize in? And are you an anthropologist

Gavin: Yes, we're at www.twowest.com. We focus heavily on messaging design and semiotics. So translation of symbolic life into marketing and brand design.

Siamack: Your clients?

Gavin: Sprint, H&R Block, Miller Brewing, DDB, United Healthcare, have been our principle clients, but we have numerous project-oriented clients too.

Siamack: Are you an academic? I am interested in methodology/tools you apply

Gavin: I was, but I have a certain distaste for academia. Theoretical work is tremendous and grounds what we do, but it rarely finds its way out of the university and rarely has direct input on society, so I've kept relatively clear of academic settings for the last ten years or so.

Siamack: Are you an anthropologist by education?

Gavin: I am an anthropologist, specializing in linguistics and ethnography. I fell into this by dumb luck about ten years ago.

Siamack: When and why did you fall out with academia?

Gavin: An up-coming child was the real drive. I joke, but there is truth to it. A friend saw an opportunity and we jumped, not knowing we could make a living. After about two years I realized we were doing better work than academia was doing, at least as it applies to design and real-life use. Our company, however, had difficulties since we had no business experience.

Academia seems mired in rehashing theory, espousing unidirectional political and economic views and maintaining disciplinary walls. It is frequently about defining a person’s identity more than it is about finding answers. I'm of the opinion that good work comes from a range of experiences and dialog. Academia is driven by maintaining those walls.

Siamack: What has influenced your approach?

Gavin: The biggest influences are structuralism and deep-dive field work. We go in assuming everything is data and we will be with key informants for at least 6-10 hours at a time. Ideally, we’re in a setting for multiple days. Context mapping is a key element as is lexical dissection.

Siamack: What are the biggest challenges to your approach?

Gavin: Clients seem to give push back on timelines. We prefer longer sessions but it can be difficult to pull them into that model. I think it's a matter of the goal, frequently. If the goal is marketing, a cross- functional team is central to what we do. Context mapping is essentially mapping where language utterances occur and comparing them against what is literally mapped in the physical environment. So it combines workflow and real life movement (and material culture) with what is being said.

Siamack: How do you convey your findings?

Gavin: We limit what we actually show them because, frankly, they're usually looking for the big idea. We demonstrate linkages b/w concept vs. reality. So shopping, for example, is about being a good mom, entertainment, etc. So the idea is to give different trajectories. I think we interpret and uncover the right questions. It is half science, half intuition I always tell people.

Siamack: How do you 'manage' intuition?

Gavin: People are obsessed with science as numbers. I think it's about discovery. I use examples to manage it. A friend of mine works at JPL (NASA) making robots. I can’t do that, nor do I want to do that. I CAN uncover the strangeness and complexity of the human condition.

Not everyone is a painter and we accept that. Not everyone is an ethnographer. Don't get me wrong, I admire the output and thinking depth of academics, but in a business context it's difficult make the transition. They are not trained to think in business terms -- they simply don't speak the native tongue. Some, like myself, are tossing that perspective out the window as much out of necessity as anything else. Some anthropologists, both in and out of academia, I think, are afraid of losing their "anthropologist" identity. That can be a tremendously threatening thing. Another discipline?

Siamack: Is there something else to yourselves?

Gavin: I don't worry about the titles much. "chief anthropologist" sounds cool, frankly. Ethnography could be a powerful tool, but it's being so watered down as to become nearly meaningless. What we do is uncover meaning and complexity -- systems of meaning. If someone can uncover a good term for that, they will be a millionaire

Siamack: I'll get working on it.

Gavin: There's a lot of crap being produced by so-called ethnographers. Being able to conduct a good interview does not make a person an ethnographer anymore than being able to balance a checkbook makes someone a mathematician. I think it comes down to being able to talk about depth of knowledge and make connections that others overlook. One thing I'm hoping is that anthropology programs will change and get back to their roots.

Anthropologists started as rogue methodologists in many ways, developing theories and barrowing methods in order to get to a deeper truth. They need to return to that in all areas of anthropology, but especially on the applied side. People like Boas were looking for understanding the human condition in the broadest sense. By 1960 it was about defining the discipline.

Siamack: favourite insight you can share

Gavin: telling miller brewing that no one cared as much as they believed about the taste meant opening up design and marketing in new ways. cheap beer has nothing to do with beer connoisseurship and everything to do with making people feel equal in a social setting. Guinness is about being smarter and cooler. It is about having mastered a more nuanced sense of taste. Miller Lite is about an iron worker and a CPA (accountant) sharing experiences. It is a populist beer that signals an invitation into the drinking circle rather than excluding people. It is expansive in nature rather than restrictive and therefore fits into specific contexts driven by cross-subgroup social interaction. The result for miller was to incorporate more realistic drinking venues into their ads, start messaging around the shared experience (unlike Bud Light, which is about humor) and start hosting “parties” in places like Culver City -- midway between white collar and blue collar.

Gavin: Clients think ethnography is a panacea and it isn't. It is one of many methods in a system. To really articulate our value I think we have to drag clients into the field and point out where the mistakes were made. I think we also have to demonstrate how it makes them money. We deliver a lot of info, but avoid telling them what to do with it. We have to start telling them what to do. As a company, we make every client sit through a day or two where we work with them to build something meaningful at the end. It makes all the difference in the world.

Siamack: Thanks so much for your time, Gavin. Really enjoyed our chat.

By the way, this was a Skype chat. Half talking face to face and half typing. Which is a surprisingly easy way to chat and discuss. If you feel I omitted any questions or have any questions of your own, please let me know.

Bringing the digital world into the real world

Simply mind blowing. Have a coffee break and prepare to travel to the future.

Dialogue

It's been fun.

I feel, for once, like a race course owner rather than the race horse running the race. I am not just doing any more. I am facilitating the doing. I feel, for once in my working life, truly 'client side'. Heck I even have my own suppliers - three groups of people working on the App and the website; I have customers - the researchers; and I (will) have consumers - the respondents who participate in the panels.

When I first launched the App I was very worried indeed about comments and reviews which might criticise. I knew that my hard work could come to nothing with only a handful of 'this doesn't work/this is rubbish' type reviews. Worse, our reputation as a company would be destroyed too (the first big learning was: don't call your App the same name as your company).

Then we launched and the emails started coming.

None so terrible that I had to delete them. And I carefully replied to each and every one while at the same time forwarding their emails to our developer.

I suddenly found myself 'in dialogue' with customers who essentially liked the App but wanted to see improvements. And only now do I appreciate the significance of something I have always preached to retail clients. That the best time to engage with and delight customers is when you are resolving some sort of issue for them. Things going well is expected and opportunity to 'delight' is low. But correcting an issue efficiently will build loyalty, trust and love in a way that things going fine never will. And it all comes down to having a dialogue with customers.

Does this whole article read like a cliché? Then why are most organisations so useless at doing it?

Gut feel

I loaded a series called, The Ascent of Money to my iPhone. Not sure why I thought it would be interesting but luckily it was a fantastic watch.

The best single interview from all six episodes is with, Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group (in episode 4). He is billionaire hedge fund manager who looks younger than me and payed himself $1bn dollars in 2009. More than I paid myself.

His success, he states, is down to mathematics followed by intuition. The most successful managers, he continues, have brilliant intuition which they use fearlessly. The mathematics still has to be done, but is only important in helping to make sure you understand the problem.

There is a fantastic parallel here with ethnographic research or any research for that matter. Using research to help you understand the landscape you are exploring. But then using intuition to generate actions. And good intuition comes, in my view, with practice. Around 10,000 hours according to, Malcolm Gladwell.

When we debrief outputs and workshop them into actions and implications, the research findings form a kind framework or perhaps even a perimeter fence within which to think and be creative. The answers to the objectives never, ever lie in the contents of the films or what people say in them. And we find ourselves constantly having to remind/force clients to think about what isn't happening in the films we have created in order for intuitive thinking to replace rational thinking.

And it really does work. Any thoughts anyone?

Talking the talk

I stumbled across it in one of my folders which had been lost inside another folder for the past year. It's a document I created for one our new colleagues to familiarise herself with how we talk, walk and do ethnographic research. I thought you'd be interested so I am sharing...

KEY POINTS

1. Ethnography is about watching what people do, then understanding what it means. We record ordinary, everyday events to find out extraordinary new things about people

2. We do participant observation – which means hanging out with people and learning first hand what life looks like, feels like and tastes like for our subjects

3. We record people’s lives and events on camera - video recordings enable us to scrutinise events in detail and to view them again and again

4. Things do not naturally ‘mean anything’ – meanings are created not found. Our ethnographers are never just camera operators. They are researchers, thinkers and interpreters of other people's realities and priorities

5. Interpretation and finding meanings is done best as a collaborative process, so we involve clients every step of the way, we don't work in isolation

B. COMPARISONS WITH OTHER FORMS OF RESEARCH

6. Most research is based on what people SAY. Our research also captures what people DO.

7. Most research is about things that have happened. Our research also looks at things that nearly happen or things that don't happen.

8. Most research is about what you know that you don't know. Our research always includes what you don’t know that you don't know, which is the source of most insights

9. Most research focuses in on a product or brand or topic. Our research looks at the context in which the product or brand or topic arises. (We never treat an event as a stand-alone, discrete happening. Everything is connected)

10. Most research struggles to identify those split-second, often private moments where decisions are made. Our research is designed to capture and record those key, decision moments.

11. Some research uses CCTV to study shopping behaviour. Our research nearly always includes shopping. But you cannot understand shopping behaviour by only watching people shopping. You have to know what emotional baggage the shopper ‘brings with them’ to the shop and what the arrangements are at home.

C. THE PROCESS

12. We study client briefs to ensure that all of the objectives are appropriate to ethnographic explorations – there is no point doing ethnography if an interview-based approach will achieve the same results

13. Before an exploration begins, we agree what are the absolute minimum key events we need to capture in order to provide the necessary raw material for great analysis and interpretation

14. We typically spend 2-3 days in-home, usually with between four and six households.

15. We never tell households what we are there to film/capture during the first in-home phase. This way we don't set up biases. It is vital that we natural occurring natural events which occur spontaneously

16. We edit the raw footage and show the edit to the clients (usually up to 30 minutes per household). We hold a question-generation workshop, to find out what the client team wants to know about the subjects’ behaviour / what they have watched

17. We go back to the subjects and ask them to provide a commentary as a voiceover to the edited film – this is known as the co-discovery process and we incorporate the client questions at this stage. Clients are encourage to attend too.

18. Our deliverables include household narrated films which are carefully edited and dubbed to most effectively convey the key insights and interpretations by theme, market & segment.

D. OTHER POINTS

21. Our speciality is running multi-country projects. We have developed techniques to ensure consistent quality across different markets, cultures and languages.

22. We only ever use local country ethnographers who know and understand their culture.

The next big idea

What next?

We are looking at finding entire communities in the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Sweden with which to conduct a 12 month long exploration of every day life. We will probably give each household an iPhone to double as an incentive payment (I hope) and we will look to using our App, on said iPhone, as the main data collection method.

Apart from logistics, cost and timing, we have a substantial quality control issue: How do we obtain consistent quality data(photo, film, audio and text) which is rich and usable? Short of recruiting a community of film makers, we need to follow the same process we follow with existing multi-country projects. That is, to create a series of template films. A template film - usually for our own ethnographers rather than households - is designed to set a benchmark for quality, style and content. It may even be necessary to send a new template film with each task. Since we expect to set a new task every 6 weeks, that will mean quite a lot of short films to send everyone.

The next big issue is finding our communities. In fact, how large should a community be and who should populate it? The answer is around 30 people and ideally all from the same street so they vaguely know each other. And the socio-demographics? As broad a mix as possible. This won't be a segmentation study. It will be a resource for those who want to observe and understand the precise points at which decisions are made, discoveries are made and opportunities are lost. It will also, therefore, explore things people nearly do or don't do.

Watch this space!

I need your help - no really...

The App is rolling along, selling nicely and collecting advocates as it snowballs. But there has, all along, been a gaping omission. Something we knew about but I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to ignore and leave 'til last.

Any ethno-app worth it's salt, a user told me (and I knew this already) must have a web based service to receive and allow manipulation of the captured events. So you can get back to your desk, log in to your secure project area in the edlAPP site and begin analysis, interpretation, editing, sharing, etc. The App, all by itself, she continued, is like an ice-cream without a cone. It will wither and die. It will never become widely adopted as the ethnographic App of choice. Point taken.

In a couple of weeks we will have this resource, repository, whatever you want to call it (what do we call it?) ready for BETA testing. It will be a basic layout with basic functionality. The idea being that users suggest functionality we might not have considered before we launch the all bells and whistles version.

But here is what I need help with. Pricing - how do we charge? And we will have to charge something to cover the bandwidth charges. I have been looking at various online services to see what their fee structures look like. This is a good potential model. Different levels of functionality with a monthly fee. Or do I, perhaps, go down the route of a fee per respondent used? But what if I have an academic using the tool to explore an entire community? It's a tough one. So I am appealing to you, the reader to help me, the terrible business person that I am, figure out a charging structure.

If you have thoughts about how much I should charge that would be helpful too.

I so look forward to your advice.