Episode Description:
Tim Malefyt has an amazing ability to make the familiar strange.

He does this by doing deep, ethnographic research with customers, helping brands uncover hidden consumer truths through a combination of carefully constructed activities and thoughtful conversation. 

As a business anthropologist, Tim’s research methodologies and key findings have helped re-energize a number of big name brands across multiple categories, including Campbell’s, Gillette, FedEx, HBO, Revlon, PepsiCo, Cadillac, Crayola, and New Balance among many others.

For Tim, context is everything. 

If you want to understand a person’s behavior, you have to talk to them in the right context. That means getting them out of the focus group room, putting away the interrogation pad,  and talking with people in the environment where the behavior naturally takes place. 

Because as Tim puts it, “It is in the doing, in the action, that the ‘knowledge of the body’ starts to come through.”

Some of my favorite aha moments talking with Tim with include:

• Reframing Campbell’s “dinner dilemma” into something more creative and communal

• The surprisingly social nature of driving and the unexpected challenges that poses designers of self-driving cars

• The power of metaphors to hide, shape, or distort reality and how to use metaphors during interviews to get to more meaningful truths

• How to check for and overcome gender bias in research projects 

• The way Tim’s experience as a ballet dancer has influenced his approach to research and presentations