Don Hammonds of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports on the use of market research and ethnographic observations by car manufacturers:
“The tool that most people associate with automotive market research is the focus group but another tool has become more popular recently: ethnography.
With this, market researchers go into people’s homes to see how they live, what they do with leisure time, how they use their vehicles and how they define themselves by what products they use.
Two new cars from Detroit for 2010 were developed partly based on ethnography: the Ford Taurus and Buick LaCrosse.”