Um antropologista entra num bar... (parte I)

Um artigo cheio de exemplos e mensagens para as empresas. Na HBR de Março de 2014, "An Anthropologist Walks Into a Bar" de Christian Madsbjerg e Mikkel Rasmussen.
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Antes de mais já sabem do papel que reservo aos antropologistas no mundo das empresas (recordar, por exemplo: aqui, aqui e aqui).
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O artigo começa com o caso de uma empresa produtora de cerveja que estava insatisfeita com a evolução das vendas nos bares. Por que é que as vendas não crescem? Um grupo de antropologistas foi enviado para os bares, para estudar o que se passava...
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Resultado, a percepção de que os bares não são todos iguais, por isso:

"Instead of bombarding them with one-size-fits-all promotional materials, it began customizing items for different types of bars and bar owners. It trained its salespeople to understand each bar owner better and invented a tool to help owners organize sales campaigns. It created in-workplace “academies” to train waitstaf about its brands and won over female servers by providing taxi service for employees who worked late. After two years BeerCo’s pub and bar sales rebounded"

Ehehe, algo que poderiam ter aprendido neste blogue!
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Outro ponto importante, em sintonia com este blogue, a opinião sobre o Big Data:

"According to a recent global study of 1,500 CEOs conducted by IBM, ... The research also reveals that CEOs see a lack of customer insight as their biggest deficit in managing complexity. They prioritize gaining customer insight far above other decision-related tasks and rank “customer obsession” as the most critical leadership trait.
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Accordingly, many companies are turning to customer research that is powered by big data and analytics. Although that approach can provide astonishingly detailed pictures of some aspects of their markets, the pictures are far from complete and are often misleading. It may be possible to predict a customer’s next mouse click or purchase, but no amount of quantitative data can tell you why she made that click or purchase. Without that insight, companies cannot close the complexity gap.
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In the rush to reduce consumers to strings of ones and zeros, marketers and strategists are losing sight of the human element. Consumers are people, after all. They’re often irrational, and they’re sometimes driven by motives that are opaque even to themselves. Yet most marketers cling to assumptions about their customers’ behavior that have been shaped by their organizational culture, the biases of the firm’s managers, and, increasingly, the vast but imperfect data stream fowing in."

Outra preocupação deste blogue, a concentração na experiência do cliente, em vez dos atributos da oferta:

"At the core of sensemaking lies the practice of phenomenology: the study of how people experience life. Management science can tell Starbucks, for example, how many cups of cofee its customers will drink in a day; phenomenology reveals how those customers perceive the cofee experience."

Continua.