What Business Anthropology Can Do for Your Organization

You may know your clients, but do you know the stories behind them?

Your goal is to deliver the best possible user experience, building your brand and your profit as they grow to trust that you can best meet their unique needs. Mixing ethnography, empathy building, direct communication, and secondary research, anthropology provides a rich explanation of the behaviors, desires, and unmet needs of your clients, employees, and stakeholders. This deep knowledge creates indispensably products and services that distinguish you from your competitors.

Anthropologists have the unique ability to set aside biases and objectively represent the viewpoint of the customer. Holistically trained, anthropologists work across the silos often created within marketing, R&D, and decision making chains, and ensure the voice of the everyday user is present throughout the design and delivery process.

Common anthropological skills include:

• Approaching problems from multiple perspectives while withholding common biases
• Researching across cultures and within multicultural groups
• Trend analysis and identification of patterns in consumer behaviors
• Understanding consumer motivations and unmet needs
• Facilitating empathy based, user-centric design research
• Developing, coordinating, implementing, and analyzing key research methodologies (e.g., focus groups, co-creation, surveys, interviews, in-depth ethnographic studies)
• Communicating accurate, accessible, and actionable findings and recommendations to stakeholders and decision makers

Anthropologists also apply their skills to understanding organizational culture and improving work processes and productivity.

Studying your "insides" means streamlined processes, healthier work environments, increased creativity, and happier and more productive employees. Better performance creates better products and services, decreased costs, increased profits, and creates many other benefits for your people, brand, and bottom line.