Tag Archives: persona
Working on a cult brand at CM that triggers nostalgic associations I was asked to create personas with a mandate that “we need to know a lot more about online consumer behavior”. But given the constraints it was evident that traditional surveys and focus groups are not the right options. Companies and researchers have traditionally relied on a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques to observe human behavior. While effective as standalone tactic, each approach is subject to bias and often proves costly and time-intensive.
Enter Netnography! Having studied it as part of my MBA curriculum I turned to this emerging field of research to mine consumer insights online. Now, with blogs, forums, social networks and the plethora of information posted in social media, data on consumer sentiment and opinion is readily available.
Simply put, netnography is ethnography done via the Internet. As Prof. Kozinets (Father of netnography and my professor in the university) puts it – “Traditional research methods like focus groups and surveys ask people questions in artificial surroundings and in an artificial way. Netnography is based upon the fact that people are already communicating about things that are meaningful to them in a natural way, as cultures and communities online.”
Anca Micheti | Critical Mass Calgary
Cultural theorists, from Michael Foucault to Judith Butler, have said it a long time ago: identity is not fixed and determined by demographics, but fluid and multifaceted. It is, to a certain extent, what we want it to be. It is a performance we put on for the world.
Social media makes this identity performance easier than ever. With more than 400 million active Facebook users and 73.5 million visitors to Twitter each month, it has allowed us to become content producers and consequently public performers of our identities. Every digital imprint we leave on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, every blog post, review or tag is an opportunity for identity play. And who’s to say that each and all of these performances are not “the real me,” even if they’re not necessarily consistent with each other, and maybe each paints only a partial picture of who I “really” am. (more…)
