Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows of the early Louis Cheskin work, a recent Stanford study established that the more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes.

Expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected. While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.
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“We have known for a long time that people’s perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price,” said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

When we worked with a wine brand recently, we sought to understand the complete wine “usage” process, from planning, through shopping, to storage, to opening, to serving and drinking. We looked specifically at people who were interested in lower-priced wines and most of them were limited in their knowledge and/or experience.

In other categories when the customer is new and is presented with enormous product choice (the amount of wine choice dwarfs most other categories I can think of) we might feel sympathetic for the learning/selection/usage learning curve they would face; with wine people spoke very enthusiastically about the journey. Each trial experience involved drinking wine…something they liked to do! A social, tasty, and rewarding experience. Even a wine they “didn’t care for” (the typical critique) wasn’t a failure, because it still carried all the symbolic meaning.

The marketers were hampered by a limiting view of their customers; the market had been sliced into ridiculously narrow price points and this inevtiably drove discussions of people characterized exclusively within those $3 slots (as in, “I’m a $7.99 to $10.99 drinker”). While our client no doubt had cash register data to support their segmentation, it was completely at odds with how people saw themselves. They purchased across a much broader price range, and their primary concern was their own knowledge and accumulated experience. We were given a great opportunity to offer this different view and illustrate some of the unmet opportunities this presented.

On Friday I became a first-time uncle as Talia Elyse Todd arrived. We’ll be headed up to Vancouver in a few weeks to check her out!

I’ve been running around evenings and weekends the last few days doing fieldwork. We did find a fun place for a debrief (listed as “Java on Judah” in my GPS) with a gregarious San Francisco-type proprietor.

Sunday was 3 hours of driving, to Bolinas and back, for an all-day faculty retreat for the CCA ID department. Really great session and I feel excited about this and upcoming semesters, but still.

Virtual Anthropology is the mini-meme of the moment, I guess – a post from Trendwatching that highlights all the ways you can, from the comfort of your desk, learn about what people around the world are doing, photographing, wearing, buying, etc.

As usual, when you read about a shortcut to actual research written by someone who really has no clue about doing real research, they omit the valuable part – asking questions. Asking why! What is the meaning of the clothing you wear? Tell me a story about why you’ve got those items in your fridge?

It takes skill to unearth the insights – you can’t start and finish with self-reported data. Otherwise, you’re just a step above a mood board or something artifact-based. Insights come from people – from interacting with people, dynamically. Not simply observing their shit.

I feel like a broken record on this one, but whatever.

Wonderfully passionate blog entry about making that all-important connection with another person in a user-research setting. This would be great fodder for the workshop I’m leading at EPIC

next month.

Last week, after a long long time I had a chance to conduct user interviews again. I loved any minute of it. There is nothing more rewarding (for me) than spending two hours with people I never met before (and probably I will never meet again) trying to understand the world from their point of view.

In those two hours and from the first few seconds, my attention is totally focused on the other person. I observe how they enter the room, how they look at me, and how they shake my hand; I need to understand anything I can about their personality, their level of comfort, and their communication style to be able to be in synch with them. The entire session is a dance, where I ask and listen, probe and observe, with the only purpose of gaining insight in somebody else perceptions, thoughts, and expectations. It’s always a fascinating journey.

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But I believe that the magic of understanding another person is not just a technical issue. It requires to suspend for a moment our ego-centered way to interpret the world and open up to a different interpretation. In a way, it’s about love.

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There is something wonderful in experiencing somebody else’s world. You understanding expands, you suddenly see something you could not see before. And there is no going back.

I will be doing a workshop at the EPIC2005 conference next month in Seattle.

The Sociality of Fieldwork (or Personal Experiences with Interpersonal Connections)
Workshop Facilitator: Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting

In the activity of fieldwork, the ethnographer creates and facilitates a series of powerful interpersonal connections including (but not limited to):

* ethnographer and respondent
* ethnographer and fellow ethnographer/researcher/designer
* ethnographer and ‘client’
* ‘client’ and respondent

We leverage these connections to accomplish our most basic purposes: creating empathy and gathering data through establishing rapport. But perhaps there is more going on here. The goal of this workshop is to explore and consider these closely-felt connections and collectively begin to build a deeper understanding of the roots, power, impact and further potential for these interpersonal connections.

Through the workshop we will share our respective experiences, looking both for common themes that emerge, but also unique perspectives that the workshop participants may have, drawing those out and ideally building specific techniques that we can employ in the future, looking towards fieldwork that is more stimulating, impactful, and satisfying for each of the different stakeholders.

via Boing Boing

Wife Swap is part of ABC’s primetime line-up and we are currently casting families for its second season. The premise of Wife Swap, which generated a lot of buzz in its inaugural season, is that one parent from each household swaps places for ten days to experience how another family runs their lives. It is an incredible family experience and opportunity to both learn and teach different family values. Wife Swap is a fascinating story of what happens when two married couples see themselves, and their spouses, in a whole new light.

Potential families can live anywhere in the United States, but we ask that families who apply consist of two parents that have at least two children, over the age of 5, living at home.

All participating families receieve a $20,000 honorarium fee too!

Wow, $20K – I wonder if this begins to set the bar a little too high for the ordinary incentives we pay households for user research!!!