Skip to content 
Ethnographic market research observes how your customers behave in their natural environments, allowing us to uncover the often behind-the-scenes processes that drive decision-making and brand interactions.
At STRAT7, we immerse ourselves in the everyday lives and contexts of your customers to capture authentic moments, unfiltered reactions, and genuine behaviors that explain the “why” behind consumer choices. This human-centered approach delivers insights that would be impossible to discover through surveys or focus groups alone, and provides a foundation for more meaningful innovation, communication, and customer experience strategies.
Uncovering authentic experiences
The way customers engage with brands in the real world is complex. Traditional research methods can easily overlook the subconscious behaviours and emotional drivers that truly guide decision-making. Ethnographic market research is about watching B2C and B2B consumers going about their daily activities, in real time, in their normal environment.
This allows us to get a much clearer understanding of what factors actually influence their decisions and perceived experiences, and reveals the gap between what people say they do, and what they actually do. With this information, you can understand your customers more deeply, meet their unmet needs, and craft better experiences for them.
At STRAT7, we blend observational techniques with digital tools to what is actually driving behaviour. Our ethnographic approach goes beyond what people say, to reveal what they actually do and why.
Our skilled researchers embed themselves in real-world environments, whether that’s shadowing customers in stores, observing product interactions at home, or accompanying your users through their daily routines. By doing this, we can capture the unspoken behaviors, decision-making patterns, and emotional responses that your customers themselves may not even recognise.
Our researchers study the cultures and communities that form and interact in online spaces, including how people behave, communicate and form digital identities. This approach extends our observational window beyond in-person sessions, capturing moments of interaction with your brand as they naturally occur online.
We engage in deep, conversational interviews with your customers to explore the influences they believe drive their behaviour. These discussions go beyond superficial responses, diving into the cultural context, personal histories, and social dynamics that impact how your customers perceive and interact with your brand.
By combining ethnographic insights with behavioral data, we connect qualitative observations with quantitative patterns. This lets us build up a solid picture of customer behaviour that doesn’t just rely on understanding why customers do things, or what they do, but unites the two for a more complete understanding.
Ethnographic research is most valuable when it informs broader strategies across your organisation. At STRAT7, we help you leverage the insights we glean to hone multiple aspects of your business.
Our ethnographic research helps you to understand the cultural forces shaping your market. By seeing how people interact with products and services in real-world settings, we can gather insights that help you align your brand with evolving consumer values and create more authentic connections with your audience.
Ethnographic observations reveal the friction points and moments of delight throughout the customer journey that may be invisible through other research methods. With this information, we help you design more intuitive experiences that reflect how people naturally behave. These improvements reduce frustration, increase satisfaction, and drive loyalty.
By observing how customers use, adapt, or struggle with existing products, we uncover opportunities for meaningful innovation. We identify workarounds, unmet needs, and emerging usage patterns that can inspire new product features or offerings, so your development resources are invested in solutions that address genuine customer challenges.
Ethnographic insights help identify untapped market opportunities by revealing needs that customers themselves may not be able to articulate. By understanding the broader context of your customers’ lives, we can locate opportunities for growth and drive more targeted expansion strategies with higher success rates.
Our ethnographic research shines a spotlight on aspects of customer behaviour that traditional research methods struggle to uncover. Here’s how these insights can transform your business:
Our ethnographic approach uncovers the often unarticulated emotional, social, and practical needs that influence your customers’ decisions, so you can develop products and communications that connect on a deeper level.
See how people actually interact with products, services, and environments, and how it differs from what they self-report in surveys or focus groups. This reality check helps you design for actual usage, rather than idealised behaviours.
Our ethnographic research reveals the moments of confusion, frustration, or abandonment that customers might not recall or report in traditional research. By addressing these specific pain points, you can create smoother, more satisfying experiences that increase conversion and build loyalty.
Get a broader view of how cultural and social dynamics affect brand perception and purchase decisions. These insights help you create more culturally relevant communications and products that resonate with your target audiences’ shared values and aspirations.
Our custom ethnographic research programs are tailored to your specific business objectives and customer context, so the insights we deliver are directly relevant to your decision-making needs.
Our ethnographic research has delivered transformative insights for leading brands including IKEA, Converse, ITV, Samsung, and AMEX.
With a global network of researchers, we can conduct ethnographic studies across diverse markets with cultural sensitivity and local insight. This helps multinational organisations gain insights across regions while respecting local nuances that impact customer behavior.
Ethnographic research is a qualitative research method that involves observing people in their natural environments to understand their behaviors, motivations, and experiences. It combines direct observation, conversations, and immersion in the participant’s environment to reveal patterns and insights that may not emerge through other research methods.
Unlike traditional market research methods that rely on self-reported data, ethnographic market research observes consumers in their natural environments to capture genuine interactions with products and services. This approach reveals the often significant gap between what people say they do and what they actually do, providing businesses with insights into unconscious behaviors, unarticulated needs, and contextual factors that influence purchase decisions and brand experiences.
Ethnographic research uncovers authentic behaviours, revealing the “say-do gap” often missed in self-reported data. It puts consumer actions in the context of their physical, social and cultural environments, identifying unarticulated needs and capturing emotional responses that impact brand perception. These insights challenge assumptions and inspire more innovative, customer-centric solutions.
STRAT7 applies across a wide range of business challenges. We use ethnographic research to:
