Social Science Highly Sought After

Google hired a ethnographer to improve its mobile operations. Intel works with a cultural anthropologist. Microsoft is “reportedly the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world.” Why are our skills so highly sought after? Social scientists are better placed to show companies what their clients need from a product, which can often be very different to what companies think customers want. More importantly, whether the industry is marketing or medicine, social scientists are able to analyse “what products mean to customers.”

Social scientist Christian Madsbjerg tells the Business Insider: “If you look at launches of a new product, most of them fail. That’s because people don’t understand the world in which we operate.” The secret of success is to “understand the world” and put an industry in context. We use research to give businesses what they need “even if they didn’t consciously realise it yet.”

Read more: http://buff.ly/1fFFE4p Photo: Dell Inc, via Flickr CC 2.0

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