Context in the News
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Scary! Halloween's been hijacked by adults
On Wednesday night in New York City's Greenwich Village, a record 2 million people — about 90% of them grown-ups — are expected to gather for one reason: to act like kids.
The annual event, now in its 39th year, is the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, which will go all night long, filling bars, restaurants and hotels and acting as a $90 million instant stimulus to the city's economy.
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Google Ads: Racist? - HuffPost Live
We've all typed our name into Google & clicked search. But for people with ethnic names, data shows that the ads that pop up may reveal inherent racism.
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Interview with Robbie Blinkoff
Anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff’s work has taken him from Papua New Guinea to Proctor & Gamble. As managing partner of Context-Based Research Group, Blinkoff provides marketing and strategy consulting for companies the world over. In this issue of Ascender, he shares insight into the shifting landscape of communication—and talks about his firm’s own unique approach to visual problem-solving. "The ability to think visually is a skill that’s sorely lacking in the workplace...The solution is to involve designers early and often."
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Men Pee Standing Up: The value of an anthropological perspective [guest contributor]
I’m an anthropologist. My wife is an anthropologist. I know a lot of anthropologists. I’m not an academic anthropologist, but I do teach college courses on anthropology. My job title is Principal Anthropologist. What I’ve come to realize is that “being an anthropologist” is just something I understand and am sure that’s who I am. As an anthropologist I just know nothing is for certain and that there exist a number of reasons and ways of doing things. I always looked at life this way. So when I found anthropology it just made sense that I was an anthropologist.
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The Planking craze: Strike a pose -- then post
Lie down, stomach to the the floor. Arms in, legs straight. Wait for a picture to be snapped, then post it online.
Planking may be a fad, says anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff, but he doesn't pshaw its significance.
"It's a culturally important example of a very critical moment in our society and world," says Blinkoff, founder of Context-Based Research Group, a Baltimore firm that uses ethnographic research to help companies. Planking is a way for people to be "creative social spirits," he says, especially crucial in a time of economic strain.
"Planking is awesome and I think more people should be doing it -- safely," says Blinkoff, who runs a video blog called The Consumer Anthropologist. The permission to plank, he says, is the permission to be playful, to stop being productive for a moment and enjoy life, going so far as to call it a backdoor route to Zen.
"It's turning your world on its head for an instant, doing something you'd never do before," says Blinkoff.
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'Oprah Winfrey Show' ends, but Oprah's legacy lives on
Oprah Winfrey winds up her role as daily TV host Wednesday, but she is not so much leaving a job as reinventing herself – again. For while her syndicated show is ending its 25-year run, the billionaire media mogul is already up to her eyeballs in her next venture, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), the cable channel that launched in January.But Winfrey is a rare breed, says Robbie Blinkoff, anthropologist and founder of Context-Based Research Group in Baltimore. “She is what I call a creative, social spirit,” he says, “someone who inspires hope and change.” As audiences for media messages continue to splinter as they look for increasingly niche content, he says, these sorts of high-profile individuals will be less and less likely to emerge.
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Oprah Winfrey Show ending after its 25-year daytime run OPRAH: Her TV show was hyper-personal
No one is saying goodbye to Oprah. But we're saying farewell to The Oprah Winfrey Show, blasting off the airwaves today after 25 daytime TV-defining years. Winfrey, 57, will live on at the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which has been busy with a behind-the-scenes look at her show's final year. Turns out, Oprah curses. And doesn't always wear makeup. Or shoes.It started with the most basic elements of life and peeled them apart, notes Robbie Blinkoff, a consumer anthropologist and founder of Context-Based Research Group. "She'd have a show about a family and their struggles with a parent's illness, but she didn't bill it as a show about health care reform. She personalized issues with real people and real stories."
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The Positive Effects Of Cause-Related Marketing
Any marketer who’s not a novice can recall when terms like “cause-related marketing” and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) were exotic novelties. But now it’s a given that consumers believe companies have obligations beyond making money for their owners.
“What the recession has taught us is that our greatest deficit isn’t economic--it’s social,” said Robbie Blinkoff, an anthropologist who is co-founder of Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic research and consulting firm that has worked with ad agency Carton Donofrio Partners to produce recent studies of the shifts in consumer attitudes.
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Just call it v-commerce
It's one of the many twists in the evolution of vending machines as companies embrace the potential of "v-commerce."
Robbie Blinkoff, a consumer anthropologist and managing director of Context Based Research Group in Baltimore, understands the draw. "Anything that's moving toward vending makes sense for consumerism," he said. "It's quick and it's done."
And Blinkoff, the anthropologist, said his research shows that the recession has made people "hungry for connecting, and building up a sense of the social." Vending machines don't do that.
"It's the ultimate transactional relationship," he said. "It shows the commoditization of our lives."
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Consumers take control of shopping
While the 2010 holiday shopping season came in stronger than expected, retailers aren't waving the victory flag just yet.
As merchants pack up the Christmas decorations and make room for the clearance racks, they are also dealing with a shopping environment that has changed dramatically since the recession began in 2007. Retailing, never a game for the meek, is getting tougher.
"The biggest story is still the recession, even though everybody wants to say we move on," said Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist at Context-Based Research Group, in Baltimore. "This is a post-recession world, and, just like post-Depression, we have to face the fact that life is different than it was before 2008."
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 Listen to the Tech Talk podcast on Virtual Worlds with Robbie Blinkoff.
Our culture is in the midst of some seismic shifts. Virtual worlds – and the opportunity they offer to escape and to play out an alternate life – play a prominent role in such changes. In these alternate realities rules are unclear, boundaries are subject to interpretation and identities are ephemeral. |
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Anthropology in the News
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The Ethnography of Marketing
A software tool allows researchers to study human behaviors and plot them along dimensions that reveal product and service needs. The new core competency is ethnography. Companies use it to gain insights into the culture and behavior of their customers.
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Corporate Ethnography
High-tech companies are deploying ethnographers and anthropologists by the score to study how people actually use technology.
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Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village
Anthropologists Go Native in the Corporate Village, according to a recent article in Fast Company...
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The Consumer Anthropologist
The problem with focus groups? They take consumers out of their natural habitat. So welcome the idea of ethnographic market research, which uses the anthropologist's tool kit of methods and theories.
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Corporate anthropology: Dirt-free research
The influx of corporate anthropology has grown in recent years as companies have tried to get more tactical about consumer research, evaluating increasingly technological products before their release.
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Consumer Input, Scientific Analysis Provide Foundation for MSN 8 Research and Innovation
MSN 8 represents the first intensive use of anthropological study to enhance the MSN client and bring the customer's voice into the product development cycle.
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How to Get Really Close to Teens' Lives: MTV's
MTV has long emphasized market research to learn about its teen audience. But in the late 1990s it noticed its ratings were starting to slide. So MTV embarked on a new teen research campaign, the hallmark of which was its "ethnography study."
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THE HUMAN TOUCH
Companies that truly want to understand their customers are hiring social scientists -- such as anthropologists -- to bring their insights to the enterprise. Says Intel's Shane Wall, "When you compare it to the traditional marketing effort, there's no comparison."
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THE HUMAN EQUATION
As participants at an Intel conference on Human Centered Product Innovation learned, companies that really want to figure out what people want are turning to antropologists and social scientists for help.
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Context News Releases
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Context-Based Research Group Launches The Wild Pig Tail Project
Context-Based Research Group, an ethnographic firm with a global network of consumer anthropologists, today announced the launch of the Wild Pig Tail Project – an endeavor to help people articulate and act on the recessionary related need to restore civility as well as our ‘sense of social.’
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Social engagement networks could enhance advertising effectiveness, study shows
Many news consumers feel bombarded by advertising but are more receptive to it if is presented in a trusted, interactive environment, a new study for The Associated Press concludes.
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NEW HOLIDAY SHOPPING STUDY CONCLUDES SALES MAY BE DOWN, BUT JOY WILL BE UP THIS SEASON
Quantitative Study by Context-Based Research Group and Carton Donofrio Partners Finds
43 Percent Believe the Recession Has Had a Positive Impact on Their Lives
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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS UNVEILS FINDINGS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH AT WORLD EDITORS FORUM
Global Study by Context-Based Research Group Finds Younger Consumers Struggle with News Fatigue but Yearn for In-Depth Stories.
The Associated Press and Context-Based Research Group unveiled key findings from their global anthropological study at the annual World Editors Forum in Sweden. The study examines news consumption patterns of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 in Britain, the United States and India.
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ROBBIE BLINKOFF OF CONTEXT-BASED RESEARCH NAMED TO FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE’S FAST 50 CHAMPIONS OF INNOVATION
Robbie Blinkoff, PhD, Principal Anthropologist of Context-Based Research Group, whose efforts have helped make Ethnography, or cultural anthropology, the fastest-growing segment of marketing research, has been named to Fast Company magazine’s 2003 list of the “Fast 50” Champions of Innovation – individuals whose achievements have helped change business or society.
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THE (R)EVOLUTION IS NOW: ‘THE MOBILES’ DEFINES AN EMERGING WIRELESS LIFESTYLE
A growing and vibrant international subculture has seamlessly integrated wireless products into their daily existence: The Mobiles. Context-Based Research Group's latest global study reveals a shift in human consciousness as wireless integration alters behavior, attitudes and etiquette around the world - as well as how business should adapt to this evolution.
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ROBBIE BLINKOFF NAMED ONE OF BALTIMORE BUSINESS JOURNAL’S 40 UNDER 40
The Baltimore Business Journal recently named their top 40 under 40 business people. Context Principal Anthropologist, Robbie Blinkoff was among them.
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CONTEXT-BASED RESEARCH GROUP HIRED BY WORKPLACE INNOVATOR HERMAN-MILLER
Herman Miller, Inc., the leading global designer and manufacturer of office furnishings recently selected Context-Based Research Group for an extensive ethnographic project.
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GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF WIRELESS USE REVEALS KEY LESSONS FOR COMPANIES MAKING WIRELESS PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Context's Wireless Opportunities study provides a new perspective on what consumers really want from wireless and what companies need to do if they want to close the gap between expectation and user experience that is keeping wireless from reaching its potential.
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ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE OLYMPICS UNCOVERS REASONS WHY AMERICANS HAVE OUTGROWN INNOCENCE OF THE GAMES
A Context study has found that the reasons Americans used to love the Olympic Games are actually alive and well in other parts of the world. The research, conducted through Context's network of 1,700 anthropologists around the world, also uncovered some of the reasons – beyond the tape-delayed coverage – why Americans aren’t connecting with the Games like they have in the past.
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