John Curran spent weeks shadowing British people going about their daily business. He was there on the school run, he followed them to the supermarket and lurked in cafés while they sipped cappuccinos. Mr Curran is not a private investigator hoping to uncover a dirty secret but an anthropologist – a social scientist who studies human behaviour through systematic observation – working on behalf of a greeting card company. His task? To discover events in need of commemoration.
The “informants”, as he calls the people he observed, revealed a need to remember deceased relatives. Many he discovered kept shrines, for example on pianos, and performed rituals on anniversaries, such as lighting candles. Some included cards at such ceremonies but found most greetings cards lacking because they were written in the present tense. Such insights, Mr Curran says, were unlikely to have been discovered using conventional market research methods such as focus groups – especially on the taboo subject of death.
Mr Curran is one of a growing number of anthropologists employed by companies researching new markets or designing products to fit with users’ lifestyles. “We get a sledgehammer to [received wisdom] and then piece it all together . . . It’s a challenging way of ruffling feathers, and from that opportunities arise.”