Greatest Hits – Ethnography in Action: How Lindsey Goodman Turns Observation Into Innovation

Description

Some conversations stay with you long after they end, and this one with Lindsey Goodman, Consumer Insights Leader at Wolverine Worldwide, is one of them.

In this Greatest Hits episode of The Curiosity Current, hosts Stephanie and Matt revisit a timeless discussion about the art and impact of ethnographic research. Lindsey takes us inside the work of uncovering human truths that shape powerful brand decisions. showing how empathy, observation, and curiosity can bridge the gap between data and meaning. From trail runners who run for donuts to mobile ethnography during global disruption, Lindsey shows how simple observations can become brand-defining insights. She also explores why the 50-plus market is an overlooked growth engine for forward-thinking brands. Whether you work in research, strategy, or creative, this conversation is a masterclass in making data human and curiosity actionable.

Lindsey - 00:00:00:

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It was a way to bring us right into their homes and still see their routines and understand their emotional states, and it gave us that real time window into how people were coping and adapting and really, like, reprioritizing their lives.

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Stephanie - 00:00:13:

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Welcome to the Curiosity Current, the podcast where we dive deep into what's shaping today's trends and tomorrow's consumers. I'm your host, Stephanie, and I'm so glad you're joining me. Each episode, we tap into the minds of researchers, innovators, and insights professionals to explore how curiosity drives discovery and how discovery drives better decisions in an ever changing market landscape. Whether you're a data enthusiast, a strategy pro, or like me just endlessly fascinated by human behavior, this is the place for you. So get ready to challenge your assumptions, spark some fresh thinking, and have some fun along the way. Let's see where curiosity takes us next with this brand new episode. Today on the Curiosity Current, we are joined by Lindsay Goodman, a consumer insights leader with over fifteen years of experience at top global brands like Nike and Wolverine worldwide.

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Matt - 00:01:10:

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Lindsey currently leads the Consumer Insights and market intelligence efforts at Wolverine Worldwide, where she's driving innovation and product development for some of the most well-known brands in footwear and apparel, including Merrell, Saucony, and Chaco. Her work blends deep ethnographic research with cutting-edge digital tools, helping brands stay ahead of the curve by truly understanding what consumers want and need.

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Stephanie - 00:01:31:

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We're going to be diving into how ethnography can uncover hidden insights, why democratizing consumer data is more important than ever, and finally, how Lindsay's approach is helping brands like Wolverine Worldwide innovate and grow in a rapidly changing market. Lindsey, welcome to The Curiosity Current.

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Lindsey - 00:01:50:

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Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

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Stephanie - 00:01:53:

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We're happy to have you.

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Matt - 00:01:55:

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Very happy to have you. So you've spent years leading Consumer Insights teams at major brands, Nike, Wolverine Worldwide, House of Major Brands. Ethnography really seems to be a core part of your approach. What initially sparked your interest in ethnography?

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Lindsey - 00:02:11:

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In my humble opinion, I think it's the most interesting and honestly, the most fun part of the Consumer Insights playbook. Sure, you know, every party loves a good choice-based conjoint, but you know, there's really nothing more impactful or more human than just talking to consumers in their natural habitat. It's kind of where everything clicks. You're no longer just looking at numbers. You're watching behavior, you're hearing emotions, you're seeing the environment that influences decisions. And so it really turns data into dimension, I think. And I think what first drew me to ethnography was that sense of immersion. I've always been curious, maybe annoyingly so, about the why behind behaviors. And ethnography doesn't just help you observe, it helps you feel what the consumer feels. It really creates empathy, not just insight. And so over the past year, I've done a lot of work helping our stakeholders across the organization understand what an insight actually is, and how ethnography is kind of that secret door to unlock it. I kind of think of it as a triangle model, if you will. So the base is like data points, right? It's raw data. So let's say 60% of consumers wear sneakers to hike. That's a data point. It's interesting, but it's just a data point. If you go up a level, you've got findings, right? Like men are more likely to wear hiking boots than women. Okay, that's an interesting trend in the data. But the top of the triangle, that's where the insight lives. So in this example I'm using, you know, we did a project with Merrell and in talking to female hikers, we discovered that comfort and safety were super important to them. But shopping for technical hiking boots was really intimidating. And it felt overwhelming. And they weren't sure that they saw themselves represented. So they defaulted to what was already in their closet. That's an insight. That's a problem we can actually solve. And that's something I don't think we would have uncovered by just looking at numbers.

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Matt - 00:03:59:

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That makes a lot of sense. You would have had to climb several ladders on the Y journey to get there that you just couldn't have done in a traditional research approach.

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Lindsey - 00:04:08:

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So we did an ethnography a few years back with roadrunners. And I'm not a runner. And so I have this preconception of runners as being like health freaks, Green juice drinkers, protein shakes, all this stuff. And what we found was that these consumers were not eating healthy to run better. They were running so that they could eat unhealthy food. And I mean, like, these are some of the unhealthiest eaters I've ever seen. They basically are running for donuts and for beer. And I think what's so funny about this is it didn't matter where we were. We went to San Diego, Toronto, and London. Someone seemed to bring up donuts everywhere we went. And so it was both hilarious, but also deeply insightful. And so I think that theme gave us that cultural permission to lean into that fun of the collaboration. And it really made it feel playful and authentic and not forced.

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Matt - 00:05:01:

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That's super interesting. That resonates with me. I definitely run for the ability to just eat gobs of unhealthy food rather than particular health goals. Yeah, I hear that. I feel that.

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Matt - 00:05:13:

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In particular, I want to talk about this statement that you talk about, which is democratizing insights through ethnography. I want to know, like, what does that mean to you and why is it so important?

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Lindey - 00:05:25:

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I'd say in its simplest form, democratizing insights means making research and data something everyone can use, not just researchers or executives or strategists. It's really about removing that gatekeeping and helping everyone in the organization, whether you're in product or marketing or finance or sales, everyone can connect with the consumer. And I think ethnography is such a powerful way to do that because it doesn't require a background in research to understand it. It's just grounded in human connection. When you see a consumer's lived experience, what frustrates them, what excites them, what their real needs are, you can't unsee that. It just clicks. And suddenly it's not just a research finding in a deck, it's a consumer truth you feel. And for me, that's what makes it so important right now. I think the companies that win are the ones that are consumer obsessed and you can't build a consumer centric culture if only a handful of people ever meet their consumer. And so democratizing insights, to me, it's not just a buzzword. It's really a shift in mindset. It's saying, hey, you don't need to be a researcher to care about this stuff. You just need curiosity and access.

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Matt - 00:06:29:

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We're going to be talking about ethnography a lot today, but I do want to just back up for a second and give you a little bit of space to talk about where ethnography sits in your larger toolkit. Because I know at Wolverine Worldwide, you had shared, you know, you have an interesting framework for exploring insights in a more comprehensive way. So if you could just talk to us a little bit about that and where ethnography plays its particular role.

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Lindsey - 00:06:53:

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I'm glad you asked this question because as much as I love ethnography, it's really only one piece of the puzzle. And so at Wolverine Worldwide, we use a framework we call hindsight, insight, foresight. So think of it as kind of three overlapping lenses that, you know, when used together, give us this full 360 view of the consumer. So hindsight is all about looking back. You know, what has already happened? This is where our market intelligence team lives. They're analyzing sales data and market share shifts and competitive performance. It's fundamental. It's important for us to know where we've been in order to know where we're going, right? Insight is now. It's where we're digging into current consumer behaviors, perceptions, unmet needs, motivations, and ethnography fits squarely here. It's a tool we use to understand the human context behind the behavior that we're seeing in the numbers. And then there's foresight, which is probably the most interesting but ambiguous of the three. It's about identifying kinds of signals, watching cultural shifts, and anticipating future consumer behavior. It's not about predicting the future with certainty, but it's about preparing ourselves for the possibilities that may shape the market as we look to the future. So I can give you a great example of how these have come together for us. You know, a few years back, our hindsight data showed us that Saucony had really strong equity and trail running higher than you'd expect based on the level of investment we were making. So that was a clue. And then we launched a global trail running ethnography, and we found that trail runners were really burned out on kind of heavy, overbuilt shoes. They were craving something that still performed, but felt like they're road running shoes, something that was lighter and simpler and more versatile. And then in foresight, we were starting to see these emerging signals around life becoming more fluid and work and play and travel all blending together and this desire for personalization and kind of multifunctionality in the products that they were buying. And so when you overlap those three, you get this really clear consumer opportunity. And from that, we ended up building not one, but two product franchises. One of them was brand new. One of them was a reimagined version of an existing one. And those franchises have gone on to become some of our best performing lines in the trail category. And so it really is that triangulation that turns insight into action. So ethnography is one part of it, but it's really powerful when you get all three.

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Stephanie - 00:09:14:

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Do you have a particular example where ethnography revealed something about consumers or your customers that really did surprise you?

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Lindsey - 00:009:22:

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That's a good question. I think this is where ethnography really flexes its muscles, right? Surveys are great for scale, but they're limited by what you ask. You only get answers to the questions that you thought to pose. And those answers are usually structured and tend to be surface level. Focus groups, sure, they can help a bit more, but they also often fall victim to groupthink and dominant voices or consumers telling you what they think you want to hear. Ethnography, as you know, we said earlier, really helps you observe people in their element. All that ego is gone. The structure is gone. It's just very human. And it's about the connection. I mentioned this earlier, but we did that trail running study. And I'll never forget, we were in Chamonix, France, which we don't always go to glamorous places like that. But Chamonix is like a mecca for trail runners. And I remember one of the runners said something that was so moving that it shifted how one of our designers thought about footwear and their work for years. And I mentioned this earlier, like stakeholders that still quote me from that same runner long after the research has ended. I'd say another really good example is, yeah, I was talking earlier about runners and how they eat. But another one that really stuck with me was how many runners, even those that were logging 50 plus miles a week, refused to call themselves runners. And we were seeing it in survey data. We were talking to these people who were runners. They're running a lot. And we would ask them directly, do you consider yourself a runner? Do you call yourself a runner? And we were getting a lot of no's. The percentages were really low. We were, that's so confusing. Why is that? It wasn't until we did ethnography and we were talking to consumers that we were able to uncover that something about that label felt elite and almost illusionary. We saw running as part of their lifestyle, but not something that defined them. And so they were uncomfortable with that label. And that insight, it really made us rethink how we talk about running, who our messaging includes or accidentally excludes. And it really reminded us that like identity is a nuanced thing and the brand language that we use, it really needs to reflect that. And so again, that's something that I just don't think you get unless you do ethnography. Otherwise, that just would have been sort of a data point floating out there that we would be confused about probably still today. But ethnography really unleashes that deeper understanding.

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Matt - 00:011:50:

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Was it that they almost saw it as an aspirational title that they had not yet achieved? Or was it just that it brought up an image that they didn't necessarily fully associate themselves with? I'm just curious, because that would kind of have implications for how you act on that insight.

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Lindsey - 00:12:10:

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I think a little bit of both, but I think really it was more the latter. I think they think of runners as professional runners, just like elite competitors, people who are doing it for a living, people who are professionals. And so in some cases, maybe some of the consumers we were talking to aspire for that. But for the most part, our consumer, our target consumer for that brand, they're just people and they run. Their parents, their students, their work in the corporate world. Well, they're just people and running is one thing that they do. It's a very important thing. It's a very meaningful thing to them, but it's just one part of who they are and they don't want to be identified as sort of one dimensional.

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Matt - 00:12:51:

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That's great and this ethnographic approach enabled you to really suss out all of that nuance in a way that really drove true understanding. That's very cool. I'm curious, you have this emphasis on deep ethnographic understanding and you alluded to it at the beginning of the talk, you know, it's a different vibe. It's a different approach than say your typical choice-based conjoint segmentation, you name it. Do you find you have challenges sharing those results out when it comes time to actually tell the insight story? Do you have ways that you have to go about really helping your stakeholders to understand the importance and to understand the finding, given that you're sharing it with them in sort of a different way?

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Lindsey - 00:13:37:

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One thing that we do here is we, one of the methods we employ is a process called 4D. It's rooted in design thinking. It's all about embedding empathy into the innovation process. And it really works beautifully for ethnography because it keeps consumers front and center every step of the way. I'll break it down for you. So the 4Ds are Define, Discover, Dream, and Design. And so first we define what we want to learn. Maybe it's understanding the mindset of a trail runner or the pain points of a workbook consumer. We moved into Discover and that's the field work. So we take cross-functional teams with us, which is key. It's not just the insight teams in a vacuum. It's designers, it's marketers, it's salespeople, everyone hearing it firsthand, whether that's in person, which we prefer in person ethnography or mobile ethnography, which we did quite a bit of in the post-COVID era. And then comes Dream. And this kind of goes to answering your question. We come back together in a workshop setting and we start clustering what we heard together. So tensions, unmet needs, consumer quotes that stuck with us. It's not about my team presenting the insights to the team. It's about uncovering the insights with the team. And that shared ownership is what really makes it stick. It helps feed into that last D, which is design. And that's where we use what we've uncovered together to spark new product ideas, messaging platforms, strategies. It's a whole journey. By the time we're done, the stakeholders are so immersed in it that they don't just remember the insights. They're championing them. They are advocating for them because they felt them and experienced them firsthand.

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Matt - 00:15:15:

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They were there for the journey. I think that's such a great approach. Having had a bit of exposure to design thinking methods, that really resonates. I mean, having a cross-collaborative group with you from the start, it also helps you as the researcher, right? I mean, it helps you kind of frame questions in a way that you know are going to be easier for maybe people who weren't lucky enough to be part of the project. Digest, you know, you can incorporate all those multiple viewpoints. I think that's just such a terrific advantage that a design thinking empowered ethnographic approach that rolls off the tongue really, really can provide a lot of advantage.

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Stephanie - 00:15:51:

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I can see that.

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Matt - 00:15:51:

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It occurs to me that central to ethnography working, it is intimate to a degree. It emphasizes connection to a point that some other approaches don't. However, at Wolverine Worldwide, you have a house of brands where each brand has a very different target persona. How do you balance that? Because do you have to tailor the ethnographic approach or do you have to tailor your methods in any way, given that the consumers you're speaking to, it's so important to get to that deep level of connection, but they're just so different from one another.

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Lindsey - 00:16:30:

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It's definitely a mix of both, right? We have foundational toolkits, methodologies, and frameworks that we think work across the portfolio. But I wouldn't say we're running a one-size-fits-all playbook. I think, to your point, each brand has its own identity, its own consumer target, its own set of business priorities. And so we have to adapt accordingly. And I think, for example, the way we connect with a blue-collar workbook consumer is going to look different from how we engage with a Gen Z lifestyle consumer. That workbook consumer, they're probably not posting, you know, outfit-of-the-day pics on Instagram. And we're probably not going to get them to download an ethnography app on their phone. So in those cases, we'll go to them. We'll go to job sites. We'll interview them face-to-face. We'll make it informal and low-tech. And frankly, you know, those conversations are still gold. They're real. They're unfiltered. They're deeply practical. And so they're great. Contrast that with how we might engage a Gen Z consumer. They're digital natives. We'll use mobile ethnography. We can ask them to upload photos or create video diaries. They're going to want to show us their closets and their style rituals and their TikTok or Instagram inspiration. Same core goal, right? Empathy and insight, but maybe different methods. I'd say, though, where we stay consistent is on the back end. How we're synthesizing insights, how we're sharing them across the business, how we activate them through things like the 4D process we just talked about. That's the system that creates consistency. I'd say the front end approach, you know, always flexes based on the consumer we're trying to understand.

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Stephanie - 00:18:03:

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So I'm going to take us back in time a little bit from Wolverine Worldwide and ask you a question going back to your Converse days. I'm curious, how did the Consumer Insights team there use ethnography? And again, is there any kind of specific instance that you could talk through where this kind of qualitative research, specifically ethnography, directly influenced a major shift in a product or a brand strategy?

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Lindsey - 00:18:29:

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Converse is such an amazing brand with such a unique fan base. Honestly, I have an example from Converse. It's probably one of my favorite examples of ethnography in action. When I was there, we ran a global online community where consumers could engage with us and each other. We would use it for feedback, pose kind of exploratory questions, trend spotting. The best part about it, though, was that it was interactive. So people could upload photos. They could start their own threads. They could comment on each other's stuff. It was sort of a window into their world that we didn't have to moderate or control. We could just kind of watch it unfold. And one day, a community member shared a photo of their Chuck Taylors, completely covered in doodles and hand-drawn artwork. And they talked about how they had worn them during this really meaningful time in their life and how each drawing was tied to a specific memory. And it wasn't just a shoe. It was like their personal time capsule. And what happened next was just incredible. So dozens and then hundreds of other members started sharing their own Chucks. Some of them were signed by musicians or colored with Sharpies or did unique laces or they personalized them with patches or pins. And everyone had a story. And they were all telling this story of self-expression through their shoes. Now, like we already knew that customization was like a big part of the Chuck Taylor legacy, but this felt a little bit different. It was emotional. It was storytelling. And we didn't ask for it. It just happened organically.

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Matt - 00:20:00:

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I wanted to go back just briefly to something you mentioned, which was finding ways to continue to do ethnographic research through the COVID-19 pandemic, which just completely turned the qualitative research world on its head. I can't imagine the trials and tribulations you had to endure to make that work. I was just curious if you could talk us through that experience a little bit.

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Lindsey - 00:20:24:

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This is where we really started to lean into mobile ethnography. And we started something called the COVID-19 Consumer Tracker during that time. And it was really a game changer, especially during such a chaotic and uncertain time. We couldn't travel, couldn't sit down with consumers in person. And so mobile ethnography became a lifeline for my team. We had people sharing video diaries and uploading photos and, you know, recording themselves. And it was a way to bring us right into their homes and still see their routines and understand their emotional states. And it gave us that real-time window into how people were coping and adapting and really like reprioritizing their lives. But the trick isn't just collecting the insights. It's kind of keeping the momentum going. And that part for us kind of came down to two things, relevance and rhythm, I'd say. So if the tracker was just saying consumers are still anxious week after week, it starts to impact. And so we were layering in special topics like how people were redefining their wellness, how their shopping behaviors were changing around home and comfort. So. Just kind of small lifestyle shifts and things like that. And through that, we were able to catch kind of early signals of things like the slipper boom and the spike in the interrail interest. And we're able to kind of pivot quickly in some cases because we were paying attention, not just to that headline emotion, but to those kinds of undercurrents and the little behavioral changes that are happening around it. And then kind of the rhythm part is just keeping the cadence tight. You know, we didn't let insights pile up in a report that was just gathering dust in a graveyard somewhere. We shared things as they emerged, whether it was just sort of like a quick email or a highlight reel or a quote. The more you make it feel alive, the more likely it is that people will act on it.

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Matt - 00:22:07:

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Are there particular voices, particular brands or ad agencies, consultancies, whatever it is that maybe are doing a better job of paying attention to this segment than others that you can think of? Like, who should we go to? Who should we look to as the leaders if we want to affect this change?

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Lindsey - 00:22:22:

Yeah, pretty soon it's going to be me. I don't know. Mostly have been really influenced by Michael Clinton's work. Again, he is not paying me for this. He's just my source of interest here. But he has a whole website and one part of it is consumer facing. It's for this 50 plus community to talk to each other. And the other side is sort of business facing. And so I know he's doing a lot of work with companies to help them understand how to better market to this audience. But I don't know. And I think that's kind of my point is that I don't think anyone's really talking about this. And these are people that have loads and loads of disposable income and they do care about style and they do and they are active and they are all the things we want them to be. And we're sitting on a goldmine, I think all of us are.

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Matt - 00:23:14:

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We can be the change. We could start it right now.

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Lindsey - 00:23:17:

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Yes. Let's do it.

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Matt - 00:23:19:

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Oh, that's great. It's somewhat related to our conversation today on ethnography and passion for studying individuals, for learning about people driving our career choices. I just wanted to mention for my little segment here that I had the pleasure of attending IIEX North America in D.C. Just past week dating the episode, but that's okay. It was really interesting for me to see the topics, not necessarily the topics of sessions that various researchers, brands, and agencies bring to the show, but the undertones of those sessions, the sort of like driving current, no pun intended, behind what's making people talk about the things that they're talking about. And obviously data integrity is a big topic in our field right now. That was one topic, but alongside that, a lot of talk really got back to this idea of empathy. And I found that interesting because, we've been having a lot of conversations on the show with insights leaders who, through one way or another, our conversation will almost eventually always turn to empathy as a driving force in their career aspirations, their passion for insights. And it's been interesting to kind of observe this cyclical nature in the insights industry where a few years ago, we were talking about empathy a lot. It has almost sort of reached this phase, I would say, where it'd be easy to kind of write it off as a buzzword. Like it was sort of in all of the corporate briefings. A lot of people were talking about it like, hey, we're going to do this empathy thing and we're going to be empathetic. And then, I don't know, I kind of feel like it by the wayside to some degree for a few years as we kind of collectively as an industry kind of moved on to the next shiny thing. And now we're in this space where everything is tech, everything is AI, everything has changed, changed, changed, changed. Social upheaval, yada, yada, yada. And I think because of that, we're starting to see this reemergence of a growth and interest in empathy again. Like maybe there was something to that, you know, kind of like as an industry, we're thinking this passion, this true human impulse to feel and understand others in a really meaningful way might actually be something core to who we are as professionals. And I just think it's cool to see that. I think it's interesting to see the cyclical nature of things. And also, you know, we're all Consumer Insights nerds and we love studying people. So I love to see that particular topic sort of getting another, a second, third moment in the spotlight.

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Stephanie - 00:25:52:

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It's a good one, Matt. Well, just to round us out here with a, I can't even call this tangentially related, but I'm going to develop a reputation for doing this, going way off topic. My undercurrent sort of thing I'm nerding out about this week is a book I'm reading called Everything is tuberculosis by John Green. It is a nonfiction book. It's about the history and persistence of tuberculosis. I think, you know, the book essentially is just positing that people think of TB as this disease of the past, but in reality, it's not. I think 10 million people will be diagnosed with tuberculosis this year. And we know the direct cause is, of course, the bacteria. But Green's argument in the book is that the real cause of TB in the 21st century is humans. I'll say consumers, so it'll be relevant. It's consumers. Just kidding. My point is we know how to kill this bacteria. It's that human choice, human built systems, though, are the root cause. So it's just this book that dives into the social determinants of health, things like poverty, lack of education, and systems that are discriminatory often by design. But it's told in a narrative format through one boy's, one young man's experience in Sierra Leone. So it's a really powerful, you know, I think, Matt, back to your point about empathy. When it's told that way, it really has the ability to draw you in, right? Because it is a story about one person kind of navigating this reality. It's a sobering read, but it's definitely a worthwhile one.

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Matt - 00:27:23:

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Sounds worthwhile.

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Stephanie - 00:27:25:

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Nice, alright. Well, Lindsay, thanks again so much for joining us today. I have to say, this is definitely one of our more, besides the end there, fun episodes to record, so many fun examples from your work. So we really appreciated getting to know about you and your work.

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Lindsey - 00:27:39:

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Yeah. Thank you for having me. This was fun.

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Matt - 00:27:42:

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Thank you.

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Matt - 00:27:45:

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The Curiosity Current is brought to you by A YTM. To find out how A YTM helps brands connect with consumers and bring insights to life, visit aytm.com. And to make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to the Curiosity Current on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.