What does a business anthropologist do?

I am a cultural anthropologist. Unlike many of my peers, I do not work in a university, nor in a museum. I work in the business world. This is often as confusing as it is interesting to people, and I’ve learned to thrive in that tension.

Anthropology is a social science. The easiest way to describe what anthropologists do is to tell you that we study present-day groups of people to understand the social and cultural dynamics that shape how members of that group think about the world and their place in it. A cultural anthropologist will not just describe what a group or person does, they will also be able to tell you why (or why not) that person believes it is the right thing to do, or say, or aspire to. Anthropology is core for understanding how people interpret the world and respond to the things that happen every day.

In business contexts, anthropologists are usually tasked to study groups of people as well, but often framed in a different way than “traditional” anthropology. These groups can be as broad as “Lexus owners” or as pointed as “elderly folks with a chronic heart condition living in rural Wisconsin.” The purpose of studying these groups is to answer a business question or need with the understanding and insight gained during the research: Should we acquire this luxury wellness hotel brand? How do we communicate to affluent families that this vehicle responds to their needs? Which creative ad campaign platform is most aligned with people in their late twenties who are starting to think about getting engaged?

Anthropologists working in business produce knowledge about people — what they believe, what is precious and valuable to them, what their daily rhythms are like, how products and technology are integrated into their lives, what they hope to make happen in the future, and so on. Anthropologists study every facet of what it means to be human, so the application to business and organizations is endless. The catchall term for what anthropologists produce in business settings is insights. Insights carry important implications and are the material from which many businesses make decisions. In my case, insights typically structure how clients craft communications, produce ad campaigns, or design services and products.

I’ll give you an example from a recent project I worked on. I was studying affluent parents1 in the United States, and one of my core thematic interests was their relationship with technology within family life. My participants would tell me that they are extremely intentional in limiting their children’s screen time. Recent headlines and many quantitative data reports will tell you the same thing. But being an anthropologist, and being invited to enter into their family life for a time, reveals something deeper altogether. The “limiting” of screen time comes from a belief that technology is something that ought to enhance the way their children engage in the world. Therefore, technology is “limited” to moments that help foster interaction with others or induce thinking, creating, and problem-solving. Technology is rejected when it fragments or discourages those things. Limited doesn’t have to mean time of use; limited can also mean purpose of use.

A quantitative data point will tell you that screen time is reportedly decreasing. An anthropologist will tell you the values and beliefs that underscore which categories of screen time feel morally good and which are to be avoided.

It’s not that the qualitative research methods anthropologists employ are better than quantitative research. The two can and should work in tandem, because they bring different parts of the answer. From what I’ve seen in many years of experience, most research — most business thinking, period — starts with audiences and segments: groups defined by what they buy, how old they are, where they fall on a chart. It is a look from above, or from the outside. Anthropology starts somewhere else. It starts with people, situated in the social and cultural worlds that make their choices reasonable to them. It starts with a look from the inside.

That distinction, between studying from the outside and studying from the inside, alongside your research participants, is at the heart of the discipline of anthropology.

So, concretely: what does that look like as a job?

For me, working in branding, advertising, and communications, it looks like doing ethnography and running qualitative research studies to support luxury and premium brands in making business decisions. At times, it means helping creative or media agencies by doing research with people so that they can build effective brand strategies, design a media plan, envision a creative ad campaign, or win a new client for their agency roster.

It also looks like showing up to meetings with marketing teams, strategy teams, or even creatives, to offer a different view on things. One that is grounded in behavioural theory and informed by an anthropological perspective2.

At other times, it has looked like designing and executing qualitative and quantitative research, followed by writing and producing reports or presentations for companies’ thought leadership. The affluent parenting example I mentioned above was for an agency to have an interesting and informed take on the aspirations of modern affluent parents in the United States. This gave the agency a leg up in new business pitches or with current clients, to demonstrate a deep knowledge of modern parents and how to design products and communications for them.

Other anthropologists I know are doing other things: they are inside product teams shaping how software gets built, or embedded in innovation labs deciding what a company should make next, or advising on how organizations understand their own culture, or doing policy work, or leading internal conversations about technology and ethics; the list goes on, and the opportunities are limitless.

Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. And business is one of the core aspects of being human in today’s world. Wherever those two things meet, some version of this work is happening, whether or not people realize it.