The emergence of socially responsible business models has changed the way some consumers think about businesses, but it has also changed the way businesses think about consumers. Buy-one-give-one (B1G1)[B1G1?] companies, for example, give one product or an equal value in cash to charitable causes for each one purchased, requiring the businesses to understand two different categories of consumers: those who would normally consume their products and those who may consume them due to the firms’ humanitarian model. This was one of the primary marketing challenges for 1-For-1 Foods, an Indiana-based B1G1 nutrition-bar startup that retails in the greater Chicagoland area and gives one bar to homeless shelters in the area in which each bar is purchased. 1-For-1 Foods realized that its actual target market extended far beyond health and fitness buffs to socially conscious consumers who might not normally buy premium nutrition bars.

To better understand these different audiences and learn how they relate to intersect, 1-For-1 Foods turned to Culture Concepts, a Milwaukee research company, for some pro bono research help. As a young company, 1-For-1 Foods didn’t have a very formidable marketing budget. So, to help reduce logistical and incentive costs while ensuring credible and useful results, Culture Concepts proposed conducting a set of ethnographic studies on larger groups of people and augmenting the results with online ethnographic research.

Using this approach, three separate studies were conducted. The first observed a group of avid nutrition-bar consumers on a hiking trip and documented their conversations, habits, and interactions with health-food products. The second study observed owners of shoes sold by TOMS—a fast-growing Los Angeles-based company that gives one pair of shoes to underprivileged children for every pair purchased—socializing in public and in private, paying particular attention to the value they placed on their shoes and TOMS’ buy one-give-one model. The third study used a digital ethnographic approach that observed what different peer groups of nutritionbar consumers and TOMS shoes consumers were saying about these products via social media. Highly detailed profiles of the most active consumers of each product were constructed using publicly available online information in order to capture the other priorities of each set of consumers.

Questions 

1. Do you think that 1-For-1 Foods has enough information to create a successful marketing strategy? If not, what other questions need to be answered and what research methodology should be used?

2. What other types of research could have been used to gather the insights uncovered in the studies?

3. Could this research have been done using tracking data and Google Analytics? Why or why not?

4. Is a hiking trip a proper venue for ethnographic research? What about dinner at a restaurant?

5. Now that qualitative research has been done, should 1-For-1 Foods do quantitative research? Why or why not?