When someone else elbows their way into your territory and takes your clients away from you.
In my case it could mean a company who starts offering what we do, same fee band and process. So, should we feel threatened?
No.
Because the more people/agencies do what we do the more easily we can differentiate ourselves and the more mainstream our approach becomes. The more mainstream our approach becomes, the more clients there will be to share among us. So why do I feel concerned each time someone sends me a link to companies doing similar things to us?
You all know about our ethnography app, right? Watch this and this.
A couple of weeks ago a colleague sent me this link. And yesterday I stumbled upon this app. So I made my wife watch both clips for her reaction.
"It's exactly what you're doing... isn't it?"
"Not really. These is for consumers."
"So is your app. And I suppose you just have to accept that more and more people will start doing similar things to you."
Which is a good thing, no? As long as we are ten steps ahead of them it's a wonderful thing.
And I found it on a rather brilliant blog by a friend called Pedro Oliveira. Here is a great post from the said blog - worth watching the clips too as the first one is mine.
I was allowed to observe all meetings, fly around and read emails.
Was it really 13 years ago?
A Marketing Week journalist called James Curtis (really nice guy by the way) approached me to say that if I was willing to do some ethnographies of EasyJet, he would write it up for his magazine as a running, weekly feature. This was not a paid PR stunt. It was inspired by James himself.
I wasn't particularly busy having been at DDB for a only a few weeks. So I agreed. And had an awful lot of fun doing it. Partly because I was under no client pressure as I knew that James would sex up even the most awful findings. In the end he didn't need to sex anything up. For one key reason: I discovered that the more I enjoy doing an ethnographic exploration the better the outputs. The fascinating subject matter - EasyJet's Marketing team and being allowed to hang out with the marketing director for a whole week - helped too.
EthOS APP - our mobile ethnographic research platform
The EthOS iPhone, Android and Blackberry App are free and available here: www.ethosapp.com
Submit a film or an article!
Since this site's purpose is to cheerfully debate commercial ethnography/anthropology's do's and don'ts, I invite you to contribute anything which will provoke, stimulate or even inspire readers.
Please email me any text and pictures and/or upload your film to YouTube and send me the embed code.
My name is Siamack Salari and I am a partner at www.ethosapp.com. I am also the President of the Mobile Marketing Research Association (http://www.mmra-global.org/).
This is a sister site to my Linked in Group which is also called, Ethnosnacker (www.linkedin.com/e/gis/129888). I created, ethnosnacker to stimulate much needed debate about what commercial ethnographic research is, isn't and should be.
I also use this site to share my day-to-day experience of managing a mobile ethnographic research platform (www.ethosapp.com).
I want this blog to serve as a single 'place' for all of us who have any interest at all in adding meaning to observations of every day life to 'meet', share and exchange ideas, knowledge and news.
Feel free to contact me at siamack(at)ethosapp(dot)com with articles, comments, suggestions and ideas to make this resource as useful as possible.
Thank you for visiting.