Why Brands Need to Get Their Hands Dirty

Before I was a strategist, I was an anthropologist - one of those people who spent weeks in a field, squatting on the floors of kitchens, riding buses to nowhere in particular, and saying yes to every awkward invitation.

Before I was an anthropologist, I was just plain nosy - a child poking around my friend's mum's bathroom (sorry Mrs Gray) or taking myself behind the shop counter in our local newsagents. Little self-created excursions that drove my parents up the wall but laid the foundations for my innate interest in real people and real lives.

I learned early that you can't understand a culture or category by looking at it from the outside. You have to enter it. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty.

Today, in the world of brand strategy, the same truth applies. The most human brands win - but you can't be human from behind a two-way mirror or a spreadsheet of survey results. Being human means listening with your whole body, showing up in someone else's world without the safety rails of your own assumptions.

The limits of 'insights' from afar

In marketing, we often mistake convenience for insight. Online polls, social media sentiment analysis, focus groups in glass walled rooms, AI shortcuts and tools are really useful (don't get me wrong – this isn't an 'anti-tech rant') but they rarely deliver the kind of deep, textured understanding that properly shifts strategy. At best, they tell you what people are thinking in that moment. They don't tell you why, and they certainly don't show you what people can't yet articulate themselves.

Ethnography is competitive advantage

Ethnography is messy, it’s slow - but it works. It means joining a single parent on the weekly shop, noticing which brands their kid points to and which ones they ignore. It means cooking with someone in their own kitchen, observing how they improvise when the recipe calls for an ingredient they never buy. It means standing in the rain outside a football stadium, talking to soggy, wet and hoarse fans.

Those are the moments when truth slips out sideways. And those truths - the unpolished, contradictory, emotional ones - are where real strategy lives.

P&G famously came up with the Swiffer mop when it observed, through ethnography, that people spent more time cleaning their mop than they did cleaning their floors. That insight - born from watching real people clean real homes - spawned a $500 million product line that redefined an entire category. No focus group would have uncovered that contradiction between intention and behaviour.

Guinness built some of its most iconic work not from spreadsheets of sales data but from immersing itself in the rituals of its drinkers. Ethnographic observation revealed that ordering a pint of Guinness was never just about the liquid - it was about the wait, the patience, and the social theatre of anticipation. Out of that came the insight that character, not speed, defined the brand. Campaigns from “Good things come to those who wait” to “Made of More” translated this cultural truth into powerful storytelling, celebrating resilience, loyalty, and depth in ways that echoed the pint itself. No focus group ticking boxes on beer preferences would have revealed the poetry in waiting for a Guinness; only watching how people behaved at the bar could.

At BMB, our leap forward for Farrow & Ball’s Modern Emulsion came not from colour charts or trend forecasts, but from quietly watching how people really lived with fresh paint in their homes. Noticing that beneath the joy of a newly decorated space, in real life those gorgeous walls had to withstand sticky fingers, scuffed shoes, and everyday knocks. It was very real ‘paint paranoia’ that would help deliver their most successful product launch ever with Modern Emulsion. No product spec sheet could have uncovered that paradox between aspiration and reality that only ethnography and talking to real people in their homes made visible.

It works beyond FMCG too … B2B brands I’m talking to you too.

This approach can’t and shouldn’t be limited to consumer goods. Ethnography unlocks breakthrough strategies in every field. Sit in a small business kitchen-turned-office and watch cash flow being managed at 2am or shadow claim adjusters to really understand the emotional weight of their work. Deeper ethnography, deeper strategies.

The principle remains the same: context is everything, regardless of your sector. A SaaS company might discover their product isn't competing with other software, but with Excel spreadsheets held together by habit and fear of change. You only learn that by sitting next to someone as they work.

Practical ways to dig deeper

Start small, but start somewhere. Brief your next campaign in a really human space, not a meeting room. If you're working on a breakfast brand, meet at 7am in someone's kitchen during the morning rush. If it's a commuter proposition, ride the train during peak hours.

Talk to people outside marketing. Spend time with customer service teams who hear unfiltered frustration daily. Shadow sales teams making calls. Sit with delivery drivers who see how packaging performs in the real world. Go work behind the counter of a fast food store. These colleagues are ethnographers by default and they rarely get asked what they've learned.

Make space for messiness in your research. Embrace the gap between what people say and what they do. Build questions that invite paradox, not neat answers.

Consider who else lives in your customer's world. If you're selling to parents, what do teenagers in those households think about your brand? If you're targeting executives, what do their assistants notice that they don't? Understand the undercurrents and subtexts - that’s where the human advantage lies.

Brands that act with the curiosity and empathy of a human who's actually been in the room, felt the mood, smelled the air.

That only comes from showing up. From practicing the kind of active listening, and watching, that ethnography demands. From getting comfortable with not knowing the ending before you start.

My invitation to dig deeper

Leave the comfort of your desks (and your decks). Go sit in the spaces where people make decisions, improvise solutions, and live messy, glorious, human lives. Don't bring an agenda; bring a notebook, a willingness to be surprised, and a deep tolerance for awkward silences. (And be prepared to be escorted out of the odd supermarket for lingering...)

Because here's the thing - brands aren't built in boardrooms. They're built in kitchens, on buses, in checkout lines, in the middle of everyday life. And the only way to design for that life is to dig deeper into the lives of the people you're designing for.

The brands winning today are the ones brave enough to get uncomfortable, ask different questions, and find truth in the places where people actually live their lives.

Read more from BMB Agency here.