At Sapient, a Cambridge, Mass.-based tech consultancy, a team of 70 corporate anthropologists advise clients on how to design user-friendly products. The team is run by the company's chief experience officer and eLabs co-founder Rick Robinson, who boasts his own academic pedigree as a developmental psychologist. The team has even survived the company's recent layoffs.
While these executive Ph.D.s may sound like some indulgence of the new economy, their services have become more important than ever in dissecting consumer appetites. These days anthropologists do everything from studying consumers in their natural habitats (the home, usually) to advising industrial design teams.
These efficiencies have only grown more important as the tech boom has subsided. Numerous studies show that at least 75 percent of all new products fail for lack of a market. That's a failure rate that technology companies in particular are eager to avoid, especially since a new product - a chip, a server, a wireless device - can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to bring to market. Intel boasts more than a dozen social scientists who've been at the company for more than five years and who are, says Carmen Egido, director of the Applications Research Lab at Intel, "sought after for our advice at the early stages of development."
This may sound like the job of the marketing department, but there are substantial differences. Marketing involves targeting an audience for a product and then selling it, while anthropologists are responsible for finding out how the product will be used - if at all. Anthropologists shun marketing's questionnaires and focus groups in favor of studying behavior. By recording in excruciating detail how people live and how products fit into their lives, anthropologists learn much more than what consumers usually tell marketers, since interviewees often lie on surveys or say what they think they should.
Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist with Intel's Peoples and Practices Research Group, calls this "deep hanging out." Her job involves finding out where families in different countries socialize and how technology fits into their lives.
After hundreds of hours of field research, Bell learned that in Europe family and friends spend much of their time in the kitchen, so home computers would have to be small enough to fit there. In China, by contrast, kitchens are small and hot, and people don't linger there. "This kind of research disrupts the idea of one product for the world," says Bell.
