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Earlier today I caught up with an old friend, Jason Horine, who recently joined QualSights. We were swapping stories about the industry, i.e., the old days at Schlesinger Chicago or Schlesinger SF when in-facility research was the norm, when our conversation veered toward a topic that just a few short years ago had everyone buzzing...but has since slipped into the background: mobile-based primary research.
You probably remember, maybe starting in 2015 or 2016 (or perhaps earlier), mobile ethnography was the shiny new object in pharma insights. Everyone wanted in. And then -- like so many things in our industry -- the spotlight quickly faded. AI arrived onto the scene with its deluge of headlines, budget shifts, and C-suite promises. Suddenly, mobile data collection, once seen as the next frontier, began to feel… almost quaint. I haven't heard a client inquire about it in, gosh, a while!
But here’s the thing: it’s still here. It’s still powerful. And, I’d argue, it’s still underutilized.
Think about your phone for a moment. It’s the closest object to you right now. It goes where you go. It hears your voice, knows your music preferences, tracks your steps, and holds your most personal notes. You're automatically drawn to it multiple times an hour for news, social media, or checking on your home canine cam.
For patients and caregivers navigating the complex emotional landscape of a disease, that intimacy is gold for marketing researchers.
At ThinkGen, we’ve seen firsthand how mobile ethnography, when done thoughtfully and with sensitivity, reveals insights that no focus group or in-person interview could ever touch. Phones capture the “in the moment” reality of living with illness. They give patients and caregivers the ability to log how they feel at 2am when insomnia hits hard, or to record a quiet voice memo in the car after a tough follow-up appointment, or to share a snapshot of their pill organizer sitting next to the coffee machine.
And unlike a one-hour interview, where participants often reconstruct events and emotions after the fact, mobile ethnography lets us see life as it unfolds. No post-rationalization. No group bias. Just the raw, real human experience.
For those who haven’t utilized with this method recently, let me paint a picture. Respondents complete activities and journaling tasks through their smartphones -- simple, intuitive, gamified activities, almost like social media. Historically, we've relied on well-established platforms such as Over the Shoulder and Recollective. The beauty lies in the variety of data streams you can capture:
The simplicity for respondents translates into authenticity for researchers. You don’t need to fly across the country, coordinate and schedule appointments, and/or sit awkwardly at their kitchen table. Instead, you invite them to show you their world as they live it.
And the reach is extraordinary. Multi-market projects that once required Herculean logistics now become scalable, cost-effective, and far more respondent-friendly. A team in New Jersey can simultaneously observe patients in Tokyo, São Paulo, and Berlin, all without losing the “everyday context” that makes ethnography powerful.
Mobile ethnography is not just convenient. As we've seen in our own experience with clients, it’s transformative for commercial and insights teams:
In our work at ThinkGen, this approach has illuminated the patient journey in ways that have directly informed creative campaigns and patient-facing resources. We’ve helped teams uncover intimate moments that shaped messaging strategies, adherence tools, and caregiver engagement.
And here’s a point often overlooked: respondents actually enjoy it. Compared to being ushered into a sterile research facility where you're observed from behind a one-way mirror, they get to participate in something creative and reflective -- on their own terms, in their own time, in their own space.
For these reasons, we've spent time and resources investing in building our EpiphanE℠ approach to digital ethnography. It’s about more than technology. It’s about marrying the right mobile tools with human-centered research design to uncover the “moments that matter.”
We ask patients to write letters to loved ones about their disease, or to describe their best and worst days and illustrate them with photos and videos. We might invite participants to imagine their disease as a Netflix series, or to record how a particular image makes them feel.
These exercises sound simple -- but the outputs are profound. You’re not just collecting data points; you’re walking in your customer’s shoes. You’re witnessing their habits, their frustrations, their moments of resilience, all in their real-life context.
When combined with follow-up interviews, this digital ethnography gives commercial and medical teams a richer, more empathetic understanding of their customers than traditional approaches alone. The outputs of such research are much more than just a PowerPoint deck: clients get audio clips, video clips, poignant verbatims... a multimedia portfolio of content to help shape everything from strategic decisions to creative campaigns.
Jason and I also talked about where this could go. How might sensors and wearables integrate into mobile ethnography? Could biometric data add another layer of context? Imagine coupling a patient’s heart rate spikes or sleep patterns with their video diary reflections. The opportunity to fuse subjective experience with objective data is thrilling -- and I’d love to hear how others are exploring it.
Which brings me to my ask. I want to put this back on the table for our industry. Let’s not let mobile ethnography gather dust in the shadow of AI. Let’s re-engage, experiment, and share what’s working now.
In an era where we’re all chasing predictive models and machine learning outputs, sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is stop, listen, and see life through the lens of the people we serve -- one photo, one voice memo, one diary entry at a time.
Mobile ethnography isn’t new. But, in my humble opinion, it still remains revolutionary. It’s intimate, scalable, and deeply human. For pharma, biotech, and medtech commercial and insights teams, it offers a rare opportunity: to capture authentic patient and caregiver experiences “in the wild,” not in the lab.
As we head into the Fall season, my hope is that more teams will dust off this modality and make it part of their toolkit again. And if you’re curious, reach out to us at ThinkGen. Let’s talk about how EpiphanE can help illuminate the journeys that matter most.
Because behind every market segment, every campaign, and every product launch, there’s a human story waiting to be told. And right now, those stories are sitting in the palm of someone’s hand.
