Reviewing Forbes Article: Bolstering Market Research With Anthropology
- fitformedblog
- Aug 26, 2024
- 2 min read
While researching different ways to market FitFormed, I found a fascinating article from Forbes by Autumn McDonald discussing the ties anthropology has to marketing. It opened my eyes to a connection between two topics that most would never think would be related but are, in fact, incredibly interconnected.
The sentence in the article that hooked me stated: “For products and services, cultures help inform our purchase decisions, our consumption choices, and our feelings toward brands” (Forbes). The author later describes culture as “the holistic system of meanings, knowledge, traditions, and practices that are formed in a community, handed down from one generation to the next and embodied in that community’s values, customs, skills, and behaviors.” Throughout my journey of trying to market my business, FitFormed, I had never even managed to consider why people make the decisions they do and why they sign up for what they sign up for. I had completely ignored consumer behavior when, in reality, that is what it is all about.
The first step that most people advise you to do before starting a company is to do market research and understand who your core demographic is. The reason why most people get it wrong is that they do not execute market research the right way. The author reasons: “I believe this is because market research is often designed, executed, and analyzed without a robust understanding of cultures, how to study cultures, and the theories involved in such an endeavor” (Forbes). When most people do their initial market research they fail to take into account the significance of culture, human behavior, consumer behavior, and anthropology as a whole. This is one of the reasons why I started this blog, to not only inform others but also myself, about Anthropology and how it helps us become better at marketing.
The author lists three ways we can use anthropology for market research: continuing education, cross-disciplinary hiring, and seeking expert insights. While continuing education and seeking expert insights is a pretty straight forward recommendation, his recommendation of cross-disciplinary hiring caught my eye. Anyone can research and look up things about different cultures and people, but to take it the next step further and bring them into your company as a part of the team optimizes your ability to understand different cultures and people.
Link to Article:
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