"The idea behind this was to see what people really do and think," said David Allen, director of marketing for Montvale, N.J.-based Eight O'Clock Coffee.
Jeffrey Wolf, a partner at the advertising firm Deutsch Inc. in New York, said he came across commercial ethnography 10 or 15 years ago, but more marketing researchers have been using it in the last five years or so. "We've actually called on anthropologists to help us," he said. "Essentially, it is observational research by a trained eye."
Jonna Holland, assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, said commercial ethnography started slowly. It was difficult for some in business to turn from quantitative, survey-type data to qualitative, interpretive research. Now, "people are more accepting of it and are realizing its benefits," she said.
Eight O-Clock Coffee hired a New York advertising agency, Kaplan Thaler Group Ltd., which had 14 families in Pittsburgh and Chicago use videocameras to record a typical morning. The "reality TV" segments from that first week in May show a struggle to get moving. A teenager, for example, slides from her bed to the floor and tries to protect her eyes from a bedroom light, and a man waves away attempts to get him up.
Elisa Benjamin, a mother of two school-age children, participated in the videotaping at her home in Buffalo Grove, Ill. She said it was interesting and fun to have her morning routine turned into market research. "I have my cup of coffee when the kids leave," she said. "It's my first moment to take a breather."
Kaplan Thaler created two television commercials that began airing in October. One shows 2004 International Whistlers Competition Entertainer of the Year Steve Herbst struggling to keep a tune until he has a cup of coffee. The second features 2004 WNBA Rookie of the Year Diana Taurasi unable to make a shot until she sips some Eight O'Clock Coffee.
The videotapes showed that for many, dawn is not a rosy, romantic moment on a front porch in the countryside, said Kaplan Thaler's research director, Chris Wauton. "In real life, people stumble around, trying to get kids out of bed," and coffee is the fuel that gets them dressed, fed, and out the door, he said.
