For this project, we were tasked with future-proofing a major convenience brand in the US within the broader context of change under covid over the last few years. For the first three weeks, two teams conducted ethnographic, on-the-ground research in cities across the east and west coasts of the US, intercepting operators, clerks, customers, and whoever else they could.
My role was two-pronged.
First, I conducted interviews with internal stakeholders to survey their research efforts and ensure that our eventual insights would not overlap with what the organization had already done.
Second, I interviewed subject matter experts across different industries to gather ideas about current and emerging trends that could intersect with the future of convenience.
To get onboard with this project, I spent three days researching and reading about the concept and history of convenience in and beyond the US. I looked for academic sources, business reports, recorded conference sessions, anything I could get my hands on. One source that caught my eye was a series of recently published articles in Economic Anthropology that introduced an "anthropology of convenience." Some of the key takeaways I took from these articles were that convenience is culturally constituted and varies across time and space, while convenience has a deep history that extends across globally circulating merchants over the last 3000 years. In this short reading time, I was able to move beyond the idea that convenience is narrowly about saving time and speeding things up and more broadly defined and experienced by socially situated groups.
While I was getting onboard with the rest of the team, I reported my findings during virtual standups and found that the ideas I encountered in my reading resonated with the other researchers, while their findings helped me delineate the contours of where the overall research was headed. These ongoing insights would help me frame my line of questioning as I proceeded to the first stage of research.
Overall, I conducted 5 internal stakeholder interviews. I didn't have to recruit these participants; they were assigned internally and we conducted the interviews over Zoom. For my line of questioning, I used a past-present-future framework to gain a general sense of what they had been doing, what they were currently working on, and what their upcoming projects were. As we discussed their projects, I asked probing questions to gain a deeper understanding of each of their projects. One strategy I found particularly helpful to elicit greater detail from each project was to run a SWOT analysis. I wasn't concerned with the actual analysis so much as the project details the SWOT framework elicited.
Following each interview, I uploaded the video file to Dovetail and ran an automated transcription of the interview. Then, I fleshed out the written notes I had taken during the interview (broad themes and insights) into a 2-3 page Word document and uploaded it to Dovetail. Since our timeframe was short, I didn't have the opportunity to code the interviews. This would no doubt have been helpful but it wasn't absolutely vital. For our timeframe, short and precise summaries were more than sufficient.
Overall, I conducted 15 interviews with experts from different industries, including confenience, foodservice, retail, and academia. To research appropriate SMEs, I started by scouring relevant business reports and recorded conferences. I compiled a list of interesting SMEs using Excel and used RocketReach to find email addresses. Then I began reaching out to everyone on the list using an email template I had crafted. Once responses started rolling in, I set up meeting times over Zoom.
After a few interviews, I began using snowball sampling via SMEs from the most relevant industries for this project. I sought to balance cold calls -- to ensure a diversity of SMEs -- and snowballing -- for a quicker acquisition of informants. For my interview protocol, I attempted to balance between specific areas of interest related to the project while also focusing my questions on each SME's areas of expertise. This required that I conduct light background research on each SME before the interview.
As with internal stakeholders, following each interview, I uploaded the video file to Dovetail and ran an automated transcription of the interview. Then, I generated a 2-3 page Word summary of the interview and uploaded it to Dovetail.
By the end of the first 3 weeks of this project, I had conducted 20 interviews and generated written summaries for each informant. I then took three days to listen to the most relevant interviews once more and add granularity to my reports.
For the next stage of the research, we would come together in Austin, Texas to synthesize our findings over a single week, so given that our timeframe was so short, my main objective going into the synthesis was to prepare myself as a pragmatic representative of the insights I had gathered over three weeks so that I could contribute key points at well-placed moments as we proceeded through the synthesis. I knew that I would not be able to dump everything I had learned so I had to be strategic with my inputs for the group.
We began the workshop with a series of hypotheses that would facilitate a framework into which we could organize our insights, and used the surrounding walls to post large sheets to record and work through our thought process. By the end of the week, we came away with a handful of key deliverables that we would take to the next stage of the research.
Following our synthesis workshop, we went our separate ways to continue the project remotely. To add validity to our synthesized deliverable, we sought to cross-reference and support them with statistical data. As we did, we put together a presentation deck that outlined what we had done, the broader context of the US, and key deliverables that aligned with these broader changes. For this stage of the research, I ran targeted searches for statistical evidence in a broad range of areas that intersected with our synthesized deliverables, while providing insights to better align our ethnographically-informed research with broad scale statistical trends over the production process of the presentation deck. The next step would be to concept tests the deliverables to see if they might actually resonate on the ground.
This was my first industry research project, and I had a good time with it. I most enjoyed the collaborative aspect. It was fufilling to learn the different perspectives, approaches, findings, and insights from my colleagues during the different phases of the project, and equally enjoyable to see my insights and findings contribute to the thinking of my colleagues and to the final product. There is ample collaboration in anthropology, but most research activity is aimed at one's individual project rather than a shared product, so this was a welcome change for me.
There were certainly challenges along the way. Collaboration was not always a smooth ride and there were some disagreements now and again, but I found these moments to be uniquely productive and made our final deliverables more compelling. I found that working towards a shared objective appeased our egos and 'being right' was less interesing for me and for others. I also find that letting others change your mind is the best way to change theirs. I think the greatest compliment is to let someone know that they've persuaded you to think differently.
Finally, I enjoyed the pace of the project. Everyone recognized that the timeline was rushed and there were many aspects of the research that we could have dug further into, but I found the brisk pace equally refreshing. The pace made it such that we had no time to linger in the data and strive for perfection. We had no choice but to move forward and quickly select the most impactful actions amid the plethora of options we had before us.