Comcast's Michael Wehrman on Ethnography's Renaissance in 2025

Curious about what's on the horizon for market research and customer insights? We've got you covered with Market Research Trends 2025-our just-released report packed with answers and fresh perspectives.

This report is based on a study we conducted using our conversational research platform, along with additional insights from secondary research and email correspondence with t

We received so much incredible input from experts that we couldn't fit everything into the report. That's why we'll be sharing even more of their valuable thoughts right here on our blog over the coming weeks.

First up, we're featuring a Q&A with Michael Wehrman, Senior Manager of Growth Insights at Comcast. Keep reading to discover why Michael sees a big comeback for ethnography in 2025 and his take on balancing the opportunities and challenges of using AI for insights.

Besides AI, what tools or technologies do you see becoming important in 2025 and why?

2025 should lead to a renaissance of ethnographic research. Slow, costly, small sample sizes-all things we're trying to avoid as an industry. If executives truly want to know what consumers think, why and how they use products and services, and critical context around timing and circumstance, eyes-wide-open qualitative work should always be on the menu.

Researchers and stakeholders can benefit from engaging people with no assumptions about who they are or what they think/know about the company or products and services. There are ample opportunities (and needs) for scaled quantitative work-and we can (and should) take advantage of those.

2025 should lead to a renaissance of ethnographic research.

AI won't deliver you insights you hadn't considered; quantitative work is unlikely to reveal patterns beyond our assumptions about brand awareness or product interest. Is it a new tool or technology? Not necessarily, however it's declining use reflects a missed opportunity with consumer research.

What's old can become what's new - not just to test brand love, new products, or price elasticity, but to truly understand connections between consumers, your brands, and your products and services.

What types of AI innovations or applications are you most excited about?

A willingness to engage that AI reliance comes with risks. For businesses, I recently heard someone say "[AI] can generate 10,000 Seinfeld scripts for you, but it can never give you the idea of Seinfeld." It's easy to admit that it's not a tool for innovation, but research needs to be mindful of the potential business risks of over-reliance on AI. Similar to critiques of relying on Wikipedia for learning about subjects, it's a fine place to start your search, but an uncertain place to end it.

Beyond business risks, the industry also will need to reckon with the economic and environmental impact of the machinery required for AI to function-the resources needed to build and maintain the machinery as well as the energy needed to supply it as well. AI may yet shift paradigms, but open discussion about tradeoffs as well as upsides is where we need to focus.

What methodologies or approaches do you see declining in 2025?

"The CSI Effect" refers to a shift in public expectations of the clarity of evidence in criminal trials based on a proliferation of dramatic crime television programs in the early 2000's. Jurors, conditioned by episodes awash in crystal clear evidence (DNA results, found video footage, and so on), struggled to render verdicts in criminal trials. Any ambiguity or inference required to come to a conclusion was too much to bear.

Similarly, industries are awash with volumes of data, and all too often expect consumer research to help arrive at an infallibly perfect insight (and also at speed and scale). Like in court, this is a faulty assumption that we need to be more honest about - with ourselves and our stakeholders. Research as an industry must be comfortable with ambiguity, nuance, and inferring the best strategy/decision/product from the sources of data we have.

What this means for declining trends is in how we build and socialize our work: methodology, stakeholder management, questionnaire/discussion guide design, insights shares, and more.

I'd like to thank Michael for taking the time to share his thoughtful responses.

As a marketer and someone involved in the insights industry, I'm particularly thinking about his point about the tradeoffs and upsides of AI. For many people today, AI provides opportunities to enhance and speed up our work. As our CMO Paula Catoira recently pointed out, AI is no replacement for creativity- but it can certainly help with many things we do as marketers and researchers.

Michael's point about the environmental and economic impact, however, is something I haven't thought about very deeply yet. I am grateful that he is bringing this POV into the conversation. It's an important one for us to think about!

If you'd like to learn more about the biggest trends in market research, check out the full report here or read our blog post for a more condensed version.

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