September 30, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

Revelation, Inc., a Portland, Oregon online marketing research company, has a big name that sets some big expectations.  I somehow got on their email list, and they asked if I wanted to see their latest report. It is called “Avoided Carbon Emissions from Online Immersive Research.”

Hmmmm. That’s an interesting angle on online research-that it is good for the environment. They take the positioning pretty far, too. They have commissioned a scientific, math and formula filled paper that was prepared by “Fluid Market Strategies” that looks at the question. Fluid  is a Portland based consulting firm that specializes in energy services and sustainability consulting. You can receive it, too, just by inserting your email address into the appropriate box on their site.

Intriguing. The report compares using traditional in-person focus groups and their own online “immersive” research, which sounds like an online panel, similar to the setup that CommuniSpace has. (Revelation, please reveal the correct answer to me if I am wrong).

They went to some trouble to rigorously estimate the greenhouse gas (or GHG) emissions of the in-person focus group and subtract those from the same research  conducted using their immersive online software approach.

In person, you have things like transporting participants and researchers, using hotel space, using up food and energy moving around. Researcher and client travel accounted for the lion’s share of GHG emissions, 68 percent. With the online method, you have the use of the computer, the servers, the researchers, and participant’s use of energy. A whopping 98 percent of emissions came from the researchers’ use of servers. You can already see the difference.

They found that, with a large focus group (N= 20 participants), the in-person groups create almost 2.5 times as much GHG emissions than the online ones. Per project, they work it out to about one half of a metric ton of CO2 emissions per research project.

 How much is that? It is like:

• canceling two typical plane trips; 
• shutting down a typical 10,000 square foot office for one day;
• or avoiding nine typical business trips (1,100 miles) by car.

Pretty interesting. That is per research project

I see no reason why netnography would be at least as efficient as this, when compared with in-person techniques such as ethnography (researcher travel), surveys (paper use, mail, energy in transportation), or focus groups.

Now, some negations. Of course, picking the number 20 for a focus group is way off. We’re usually talking 8-12 participants in a focus group. And moderators and business people do not always have to travel by air to get where they are going. And some applications (such as using virtual worlds) are very, even ridiculously energy-intensive. So there are some it-depends aspects to the conclusion that online always produces less carbon than offline research. But it is compelling nonetheless.

Think about it-run a major netnography instead of a bank of 20 focus group and you save yourself the carbon of forty plane trips. And, I think, in many cases you probably will end up with different and deeper insights.

Yet another great reason to consider netnography. It’s Green! Or, maybe (cynics, arise….), yet another great excuse for greenwashing…you be the judge.

Posted in Green Ecological Economics, Ethnography, Activism, Qualitative Research Methods, Marketing Research, Netnography, Green marketing | Print | No Comments »

August 16, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

This is true. On March 26 of last year, a woman I had never heard of before named Maria Xenitidou, or just “Maria X” contacted me. She is a British post-doc, a Ph.D., and so I feel justified in calling her “Professor X”. Or perhaps, since the X-Men are Legend, “The Young, Female Professor X.”

So, Maria, the Young, Female, Professor X, contacted me out of the blue with an email. She began by telling me that she had “recently undertaken a project with colleagues at the University of Surrey in which we are trying to locate innovations in social science research methods.” Her purpose? They were interested in identifying innovative research practices in the social sciences outside the UK, in other words, research practices that had not  yet filtered through to typical research methods courses. And, the reason she was contacting me was that my work “had been identified as involving innovative research practices especially with reference to netnography.”

That was pretty exciting. A completely non-marketing, non-consumer research group of scholars was interested in my work. These were sociologists and cultural scholars for the most part.

I wrote Maria back. We talked. We interviewed (on Skype of course). And on the basis of the material I sent her and our interview, she wrote up a very interesting document about innovative research practices that included netnography. The document was published. And then she invited me to a Research Methods Festival in Oxford at the University of Oxford on July 5th. In particular, to a smaller Workshop at the beginning of the Festival called “The Process of Methodological Innovation Workshop.”

The Festival was timed to directly follow EACR. By “coincidence.” Or, perhaps, if you are a Jungian, by synchronicity. That amazing synchronicity.

So of course, thinking that I would already be in England, and that I’d never been to Oxford before, I said yes. And I am very glad I did.

The session she assigned me to was called “Promulgating New Methods” and my mission (PhD students and post-docs like to hand professors missions, by the way) was to offer ideas and experiences about “Concentrated Activity, Networks and Diffusion Mechanisms of Methodological Innovations.”

That sounded heavy. Weighty. Meaty. I like heavy.

So I put on my Thinking Hat and started to ponder what I had learned in 15 years developing, tooling-up, and blabbing about this new methodological approach of netnography. What I came up with, and what I presented, was a way of thinking about what I do, about my approach to scholarship that I wanted to share with you here in blogglyand. But first, we continue the Oxford thing. I had to write something to present.

 In one of those annoyingly parenthetical postmodern fragments of titling, I named the presentation: “Netnography: Prom/ot(ulgat)ing a New Method.” The idea was that Promulgation, Professor X’s mandate to presenters in my slot, is always also Promotion. Science is always marketing.

That observation of course must be credited to J. Paul Peter (my department Chair when I was at the University of Wisconsin) and Jerry Olson, who wrote a wonderful, now-classic article in the Fall of 1983, during the dark depths of Marketing’s Crisis of Legitimacy. Under apparent attack from the challenge of qualitative methods, and like many of the academic business fields that were undergoing scientific rationalization in the face of the Gordon-Howell Report and the Pierson Reports, the field of Marketing “Science” was defending its legitimacy and honor by insisting that it was, indeed, as scientific as any other field, thank you very much. While so many people were writing and debating about whether Marketing was a Science, Peter and Olson came around the back door with a big rubber Foucaldian hammer and bonked those “positivist/empiricist” dumbbells on the head, arguing very convincingly that we were asking the wrong question.

It is not “Is Marketing a Science?” that is the interesting question, their 1983 article in the Journal of Marketing asserted. It is “Is Science Marketing?” And of course, it was and it is.

This inversion is what makes that article so interesting and, indeed, timeless. They showed how scientists regularly:

• use marketing strategy to target their theories and their work (where will this fit?),
• use positioning to show differentiation from extant scholarship (how is this new?),
• and employ marketing mix variables (the good old 4 Ps of product, place, price, and promotions) to effectively “sell” their theoretical innovations and their new view of the world (how do we get people to read and cite this work?).

So it was drawing upon this perspective that I decided to think about how I had Promoted the approach of netnography on an unsuspecting and obstinately ambivalent world over the last 15 years. (I didn’t need to recap Peter and Olson very much, since it is 2010 and of course no one believe that science is “the truth” anymore, everyone knows it is just a language game and a social construction. Right? Um, not.)

After a brief introduction to the method, I introduced the four waves or strategies that I used. They overlap and still overlap. They are not exclusive discrete steps. They are not a how-to. They are merely observations collected and organized for the format of the talk about how I can in retrospect think about sharing and diffusing a new qualitative approach.

The first wave, perhaps the most obvious one, I called “Legitimation Through Academia.” I will provide the details on that Wave in the next blog posting, as the context stuff goes into full swing.

How do you promote and promulgate a new research method? In four fuzzy sets of initiatives or four overlapping waves, as we will see. And these sets will set the stage for me to make some new declarations for this blog, and open the door to some new envisioning of what the heck it is that I am trying to do.

Thanks, at least in part, to the Mysterious Young Female Professor X.

Posted in Academic Life, Qualitative Research Methods, Consumer Culture Theory, Conferences & Presentation, Netnography, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | Print | 1 Comment »

July 21, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

From Word-of-mouth marketing to spreading the word on the method or approach of netnography. I was surprised that there were no comments yet on the marketing versus PR post. Actually, people seem to comment more on my Facebook page postings about these blog postings than they do on the blog itself, which is interesting. Because I know you’re out there…you keep coming up to me, and emailing me, and you show up on my Google Analytics radar pretty clear. And I thank you for your loyalty and interest, and hope to keep on writing for you for a long, long time.

Last post was my 400th blog post, by the way. That’s pretty exciting. To me at least. A bit. Maybe not so much to you. Probably not, actually.

In this post, I wanted to come back to the topic of Netnography that has been a major area of interest lately. I’ll blog more about how I have been presenting the topic in my next post, but for this one I wanted to share an exciting initiative.

Because (1) we have such a global culture, (2) the Internet has attained such global impact, and (3) because my work as an educator makes me very aware of what is happening outside my little North American bubble, it has become obvious to me that Netnography has been written about by me exclusively in the English language. And although English is important, it is certainly not the only game in town (at least, not any more).

And if spreading the word around the world is important, then keeping netnography texts as mainly “English-only” is not only counterproductive and Anglo-centric, it’s downright stupid.

I’ve been seeing a lot of non-English texts written about netnography showing up in Google searches of the term netnography. For the most part, I have no idea what those texts say. I do know that I didn’t write them.

So for the last year or so I have been very “subtly” floating the idea of offering translated versions of some of my writing of Netnography for non-English speakers over the Internet. A few of the languages I’ve considered are  Japanese, German, Spanish, and Portugese.

But the first one to come through is Mandarin Chinese. Did you know that about 23% of all Internet use takes place in Chinese (versus about 28% in English) according to recent stats by the excellent and helpful Internet World Stats?

A smart and kind Ph.D. student at our school, Yikun Zhao, generously offered to translate my work into Chinese. We decided to use the White Paper I recently wrote for NetBase, as that document is clearly written, accessible, aimed at academics and business audiences, and it is current and not yet outdated.

I’d like to thank NetBase for agreeing to allow us to do this with that paper. They asked me to note that the NetBase semantic search engine does not read and analyze Chinese at this point. It is currently an English-only search and analysis tool.

So here, without further ado, is the Mandarin Chinese version of the Netnography: The Marketer’s Secret Weapon White Paper. Netnography White Paper in Mandarin Chinese. It is presented as a pdf file. I hope that our Chinese readers and those who are interested in Netnography find it useful. Thank you once again, Yikun and Michael O.

Netnography White Paper in Mandarin Chinese

Posted in Qualitative Research Methods, Economy and General Business Management, Ethnography, Conferences & Presentation, Netnography, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | Print | 2 Comments »