Alessia Clusini on People & Tribes

Alessia Clusini is a Digital Ethnographer and co-founder of London-based research firm Trybes Agency, where a team of experts with diverse backgrounds, from data science and machine learning to psychology, netnography, social sciences and marketing, pioneered AI-driven research methodologies and coupled them with social sciences to generate Hybrid Intelligence®.

Alessia was nominated as one of the 6 scientists under 35 in 2018, one of the 50 most influential women in Italy in 2019 and one of the Data Leaders of the Year in the UK in 2021. In 2023 she was nominated as one of the Top 50 Women Gamechangers in TV, globally. In 2022 and 2024 she was selected as one of the people who are shaping the future of Social Intelligence.

I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine who is an oral historian and helps people tell their story. I use it all the time because it's such a beautiful question, but I always over explain it because it's big. Before I ask it, you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. The question is, where do you come from?

Wow, it's a big question indeed. I would love to turn the question into another question to you and find out what you find in common across all the people that you've interviewed so far. But if you want me to answer that...

I'll answer that after you.

Okay, cool. Where do I come from? I guess we all come from a lot of places. First, I don't know if you've heard about the concept of specific knowledge. It's not a new idea per se, but something that has been repackaged to say, what is your thing? What is your specific knowledge? The thing that makes you just have fun, go into that flow state, and that other people may find hard to understand. There are different ways to find out, and one of them is to ask people close to you. I've asked my mom, friends, husband, a client, and a close colleague. What is my thing? I tried to create this Venn diagram with many parts coming together.

I would start by saying that, across different opinions and experiences in life, I come from a place of deep curiosity. My mom says that I was never looking at myself, but always looking at others. I was always coming back with further questions, and that is my drive to start with. I was born in the land of Renaissance, so I was embedded in this culture of cross-disciplinarity. I love bringing ideas together, bringing people together, being a bridge and cross-pollinator. From my upbringing, I was raised in a very tight community, so I learned very early what it is to belong and come together. It's another big idea that I'm bringing into my work and lifestyle.

I carried these elements of curiosity, cross-disciplinarity, and craftsmanship from that land of Renaissance into my life. When I started exploring the world, I found those elements and got influenced by different people, beliefs, and ideas. If that makes sense.

Of course, I love the description you shared of your mother of you. Do you remember as a child, what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I do. I wanted to be an artist, but my grandpa, I come from a humble family, I remember vividly he wanted to know how I was going to make money. So I guess I picked the second best. I turned this dream of being an artist into something more tangible. I became a fashion designer. I wanted to become a fashion designer and I became a fashion designer.

I'm curious too, that word curiosity, we use it a lot, and I just want to explore it a little bit. You said it's like your drive. What does it mean to you to be driven by curiosity?

I just got back from a trip, and in the airport and station, I just sit down and look at people. I have books, a mobile, a laptop, so many emails and things to catch up with, but I just sit down and look at people. Sometimes you find these stories, like a couple that checks in and then you see them in different points in the airport, all the way to the flight, maybe to another country. I was obsessed with these people just last week. I don't know them, but I really want to know everything, and there's no way I'm going to know everything. It's a circle. I will never stop.

And tell me a little bit about where you are now. We talked about where you come from and what drives you. Where are you at these days and what are you up to?

At the moment, I'm physically in London. I share some of the time with Tuscany, Italy. Again, bridging places, ideas, lifestyle, it's in my nature apparently. I am the co-founder of a research firm that is specialized in netnography. For people who don't know about it, it's essentially a branch of digital ethnography. We are observing people just like ethnographers, but in the online world. We are navigating their tribes, communities, subcultures, groups, influencers, fandoms, you name it. And it's very fun. I think I found my thing.

That observation never gets old. There are so many niches and emerging cultures that become really big. Let's just think about veganism or healthy living lovers. I'm just thinking of emerging cultures that I studied years ago that are now basically the mainstream.

So this is my agency. It's called the Tribes Agency, T-R-Y-B-E-S. We are based in London, but we operate globally. We just closed a project where we were running ethnography from 1.0 (in real life) to netnography (2.0) to 3.0 (Roblox and virtual worlds) in China, Japan, Korea, Dubai, New York, London, Milan. The digital realm allows us to really get everywhere in a shorter time and effort.

Yeah. How do you explain netnography to somebody who had never encountered it? And what does it entail?

If you think about the job of an ethnographer, which is spending time within a culture, community, and people of interest that we are trying to study, we are pretty much the same, but we're doing this online. We would hang out with them where they spend the most time, whether that's a very niche forum where there are hundreds of people, or a subreddit, or a TikTok subculture, or in the case of 3.0 ethnography, actually getting into virtual worlds and walking with them. That's netnography.

In a way, we can democratize ethnography a little bit. By this, I mean that we don't need six months to a year to be in the field. This allows a lot of brands and projects to have the quality of ethnographic research, which is highly observational, not intrusive, with lots of deep insights, but within a time frame and budget that is much smaller. We're talking about a month, two months, even sometimes two weeks for specific goals.

You're using 1.0, 2.0. Are you talking about real world, online, and virtual? Are those the three sort of levels you're referring to?

Precisely. So in 1.0 of that project, we had to work with the semiotics of the shopping experience, shadowing, mystery shopping. So understanding the ecosystem where people shop that particular brand, hanging out with them, observing them, understanding them, and then opting out. Of course, some in-depth interviews to ask deeper questions, to understand the why. Because I don't know if you agree with me, but I prefer to be agnostic in terms of methodologies. I think we should complete every method we use in research with the best we get. We always complete with in-depth interviews.

And then 2.0 is netnography, hanging out with them on TikTok, Instagram, in their words, with their peers and cultural influencers. And then 3.0 is in those virtual worlds where you have legs and arms. Yeah, I know.

When did you first encounter research? I know you started in fashion and your journey into the space was a little indirect and zaggy, right? But when did you first encounter netnography or the idea of research for brands? Do you remember your first discovery of, "Oh, wow, I could do this for a living"?

Yeah, totally. A little bit by chance, a little bit by, I don't know, maybe it was meant to be. When I was working in fashion, I used to do lots of trend hunting. In fashion, it's not about design as in drawing, but it's about understanding what people want two years in advance. It's about interpreting cultural codes, identity. It's about intercepting those needs of people, more than what people would actually talk about. That's a fashion designer's job.

As a fashion designer, as a trend hunter, I was already trying to intercept what was going on with markets and people. But then what happened was, I was working for this brand called Miss 60. It was a big brand. And then Zara and H&M came to the market, sort of the old fast fashion disrupted the category. At the same time, there was the global financial crisis. So I had this call to reinvent myself, and I moved abroad, learned English, started living in a country very far away, didn't have any contacts there. Big change.

And I came across this thing of guerrilla marketing. Small budget, big ideas, making something that is fun and creates conversations organically. And that was another pivotal moment because I thought, okay, I can do this. I actually love it. I see that part which is marketing and intercepting needs is more fun for me than the design itself.

So I came back to Europe, I was in Australia back then. I came back to Europe and pursued an education in marketing. I practiced a bit. It was the time of social media. I was working in social media, making big numbers, again intercepting those cultures, those trends. I was like, okay, why? Why are these people belonging to these ideas that we're launching? This is the thing. This is the most important deal. This is what's driving success for business, for products, for communication, for everything.

I started studying again, and I was really lucky to meet incredible thinkers and doers. I remember the first things that caused it to the person that gave this name to netnography, publishing amazing stuff. Giordano from Italy, with the Istituto di Etnografia Digitale, also a person that taught me a lot, influenced me a lot, starting from these academics slash thinkers. Then I was also traveling and doing my own ethnography, interviewing and living with tribes and communities that had in common some sort of disruption, innovation within a society. And it was fun. It was a full year of learning, doing, getting my feet into something that was, at the time, just academic.

And then I came across this word of the transformative festivals, like Burning Man, which is the most famous one. And I thought, why don't I do the first research on Burning Man and transformative festivals ever? I want to decode transformation. I want to decode this sense of coming together to change the world. So I put that in practice, I created this research, and that was my first gig possibly. And it was great. It got me lots of people coming to us and saying, "Oh, this is so cool." So I thought, okay, then I am going to do this. I'm going to find the people, I am going to find the tools, create the tech where I need it. And this is it. I'm going to apply netnography because brands and projects actually need this deep cultural understanding.

Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like where's the joy in it for you?

The joy is in me sitting in the airport at scale. I am sitting there and all the researchers involved, all the people that we interview, all the people that we observe, they're amazing. And we do the extra step of bringing them to the client. So part of my education back then, when I got into netnography first, it was the old user-generated word. Again, I was in the right moment at the right time in the right place. It was the first wave of social media.

So we saw this part, they could change deeply. From television, I remember television, I remember three channels on television and watching television passively. I remember radio, and I saw this change with digital where everybody had a voice and they could co-create meaning with brands and projects. So that was wow. The joy comes from that. Yes, let's have a say. Let's create something together.

There is no top-bottom, but bottom-up, if that makes sense.

And what does that look like on a project, or what you're describing? Maybe I'm not fully understanding. In what way are you co-creating with people?

We started this program a few years ago that is called the Cultural Opinion Leaders. As a byproduct of an ethnography, you identify the cultural leaders of any topic. And they go beyond the influencers' metrics. It's not about having the numbers. It's about entering the cultural fabric, to use a fashion term again. We thought, why don't we bring those cultural opinion leaders to brands and we co-create together?

At the same time, I could see that in research, I don't know if you found the same, but in research, especially qual research, it was getting harder and harder to recruit research participants. It was getting really costly, but beyond costly, the quality of the participants that the companies would recruit was sometimes really not that great. And it would just compromise the whole quality of the research, right?

So I thought, okay, two birds with one stone. You can enter those cultural fabrics and you can systemize a way to recruit great participants that are not just people, panelists, people paid to answer questions, but they are the forerunners of their communities. If you talk about veganism, those people really care about veganism. If you talk about tech, those people are at the forefront of tech. These are the best people to involve to create your next big thing.

Yeah. How has it changed? I'm curious. My experience is, I'm a very traditional, face-to-face, qualitative person. I don't have experience with netnography, but I had this experience where a lot of research went online and it became less qualitative to me. At least, it felt that way. I'm wondering, with all the different methods that you have at your disposal, how does face-to-face qual fit in? How do you think about the different ways of learning, of netnography versus depth interviews? How do you define the proper role for each in a project or in your work?

It's a big deal. I think, as I said before, we should be agnostic of methodologies. Let me give you an example. We are embarking on a project where we have to reimagine the death care experience of the future. I want classic ethnography there. I want in real life ethnography. I want possibly my researchers to sit down, have a tea with these people, because these people that we're going to interview just had a loss. We're going to talk about funerals, and the body language, the vibes in the room, the immersive listening that qual researchers are able to create, generate, is priceless.

It's really hard, Peter, to define the quality of qual. It is really hard to sell qual research. We always say that among colleagues, because it's not about saving time and money, which are two metrics that we can easily define. It's about getting deeper. It's about getting the right quality of insights. It's about ultimately helping brands and projects to get into the right path. We could talk about this for ages, and I still feel like I'm not going to tackle the right words. I do share that, absolutely.

What I love about what I understand about your work is that it has a deeply qualitative spirit in the digital space. And I hadn't really encountered that before. So I'm really interested to hear you talk a little bit more. How do you bridge the depth of quality you get from face-to-face? What happens in that netnography? Your face lit up earlier when you talked about hanging out with them. Just the sentence "hanging out with them in TikTok or in subreddits," what does that look like? Can you tell me a story about what it's like to be a netnographer hanging out with a participant in a subreddit on a project? What happens and what's it like?

Let me tell you a story of people that we identified. For another brand, we needed to understand the most loyal consumers. The story of this girl was essentially that the brand, a fashion brand that is probably the most democratic in terms of sizes, shaped her identity. When she encountered the brand and she was able to dress up properly in her opinion, so cool, she was comfortable. She was finding herself within her group, standing out but fitting in at the same time.

She fell in love. There is a case of extreme, we call it marketing loyalty, but there's so much more into it. It's about this girl being able to be herself. She could daily create a new version of herself because of a brand. These are the kind of things that you meet with netnography.

She was building her audience, being a cultural opinion leader within the brand's realm. And that's why we came across her. Then we hired her to in-depth interview her and then finally to co-create with the brand because we found their point of view extremely insightful, more insightful than anybody we could ever meet. You know what I mean? So that's the kind of thing.

Yes, it's amazing. And what, how has...are you...what's the state of netnography now? Do you feel like it's growing and becoming more common or am I just the only one that's out of the loop on netnography? Which is very likely.

No, actually it's a good point. It's growing and it's getting more and more scientific. As we speak, there was just the netnographic conference in Milano last week, I think it was, but it's very academic. By academic, I don't mean to say I don't like academic, you see what I mean? But my dream was always to bring it to action and to make it really spread out across brands, across agencies. I think all of us should use much more of it. Not many know actually what netnography is and how to get there.

There's also, if we zoom out from netnography, there's the social listening industry or social intelligence industry as Dr. Gillian calls it, which is extremely interesting as well. So there are a lot of companies nowadays that have a department within the company that is dedicated to listening to all conversations around their brand, around trends, topics and so on. I still think that netnography, which is bringing in academics and social scientists to the social listening, is a deeper level of understanding, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, I really want to parse that apart because I feel that, and I know that about you, but I'm not...But I want to make that distinction because I also, with your permission, want to be a little provocative. I always struggled when social intelligence, when social media arrived, all of a sudden the corporate world used the word "listening," and they're really just reading social media. So it's got that kind of Orwellian b******t meter on it basically, right? That says that they're listening to people, but they're not actually listening.

But what you described with netnography is more aligned with how I think of listening, where you're giving a person your attention. They know you're giving...you're in some dialogue with them and you are listening. So can you help me understand, maybe it's very obvious, but the ways in which netnography is, and digital ethnography is, much more human-centered than social intelligence? Or just how they interact?

Yeah, absolutely. I feel for you because, they're like, you believe in listening and seeing listening being exploited in that way, it must feel something. Yes, it's very different. First of all, I want to be really practical about it. I think if you have ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists to analyze what they call data, which is actually, we could open a huge parenthesis on which kind of data we analyze, which is non-numbers based.

Thick data is lots of qualitative conversations. It's semiotics, it's what people share about their identity, it's really deep. It's not numbers at all. So to be tangible, to be practical, first of all, if you bring experts like those social scientists to the picture, it's already changing the whole picture because these are people, and I work with them every day, that really deeply care about people. They are the people scientists.

There's nothing that a web analyst can do beyond them, it's a different job. So that's the first separation, it's a different job.

What is the job? Because I feel like part of what I love about these conversations is making explicit very fundamental things, you know what I mean? And so what is the job of that crew with thick data? And what makes it so valuable?

First of all, this is a great question, and we should actually define it, because most of the time I think people don't understand. We know, maybe we're not good at explaining it well yet. The first thing is, these are the people scientists.

There are a number of ways you can ask questions, Peter. But the way we ask questions, me, you, and our teams, is a way to allow people to tell us the closest thing to the truth. There's no such thing as the one truth for people, but we know that people hardly remember, hardly are honest about what they feel even with themselves.

Therefore, instead of asking, let me give you a practical example, which is a true story, it was asked to me by a client a couple of months ago. They were like, "Why don't you just ask people what are their values?" And I'm like, "No, because people don't define their values. They don't remember their values."

But if you walk them through an experience and they have memory of that experience, and you ask the whys in the right moments and you observe where they hesitate, where they light up, what's going on with them, then you might get to the why of things. You might get to the values of things. This is much more what social scientists do.

They care so much about what people believe and feel, their attitudes, their true behaviors, their values, that they have ways to get there that are not just filling up a survey, which is definitely not what we're talking about.

Yes. I love hearing you talk about this and I really appreciate how you articulated the power of the question. I was, and maybe I'm diverting us, but I remember I was at your website and you talk about how marketers still market according to demographics. And this was another fundamental thing I wanted to ask you about, because it seems like it's a baseline assumption, that's how one goes to market, according to demographics. But what do you suggest to them instead? And in what way is that sort of wrong-headed?

When we started, we actually got some...we started challenging the idea of demographics back in the days at the very beginning, simply because you cannot define purchasing behaviors, values, attitudes, anything by saying, "Alessia, 41, Caucasian, born in Tuscany, living in London." People don't know that I'm a huge fan of Billie Eilish, for instance. I'm totally out of my own demographic in so many ways, but I am.

And so we, again driven by the interest of getting to deeply understand people, we challenged this concept of demographics and created the first segmentation by interest and we call that topicgraphics. Instead of a demographic, we have a segmentation that is based on topics.

We studied all kinds of topicgraphics, from niche to niche. For instance, I remember, I think we mentioned last time we talked about the mermaid fans. One of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the U.S. sells mermaid fins, right? And so the mermaid lovers, I thought it was like small numbers, but it wasn't in the end. Still a niche, right?

And that's a topicgraphic. A topicgraphic is also parents, because they have this topic in common, which is how to raise kids, which is really important for them. And it drives their habits, their attitudes, their behaviors. These are the topicgraphics. And I'm super glad that nowadays, five, six years later, it's something that even more established research firms are adopting.

Yeah.

I guess it's the nature of startups to challenge the established word, to bring on some innovation, isn't it?

I feel like in my career, maybe it's just the past bunch of years, but the idea of tribes is very common. Well, not very common, but it's become more popular. We've got this layer of cultural understanding that has become much more accessible to people.

So now marketing people talk about subcultures, right? And community. I'm just wondering, what do they struggle with the most in terms of learning or understanding community?

I feel the biggest challenge there is to understand that people are not just consumers. People are people and we're complex, we shift. Consumers are what marketers usually are taught in school to create personas out of. So you have the persona, which the word "persona" per se comes from the mask, the ancient time masks. So that says it all. We are not personas. We are not oversimplifications and detailed, weirdly detailed oversimplifications of people. We are people.

So there are a lot of things that we decide to do and then afterwards we justify them. And that's why we cannot ask the right questions in so many realms. And that's why we need to observe people. We are in a context of faster-paced changing cultures and subcultures because of tech, AI, social media, you name it.

And so it's a very complex reality we're living. And I feel the biggest struggle for marketers is to justify their very simple metrics, the marketing metrics, upon very complex people. It's really hard, as a matter of fact.

Yeah. How do you mean, can you tell me more about that?

Within this realm of cultural understanding, our bread and butter every day is to understand complexity, while marketing, as a definition, is trying to track trackable metrics. So I feel, to answer your question, what is the biggest challenge for marketers to tackle those big trendy words like communities and tribes, etc., is to address the elephant in the room, which is people are complex. Communities are not.

I think for brands, they are a concept of people coming together because they belong together. So if you guys want to tackle that and you're ready to do it, you have to be willing to go into a path of complexity, understanding people, understanding the limits of marketing and stepping back and saying, "Okay, these people belong together. Why do they belong together? I might enter that room as opposed to splashing from the top some marketing strategy."

We're near coming near the end of our conversation, our time together. What are you looking forward to? Like the next couple of years, as you look ahead, are there any big changes you're looking forward to or any work or projects that you're interested in and passionate about?

So many at the moment. I'm really interested in this relationship between human and AI. Thank you. I feel the biggest deal in AI, the main categories of AI solutions, are these agents, basically assistants, advisors, and companions.

And I think it's very interesting. Borderline dangerous. We need to tackle opportunities really well because it's going to change the workforce, it's going to change humankind to have this AI collaborating with us all the time, to be our assistant, our internship person, to be our agent and do all the job for us, to be our coach, our therapist, our nutritionist, and then finally to be our companion, our girlfriend and all the implication of culture, gender, you name it. I think this is the most interesting thing at the moment.

So I'm really focusing on that with a couple of projects. I did pioneer back in 2018, thanks to my partner who actually told me the concept of hybrid intelligence. So co-intelligence between human and AI, really stating perhaps the obvious, but it wasn't, which is social scientists and humans have to be in the loop at all times.

We can automate and we need to collaborate as opposed to race. And five years, six years later, now this thing is more urgent, it's more dangerous, Peter. So I feel like we need to write the next chapter of that collaboration. And I feel this urge. So I'm beginning this new chapter of human-AI collaboration. Let's see where it takes us. It's exciting, challenging, two sides of the same coin.

The hybrid intelligence, can you tell me more about that? I'm super...We're all, I feel like we've all been, we're all in the same ocean, you know what I mean? When it comes to this AI, the way that it was launched out into the world.

And I've had my own experience of experiencing it. It seems to be, because it's so transformational, there's no way of encountering it without really just getting really existential. Like it gets to first principles. I just was like, what do I...What is this? This changes...There's no way for me to think about generative AI without ending up at the question of what do I do? What's my work? What, you know what I mean? What's my value?

And I saw, so I love...I love the fact that you were here in 2018 and this hybrid intelligence, this idea that we could be in a race or we could collaborate. And so where are you...I'm just...talk to me about where you are right now and what makes hybrid intelligence so necessary.

Now it is happening, so I cannot, we cannot deny it. In 2017, 18, it was a thing to say, "I know we are going there. Let's work in a way that is bringing progress and wellness and happiness to humankind."

But now it's happening already, and there are people grieving when there's a change of an algorithm, right? And there are people having expectations from humans because they have an expectation from machines and we are essentially living a little bit, allow me this metaphor, a little bit like during the pandemic. We are experiencing a sort of open sky experiment where everybody's in.

And if we, the researchers, don't understand what's going on, don't expect the techies to do, because their goal is not that in the first place. Their goal is to make the top performing AI. It is not to make us happier, healthier, and better as humankind. Does that make sense? Sorry for the oversimplification, but I'm concerned about the time.

Oh, no, that's magic. No, it's perfect. It's beautiful. And I couldn't agree with you more. And I do want to respect your time. And I'm wondering if there's a...oh, you were excited as I was speaking. I saw you reacting to what I was saying. What were you resonating with?

Because people like you make existential questions when they interact with AI. And that's why I bring people like you to the AI. That's exactly it. So we need to revise and augment AI, even just, it's not just about the risk, it's to tackle opportunities, is to go deeper, is to understand the breadth and the depth of what this thing is going to do with us together, working, coaching, helping out, being our girlfriend, it's very important.

When you, the way you word it, the way you say that, it said it all. That's the point.

Thank you so much. I'm so excited that we got to meet and connect and I really appreciate you accepting my invitation to talk this through. Yeah. I thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

All right. Bye.

Bye. Bye.

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