Ethnographic research investigates your consumer, your customer within his own environment together with the whole cultural field around.
If you are working on a marketing or marketing research department of a company or if you are an entrepreneur and you are not confident in which product or business idea should you choose, which would be the most effective and successful on the market then it is worth to do some „fieldwork” and ask your potential consumers which option would they prefer. We can ask them with a questionnaire, we can conduct interviews or focus group discussions but it is much better if our starting point was not what they say but what they do! And this is the point! You can make your decision on a more reliable and credible basis if you rely on real actions and not only on what they told you. To capture this, ethnography is the most appropriate methodology.