Personalized Topic Report

Hey everyone! This blog post is another great opportunity to learn about my interests and passions. This time I will guide you through my own brainstorming session. A well-developed idea for a semester paper should be an outcome of my endeavors. I am extremely excited to see what I will come up with. I hope you will also enjoy it.

As briefly discussed in class, I am interested in writing about netnography. In its essence, netnography is “online ethnography”, a technique that analyzes behavior of people online, primarily in user communities and forums. Although netnography is generally believed to make primary use of text and context analysis, nearly any website (including YouTube, Flickr and Blogger) could serve as a data source for netnographic research. In fact, someone could be conducting a netnographic study on my blog while you are reading this post!

With the development of this tool, netnographic research became more and more focused on identifying patterns, norms, rules and relationships in online communities. It embraces everything that could be described by the term “culture”. This could sound a bit too broad and scientific. I also got a similar impression. Therefore, I decided to dig deeper and narrow the application of netnographic research to a specific topic.

Zooming in the topic brought me to the issue of lead users. This term is used to describe a sub-type of innovators in the typical innovation diffusion model. All lead users have two distinct characteristics: first, they are ahead of trend and needs of mass-market consumers, and, second, they expect to benefit a lot from a solution to their problem. Lead users are present in many markets but could be found most easily in the sphere of sports goods and sports communities. Identification of lead users in other industries could be a challenging task. I know that there is a number of traditional techniques for identification of lead users (like pyramiding and broadcasting). Recently many researchers started to view netnography as another method for lead user identification. Hence, I would like to apply netnography to identification of lead users. Still quite broad for a topic of the semester paper.

Going even deeper required me to choose the industry where I would like to look for lead users with the help of netnography. This was the easiest part. I am fascinated by telecommunications. I interned at a telecommunications company and collaborated with telecommunications providers during my full-time job. This industry should also have a decent amount of lead users due to the consumer nature of its products and services.

Now I have to combine these three components together. Thus, I envision the following name of my topic: “Netnography as Lead User Identification Method in Telecommunications Industry”. The restrictions on the scope of the paper encouraged me to narrow the topic even further. I believe that I should focus on creating a plan for a netnographic research focused on lead user identification.

The structure of the paper that I envision now should include (1) introduction, (2) brief description of netnography, lead users, application of netnography for lead user identification, and connection of these terms to the class concepts. Then, I will focus on finding and (3) describing the most likely distinct characteristics of lead users in the sphere of telecommunications based on the secondary research. As a central part of the paper, I would elaborate on a (4) set of recommendations for a netnographic lead user identification project by a telecommunications company. This section will include different aspects of the netnography's planning stage (e.g. research question, methods of data collection, limitations and further guidelines). Finally, I will (5) conclude the paper. This structure is still tentative and I am sure that I will revise and refine it during the course.

I feel that it is crucial to explain why netnography, lead users and telecommunications are so attractive to me. A short story might be helpful. Last year I was working on a project team that tried to identify lead users in a diaper industry (yes, Pampers and Huggies offer highly innovative products). Despite more than 60 patents protecting a modern diaper, many innovations in this industry come from users that are dissatisfied with the performance of the current products. I could perfectly remember how difficult it was to identify these grassroots innovations. We were struggling and nearly desperate. We applied pyramiding and broadcasting (interesting but not very effective traditional techniques) but still failed to find the traces of lead users. Till the time when we accidentally found a post from a user in an online community. Upon analysis of the post’s content, we could not believe that we found someone that could potentially be a lead user.

Sometime after the project was finished, I accidentally learned about netnography. I was fascinated by the structured approach to online communities it proposed. I could imagine how much time we could have saved if we applied netnographic research right from the start! Now I would like to learn more about netnography as a lead user identification method in a context of the industry that I am eager to work for, telecommunications. I am glad that Customer Insights class provides me with an opportunity to tailor my time to something that really makes me tick. I am not sure whether I could find motivation and, most importantly, time to learn about this tool if this opportunity was not in-built in the course design.

I feel that my topic perfectly fits into the concepts of the customer insights. To be more precise, several of the readings in our course emphasized the importance of obtaining customer insights. The article “Insights Into Customer Insights” mentioned that valuable customer insights rarely come from quantitative research. Both HBR articles (“Turn Customer Input Into Innovation” and “Better Customer Insights – in Real Time”), and Kellogg Microsoft Office case study outlined the ethnographic research as a method for gathering customer insights. Ethnography was specifically mentioned as one of the methods for indirect acquisition of customer insights in the lecture.

Since netnography is a qualitative method that emerged from the ethnographic research, it could increase the effectiveness of gaining insights online. Netnography goes in line with the principles of the Emphasize Part: it helps researchers observe user behaviors, engage with users and immerse (experience things that users experience).

I also believe that lead users are a valuable source of customer insights. These users by definition are ahead of trend. Therefore, many of their inventions could later satisfy the needs of the mass market. These users are unlikely to be reached by traditional methods (surveys). They are more difficult to find and require application of sophisticated ethnographic and netnographic techniques. In case of lead users, I could see only one significant difference from traditional customer insights research. Researchers ask lead users for both problems and solutions, whereas with ordinary customers mostly problems should matter. To understand characteristics of the lead users better, I am planning to devote one of the paper’s sections to creating a persona for a lead user in the telecommunications industry.

This all makes me believe that application of netnography to lead user identification could help companies become a truly customer insight driven organizations.

I have also thought about the literature base for the paper and come up with a couple of ideas. Since Robert V. Kozinets is the inventor of the term “netnography” and created the theoretical foundations for this research method, I consider his book “Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online” (2010) a must-have for this project. I am perfectly aware that this paper is not a book review. Therefore, I am planning to use the book just as a source of theoretical fundamentals and principles that will guide my research proposal. The book also provides interesting details on different stages of the netnographic research process that are sure to be helpful in designing my research program for a telecommunications company.

In addition to the book, I identified several articles that provide information on lead user identification using netnography. The academic article “Netnography as a Method of Lead User Identification” by Belz and Baumbach (2010) builds upon theoretical foundations of the netnographic research and connects them to lead user identification. The article also provides empirical evidence of lead user identification using netnography in the food market. Specific examples of wording found in the online community the researchers analyzed might be helpful in determining the concrete set of lead user characteristics. Researchers also briefly described the planning process that could be used as an inspiration for my own netnography research proposal.

Finally, the article “In Search of Innovation” by Bessant et al. (2012), WSJ touches upon the importance of lead user research. It does not directly provide any information regarding netnography but presents the typical methods applied to lead user identification nowadays. This article also has interesting information regarding lead users as a source of customer insights. Overall, I am planning to use this article to verify my impressions about the close connection between lead user research and course concepts. This article could also serve as a starting point for identification of lead user characteristics in a telecommunications setting.

Unfortunately, I could not find the versions of the book and the first article that are freely accessible online. The article is available at EBSCO. I have both of them and would be glad to provide them to you if you would like to take a look. The second article could be found at this link.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.