Introduction and Central Theme: 

The discussion addresses the importance of understanding human behavior for businesses that seek to create authentic connections with their customers. Tools such as visual anthropology, digital ethnography, and social listening are highlighted as essential for capturing the subtleties of consumers​​. 

Integration of Anthropological Approach: 

The guest, Fernanda Bizarria, discusses how traditional market research focuses on consumption behaviors, but an anthropological approach offers a broader perspective, considering the various social roles of individuals​​. 

Visual Anthropology and Methodology: 

Fernanda explores how visual anthropology is employed to decipher non-verbal meanings and consumer preferences, using images as objects of study and research tools​​. 

Meaning of the Company Name: 

The company name, PS2P, is explained as an acronym for 'uniting purposes with people,' reflecting the mission to identify purposes in groups of people related to specific themes​​. 

Importance of Visual Culture: 

The relevance of visual culture in building a brand's identity is discussed, emphasizing the role of designers in visually aligning the brand's message with its intentions​​. 

Social Listening and Real-Time Strategies:

Fernanda describes how social listening allows companies to anticipate trends and adjust communication strategies, highlighting the importance of strict ethics in the process​​. 

Digital Ethnography and Online Behavior Analysis:

Digital ethnography is compared with traditional methods, focusing on its advantages, such as the ability to constantly observe groups and understand emerging subcultures on the internet​​.

Dreamers and Doers, welcome to Podbrand, the podcast about design, strategy and innovation.

I am Maurício Medeiros, mentor, creative consultant in strategic design and author of the book Brand Tree: Simplifying Branding.

Today we will address the universe of understanding human behavior, essential for businesses that aspire to create an authentic connection with customers.

Visual anthropology, digital ethnography and social listening are tools that allow us to capture the consumers' subtleties and implicit preferences.

Our guest, Fernanda Bizarria, founder of PS2P, an observatory of behavior and culture, brings a rich experience in the transformation of observations into business strategies.

She is an advertising specialist with a master's degree in society and culture and has a deep trajectory in decoding non-verbal language, discovering valuable data for brands and organizations.

Prepare for a conversation that will broaden your perception of the intersections between culture, behavior, and innovation.

Fernanda, welcome.

Thank you, Maurício, very good to be here with you in this important space of dialogue about the brand, the roles of brands in the world, so I am happy to be here.

I thank you for accepting the invitation, it is a pleasure to have you today at Podbrand.

We really consider it a forum for dialogue on strategic issues, especially with the design bias, and that it affects the brand, the branding, everything that we will address today.

Thank you very much for being with us today.

Entering the subject, the understanding of cultural and behavioral nuances is a competitive differential.

The anthropological approach goes beyond the surface, revealing the underlying values and motivations of consumers, allowing brands to create deeper and more significant connections.

So I ask you, how does the integration of an anthropological approach help brands to connect in a more authentic way with their audience?

Maurício, I see it like this, the traditional market research goes for a look at consumer behavior, so it looks at people as consumers, and then it is an important, very valid cut, but it is a limited cut.

And what an anthropological approach will do is look at people from a broader perspective.

So that person who is a consumer has other social roles.

She has a family, she is a professional, she has a life story, she was born in a certain place, in a certain cultural context, and then all these other roles that also influence in the behavior of that person, in general, when you look only from the perspective of consumption, you lose all that wealth.

So what an anthropological approach brings is this broader look at that person in their life.

So in the studies that we carry out here, of course we look at consumption, but beyond consumption, how is that person's day-to-day life, how does she live, what are the pains, anguishes, dreams?

And then I understand that when we connect with people at this level, the relationships tend to go to a deeper place.

That's how it is in our lives, if we have a friendship there, we know the person a lot, we can be more relevant in that person's life, and in the same way, a brand, a company, an institution, if she knows that person in depth, she increases the possibilities of becoming relevant.

In a world saturated with communication, capturing the non-verbal gestures and expressions of consumers can unlock a new dimension of insights.

How does visual anthropology use its methodology to decipher the meanings of non-verbal signals from consumers and discover preferences and behaviors that are not explicitly expressed?

Maurício, here we are going to use images from two prisms, so the image enters the studies, or as a study object, right?

So it's looking at the various images produced and that circulate all the time as an object that can tell me about that particular culture and what's going on in a particular group.

And then when I talk about image as an object, it can be practically everything, so here we study propaganda, movies, TV shows, people's clothes, how they are dressing, the objects of a house, the architecture of a city, the gardens of a city, there are classic studies in anthropology that look at the English gardens, the French gardens, the garden of the 17th century, the garden of the 19th century, and how each of these gardens tells about that culture.

So the way we build objects has a lot to do with our values and the cultural categories that we have in mind.

And this is a process that is often unconscious.

So when we look at the objects, they have, I like to say that the objects speak, right?

And then we look at them to be able to decipher this speech.

So this is a prism, and another prism is to use the image as a device and research tool.

And then I'm already talking about video, photography, as a work tool for the researcher, that allows me to get into a relationship with those subjects, with whom we are trying to get to know.

So I'm going to bring you some examples here, an example of the image as an object of study.

We did a study a few years ago to understand teenagers, and one of the things that we did was photographs of teenagers' backpacks.

So, very interesting, a series of photographs of these backpacks, and this allows us to understand a series of patterns, what is repeated, what is not repeated, how the style of backpack changes according to age, when they are 12 years old, when they are 17 years old.

So you start to understand a series of elements there, that if you ask, maybe you won't even have the capacity to ask that question.

And then the possibilities are endless, you can look at people's homes, people's rooms, the objects they have.

Now, in January, we're going to do a study for a mattress brand, and one of the approaches we're going to do is to go to people's homes to get to know the rooms.

So, look how interesting, to know where that mattress is placed, how many things that environment can tell us, can tell us.

So one thing is this image as a reading object, and about the other aspect that I told you, which is the image as a relationship device, so I'm going to take a video to the field, and I'm going to record my conversation with that person, it's also a very interesting use, because it allows a whole reading that, if the image is not there, I will not have a reading of the gestural, of the way the person speaks.

Something that has always bothered me a lot as a researcher is that we live very strong experiences in field work, they are very rich experiences, even more in this type of work that we do, where we go to people's homes, where there is a very deep immersion, and as much as we were able to try to bring this to a report, it was never enough, all that emotional load that we lived in field work, we couldn't bring it to a report format, the report is very rational, as much as I can use the word in another way, and then having the footage there allows other people to have access to all that emotional load that we have in field work.

Outside the person's clothes, the environment where they are, all that is there communicating, so the video, while this research device, is something that we use a lot, and more recently, from 2013 until now, we started to experiment a lot also with processes of autoethnography, in which the person uses these devices to document her life there, and this, in fact, I started a few years ago, when I studied in Spain, in a course that was about studies on visual culture, a work that I did there was with Arab merchants in the neighborhood of Raval, in Barcelona, and then I used, I gave them polaroid cameras for them to take home and produce photographs of their day-to-day.

And then it's interesting, because I, as a woman researcher from another country, I would never go out, only to those people's houses, and through that device, they produced a series of photographs that opened up a whole path to a more delicate understanding of their day-to-day.

And this, in the studies of PS2P, since 2014, we have been incorporating a lot.

WhatsApp is a mega research tool for us to be with people all day.

So something that we do a lot is the diaries, which is already an old method in research.

You have a consumption diary being used in the United States since the 1950s, but what we do here is put it in people's hands and stay there all day with them.

So we had studies here about women's beauty routines, in which they were recording beauty care, day-to-day, and that goes, who does the mediation in these diaries, we invite psychologists to do this mediation, and then the conversation starts to go to very deep levels.

So we have videos of people when they wake up, reporting a dream they had at night.

So the image, too, while this device, for the person who is participating in the research, to produce your report is very interesting, you give this tool, and then it is a report many times, a thousand times more powerful than the one that the researcher himself does.

I had an experience some time ago, from one of the brands that was part of the portfolio that I was creative director in a retail group in Asia, and we did a series of researches with different techniques in relation to one of these brands, and one of them was precisely this this imagetic diary.

So for two weeks, a series of consumers, in fact, a series of people, women, not customers of the brand, still not consumers of the brand, who reported specifically, for two weeks, their outfit, how they were dressed, make-up, and what occasion justified that production, what they would do.

So we were able to build, by this analysis, a good proximity of the profile, of the criteria that make these women choose a certain outfit, a certain shoes.

In this case, the brand was shoes.

And we even associate other techniques, so as not to rely exclusively on this one, to better close the result of the research, and then also with consumers, and evaluate in a comparative way between those who have not yet consumed the brand, those who have already consumed it, anyway.

I think this work you do is amazing.

A curiosity, what is the meaning of the name of your company?

Interesting, the name of the company is an acronym, PS2P, it is an acronym that means Unir Propósitos à Pessoas.

At a certain point, we were understanding that the main objective of our work should be to identify the many purposes that exist there, in a certain group of people, in relation to a certain theme.

So more than understanding what food product that person wants to buy, what is the purpose of that person in relation to food, which combines with the purpose of life, with the vision of the world, we understand that it would be, and should be, much more powerful to commit to this purpose, to connect with this purpose, with the supply of a product.

Very well, visual culture encompasses everything we can see and interpret in our environment, from art, advertising, social media, fashion, examples that you also gave.

What is the relevance of visual culture in the construction of the identity of a brand, and how does this reflect in the behavior of the consumer?

I think it's total, Maurício, and that's where the designers' work comes in.

What I realize is that if there is a misalignment between what the brand wants to say and the way it expresses itself visually, that will either not generate a connection with the end consumer, or he will perceive things in a kind of crooked or crooked way, and people realize that, so that message doesn't arrive.

We, professionals in the research field, what we do is understand the current perceptions.

Now, this handling of the visual language, I see a lot as the great specialty of designers, and if it doesn't happen, the brand doesn't get where it needs to get.

So, I really admire the designers' work, and I have a great partnership with them because of that.

I see that the research work is completed when the brand can consistently convey those values to the people it wants to relate to.

Júlio Alves was here with you in one of the episodes, and he is one of the professionals that I see that does it in a very special way, which is to build this alignment.

In his methodology, he talks about the brand platform, and that it is necessary, he even put the name of Mio, message, image, language, that it is necessary to take care of the message, which is the verbal word, but it is also necessary to take care of the image, which is the way the brand expresses itself, and take care of this language, which is the way this brand relates.

If this is not aligned, this perception will not happen.

And what I realize is that we are a society that has a lot of ease to talk about the message.

What do I mean?

Okay.

But when it comes to the image, there is no visual lettering.

We see this in schools.

I have a 13-year-old son, and he is in school, learning to write, to write an essay, to express himself through written language, but I still don't see an education for this imagetic language, which should be fundamental in a world in which so many images circulate.

So, that's why, maybe, this great difficulty of brands to want to communicate something, but they don't have that visual code that allows them to communicate it that way.

This, I see, is the great specialty of design professionals.

With a great sensitivity to the field of the image, and with a lot of knowledge for that.

Yes.

With the advent of the internet, of social media, social listening is a strategic and essential tool in this digital era, allowing brands to monitor conversations in real time, adjusting their strategies to remain relevant.

Could you explain how social listening allows companies to anticipate trends and adapt their communication strategies in real time?

Yes.

Before that, just to make a parenthesis, Maurício, about the importance of ethics in research work.

In this work of reading behavior, the importance of guaranteeing this ethics, understanding that we're researching not to manipulate, but to bring products and services closer to what is the real need of people.

And this should be our great guide.

In this whole work of digital ethnography, we have to be very careful.

When we research a certain community, an online community, and we enter that community, we have to say that it's there, and what it's doing there, so people are aware of what's going on.

So, before getting into this topic, it's important to put this ethics, because the good use we make of the tools we have is that it will ensure that we continue to have access to them.

People are not stupid, nor manipulable.

They don't feel invaded.

Yes, yes.

But it's a tool, I consider it a fantastic tool.

When I started to see the growth of social media, and people putting so many questions on social media, as a researcher, I thought it was amazing.

People are talking spontaneously.

I like to listen to the world, so it's good to be able to listen to the world constantly through these platforms.

I think what Social Listening can bring to us is this constant listening.

This possibility of listening all the time to a large volume of people talking spontaneously, which is another aspect, because in the research of the traditional market, in general, we come up with questions ready for people.

And in Social Listening, people are expressing themselves spontaneously, freely, and this allows us to have access to certain readings that, at first, if you came up with a question, you wouldn't have.

Your own question limits a field of answers.

So, Social Listening, for me, is this great advantage of spontaneity.

People are there talking freely.

The possibility of constant listening to a large volume of comments, all this production that people do on social media, I consider it very rich.

And this constant look, I also find it very interesting, because, many times, in the research of the traditional market, you can listen to the consumer once, twice, three times a year.

There, you are listening all the time.

This is a technique that is deductive and not inductive, right?

Yes, that's right.

And the richness that comes from this, we have some interesting studies here.

In 2015, as soon as we discovered these tools, we were very excited about it, and we did a study on food, on Social Listening, and then we monitored the word eating food, so, a very broad theme, what are people talking about?

Eating, food, food.

And we gathered that there was a tool that we hired at the time, that they let us keep collecting infinitely.

And these tools are expensive, right?

But, for some reason, they let us keep collecting for a long time, and we collected 3 million dimensions over time.

And it was a very rich work, because, besides this quantitative look, that the tool helps you to make, we also made a qualitative look at what was being discussed, in which context, which images associated with those speeches, and we discovered very interesting things from this look.

One of the things that we, when we looked at this volume of information, we said, let's research the moments of consumption, right?

So, the moments of daily eating.

What do people talk about breakfast?

What do they talk about lunch, dinner?

And look how interesting, we discovered a new moment of eating, which was at dawn.

So, with our limited heads, we would never think that dawn was a moment of eating, but there was a series of teenagers there, talking about eating at dawn.

So, it's something that only a spontaneous data can offer you, the fruit of an observation.

And another interesting thing that we saw at that moment is that, in those conversations at dawn, there was a series of teenagers talking about how difficult it was to eat during the night and open a packet of french fries and not wake up the whole house.

It's great, and it's true.

More than one person saying that, so, look how interesting.

When did you discover a detail like that?

That has to do with the product design, with the type of packaging.

This tool that you mentioned, or the available tools, which are the softwares that are on the market that meet the analysis, capture and analysis of information from social media, which are not the social media themselves?

Maurício, great question, and it has to do with something that I wanted to bring here.

First, let me tell you what I realize.

Back in 2014, I saw a lot of tools.

I think it was that first moment of development.

So, there were several... several technology professionals developing this.

So, there were tools in England, in the United States, and also in Brazil.

Now, I'm not going to remember the name, but there was an incredible tool of the people here in Belo Horizonte, created within the Department of Science and Computing, the UFMG, and a tool developed by and for researchers, which was a wonderful tool.

Over time, what do I see that was happening?

These companies were being bought by others, and the number of tools was decreasing.

And then the trend was to become big tools of big global companies.

And these big tools of big global companies don't only serve the research field.

They will also serve the brands that want to interact with their consumers on a daily basis.

So, they are widely used to map who is talking about a certain brand, so that the brand can go there and interact with that person, or map the interactions within the network of a brand, which is something important, it's fundamental.

But we, researchers, are left with a bit of a lack of tools.

I'm telling you this today.

So, I'm not going to name names, but there are three or four big tools that the whole market knows, and those who type in Google will find it quickly.

But I see them very limited for the research work.

And another point, which has nothing to do with them alone, but has to do with social networks themselves, is that over time, these social networks have been decreasing the possibilities of reading the data that are put there.

So, the social network APIs have been limiting more and more.

This study we did in 2015, we wouldn't do today.

Because Facebook doesn't release its data.

Instagram only lets you search for hashtags.

Who uses hashtags?

Not everyone.

So, you have a world of conversation that you lose.

TikTok hasn't opened yet for this type of reading.

So, what we have today is only Twitter, and soon it will be closing down.

So, I consider it a great disservice of social networks, because that's supposed to be a field of dialogue, so, as I can read what's being produced there, I can dialogue more.

But they keep this data for themselves.

This happened strongly after the Cambridge Analytica case.

Facebook itself paid a fine of millions and millions of dollars because of this situation.

I think it was 55 million people who were used the data in theory, without Facebook having a clue.

But they were open, it was in their API, and Cambridge ended up using this data.

In several countries.

Yes, Maurício, I think it's a debate that needs to be turned upside down.

Because they close the data, but they keep using it.

And how, for what purpose?

Commercializing this data.

So, there could be another type of agreement involving those who produce the data, which are the people who are using social networks, and that they can choose to leave it open, depending on the type of use that is made for that.

Because the possibility of reading, of opinions, that this tool allows, it's very rich.

You can add many layers to the public debate.

And today what I see is that many people, what they write on social networks, they are manifesting themselves.

And I believe they would like this manifestation of theirs to be heard, to be considered.

So, it would be interesting to have this debate around how...

It's enough for all this to be led by an ethical code that preserves limits, but that can free access, so that a positive use of this content is made.

It's that for social media networks, they make a lot more money selling the information to companies than to research companies, consumption production companies, consumer products, I mean.

Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, anyway, all the big global corporations.

Understanding online interactions, going a little deeper into this topic, can reveal behavior patterns and preferences of consumers who are invisible in offline environments.

How does digital ethnography differ from traditional ethnography?

And what other advantages, besides the ones you already mentioned, does it offer in the context of online behavior analysis?

First of all, Maurício, I'm very much in favor of the combination of methods, and you brought this up a little bit in your speech.

So, I'll never think that a single methodology will be able to deliver a complex reading.

So, I really believe in being used together, but that each research tool, each methodology will give you a big advantage.

And in the case of digital ethnography, I see a lot this issue of temporality, of allowing a greater contact temporality with some groups you're investigating.

So, a researcher who goes to the field, physically, has a time limit.

He can stay with that group for a while, but what will he stay for?

A month, two months, a year?

And what I see that happens in digital ethnography is the possibility of constantly living with several groups.

So, I participate in several communities on Facebook that are active in debates on topics like food, beauty, and there are some that I've been there for over four years.

This wouldn't be possible if it was a physical insertion.

So, this possibility of a constant monitoring of the debate is very interesting.

A less invasive character, I would say.

If I'm physically there with the person, in some way, my presence can be a little invasive.

And if I'm in a group, that person chooses what they want to show, what they want to publish, spontaneously, then it would also be another advantage.

Right.

The internet is a fertile ground for the emergence of subcultures, each one with its own set of norms and values.

How does PS2P use digital ethnography to understand these emerging subcultures?

On the internet?

And its potential for brands?

A lot in this organic work of understanding the existing groups, of going deeper into the conversations that exist within these groups.

I think the communities help us a lot.

There are already formed communities, be it WhatsApp groups, debating about a certain theme, or talking about a certain lifestyle.

The Facebook communities, which, despite being an older network, still have a strong life there.

Often, the communities that emerge around a certain influencer, sometimes that influencer oxygenates a debate, that you have access to that community that is there with them.

So, it's a lot of diving.

I have to tell you a practical example that I think might help.

We have been studying behaviors in relation to beauty for a long time, since 2014, it's a recurring theme here.

And I see that we were going deeper from the combination of several digital methods.

The first thing we did in this perspective of understanding the relationship of the Brazilian woman with beauty, digitally, was a big social listening, that was in 2014.

And at that time, the data you had available, the big statistics about the relationship of women with hair, said that 62% of Brazilians wanted to have straight hair.

And at that time, we ran a social listening, in which, in two days, we collected 52,000 posts about hair.

And from those 52,000 posts, more or less 45% had to do with conversations about natural, curly, curly hair.

And then we went to understand what kind of conversation that was.

It was women saying about the desire to have natural hair, the desire to have curly hair, the desire to have curly hair.

We went to understand this movement more deeply, and we saw that there were communities on Facebook, support groups, for women who wanted to go through a hair transition process to have their natural hair, after years and years of straightening their hair.

We look at this movement, enter these communities, and it's important to say that, at that time, we had researchers on our team who were going through this process too, which is something else that I think is very interesting, when the researcher has an affinity with that theme of study, because this subjectivity of the researcher, we don't distance it, on the contrary, we want to bring it.

It's a subject that researches, and if that subject has an affinity with the theme, it's very interesting.

So, these researchers spent, more or less, four months in these communities, understanding the interactions, understanding the journey that those women went through, and it was a very rich study.

And we saw that it was something that was moving a lot with the women who went through this process, especially at the time of abandoning chemistry, some shave their hair to be able to see the new hair born, and we thought it was a very intense, beautiful process, and we started doing some diaries with these women, following daily what was happening in this transition journey.

And there are several micro-moments, small pains, great emotional transformations, something like that, of immense wealth.

Certainly.

And in that same study, then we started to enter communities that had to do with other themes, in relation to hair.

So, on the other hand, communities and a Rapunzel project, which are women who want to have long hair and a lot of hair.

And then there were other types of questions, of needs.

I, in particular, follow a lot of communities of gray-haired women.

It's a very interesting world, too, to quote there and see the kind of depth of the discussion that happens there.

Interesting, I feel like Neanderthal, the caveman in this, because I don't belong to any community.

The semiotic, the study of signs and symbols and their interpretation, is a key tool in understanding the consumer.

Could you explain how the semiotic is used to decode consumer behavior and its implications for marketing strategies?

Maurício, once again, I'm going to highlight this point of the combination of methods.

So, it comes in as one more of the research strategies, one more of the methodologies that will allow us to have a complex look, a comprehensive look.

But the semiotic will talk about this study of the signs and the production of meanings in culture.

And we use it a lot, inviting professionals who work with semiotic studies, to help us understand how the meaning of certain objects has been changing over time, or the meaning of certain themes has been transforming, and it's a very interesting tool.

I'm going to give you some examples, too.

A few years ago, we carried out a study on food, on changes in food habits, and one thing we did was invite a team that works with semiotic studies to bring this look to us of how the meaning of industry was changing, of the food industry.

And then a whole historical research was carried out on the campaigns of the food industry, since this industry emerged in the post-war period until the present moment.

And then we accompanied, along with that, a survey in newspapers, in newspapers, of what was said about the food industry And it's very interesting, because you follow, since the post-war period, what was the meaning?

How did the first food industries start to build the meaning of an industrialized food?

How is that received by society?

Later, later on, in the 1980s, a period in which, in Brazil, women start to go to the market, to buy things that are not in the food industry, women start to go to the labor market with much more strength.

The industry comes with other proposals for practicality.

How does it propose this?

What kind of meaning?

How does society receive this?

So it's very interesting to follow how the meaning of something changes over time.

In beauty studies, too, in one of the beauty studies we did, we invited a team to take a look at the beauty standard of the Brazilian woman based on the faces of the protagonists of soap operas.

So we took, since the first soap operas, who were the protagonists?

What standards does this tell me?

When does this standard start to be shaken?

Why is it shaken?

What is the repercussion that this generates?

So it's a very interesting tool to understand meanings over time.

This socio-historical approach is also very important.

The meaning of something today is not given, natural.

It has to do with a story.

And understanding this story and how we got here is fundamental to understand the future.

What will come next.

These are synergistic disciplines that bring this sum of results.

It's a wonderful subject.

I'm particularly enthusiastic about your field of activity, your business segment.

Well, we now enter the fire pit.

There are three questions I ask all the guests.

The first of them, what are the virtues of a successful entrepreneur?

Maurício, I realize, from what I've been able to follow up close, I realize that two great virtues are a capacity for change, the ability to make changes, along with the ability to adapt.

Because for a company to get where it plans to get, this company will have to transform a thousand times.

And for it to be able to follow the social changes that happen and connect with people's demands, it will need to change constantly.

And those entrepreneurs that I was able to observe up close, I understood that they built this capacity for change within themselves first.

This capacity for adaptation.

It was something that I realized in one person, and I even told him about it.

His company was changing a lot.

It went from one X state to another, completely different.

And I realized that he needed to transform a lot for that to happen.

And that's what I told him.

I said, the more your company has changed, the more you have changed too.

So I think that this ability to transform the leader and that he is transmitting this to the entire organization and leading this change.

So I see this virtue as very present.

What differentiates the dreamers from the doers?

Good question.

The doing, right?

But I think there's something else, I'm kidding here.

I think there's a love for the real and for reality.

Because when it comes to bringing a dream to reality, which is what the doers do, all the doers have a dream, that's what I think, the dimension of the dream is there too.

It's what gives the gas to do it.

But so that you don't just stay in the dream and go to do it, you need to have a love for the real.

It has to be bigger than the love for your dream.

Because sometimes your dream has a lot of illusion there.

And as you take that to real life, life confronts you.

Sometimes it won't be what you imagined.

I see this happen a lot in companies, they launch a product, a service, and the consumers receive that, sometimes in a way that wasn't planned.

It wasn't what was expected.

And then there are people who get frustrated and keep trying to hit that key of their dream.

And there are other people who have an openness and a love for what's going on.

Look how interesting.

People received this in a different way, and this reality data comes to complement my project.

So I think the doers have a lot of this love for the real, and this connection with the real is what keeps them moving forward.

And this real feeds the dream, right?

As you see how people are receiving that, then you connect with other people's dreams to feed yours as well.

Perfect.

And the last one, what is design?

What is design?

I'm not a designer.

Although I have an intense relationship with several designers, I think they are very similar disciplines.

Research and design.

And all my life I've had a very special collaboration with design professionals, and with Júlio Alves, with whom I work very constantly, it's a strong partnership, I don't see...

Because I think that we, from research, we understand and bring elements to what the design will build later.

And for me, design has to do with an intention, Maurício.

I'm talking out of any theory, but for me, design, I would sum it up like this, it's a drawing with an intention.

It's not a free drawing, I don't see designers designing something because they want to, or because they do.

I see designers very imbued with this why.

Why am I drawing something?

Very imbued with understanding who is going to use that to make the best possible drawing.

So I would define a drawing with an intention, and I think that explains why they are areas that have such a great affinity.

I think that we, research professionals, have this role of understanding and raising the level of the why that designers work with.

And designers have this role for us of giving the drawing, of giving the solution that was already there, imbued with what we saw.

When we participate in a field work, there's something there, imbued, that can be born.

And who can shape that are the designers.

So I'm absolutely a fan of the professionals in this area.

I like it a lot.

Very well.

We now enter one of the most appreciated sessions, which is the reading indication.

Which books have impacted your trajectory?

Wow, a lot of books, Maurício, a lot.

It's even hard to answer, but I made a selection to bring here today.

We talked a lot here about ethnography, digital research.

There's a book called Ethnography by Robert Kozinets, it's a book from 2014.

It's a kind of manual, it's not such a deep book, but I see that its value was to be one of the first to deal with this topic, in a simple way.

Almost a first manual for those who want to enter this world.

I think that all the people in 2014 who wanted to experiment with digital ethnography had access to this book.

So I think it's a good start.

Another book that shaped me a lot, and that impacted my trajectory a lot, is a book called Dialectics of the Eye, the project of Walter Benjamin's passages.

It's a book by Susan Bookmoss, an American philosopher, and in this book she recreates a book that was never written by Walter Benjamin.

Walter Benjamin is a German-Jewish philosopher, who lived in Paris during the Second World War, and he flees to Spain, he dies during this flight, and he doesn't conclude one of the research projects he was working on, which was a project to understand mass culture and society based on what he saw in Paris.

But what's left of it are the archives of this researcher.

And these archives were photographs, quotes, images, advertisements, gallery photos, and what Susan Buch-Moors is going to do is recreate this book based on these images.

It's a beautiful work, and for me it impacted me as a researcher, because it's about how small images tell us about a certain culture.

What Walter Benjamin was reading in that Paris of the 1930s explains a lot of what we live today.

And understanding that this embryo of understanding was in an image was something very strong for me.

It's a book that I recommend, because it's not an academic book, it's written for anyone who has, even though it's very deep, but it's written for anyone who is interested in the subject.

So this is a book that shaped me a lot.

But you said you could point out more, so I did too.

I brought three indications here of what I'm reading now, which, for me, the ones I'm reading right now are, in general, the strongest, the ones that I'm connecting the most.

I have this habit of reading more than one book at the same time, Maurício, I think it comes from the sign of twins, so I'm moving between one book and another, and the ones I'm going through now, there's one that I'm really enjoying, I'm reading it here on Kindle, it's called The Systemic Vision of Life, a unified conception and its philosophical, political, social and economic implications.

It's a book by Fritjof Capra and Pierre-Louis de Louise.

Capra is this physicist who wrote The Physics, The Point of Mutation, very famous books, and he joins this chemist to make a great book that sums up part of his work on systemic thinking.

So it's a book that's going to talk about systemic thinking as a solution path to the difficulties that humanity faces today, and it's going to talk a lot about the crisis we live in as a result of a world view, mechanistic, reductive, which is this vision that comes from the science of the 17th century, and that will bring a world view and a world metaphor as a world, as a machine, a gear, and that it would be up to man to dominate this machine, to dominate this gear.

They're going to say that the crisis we live in is a crisis of perception, which is this perception of the world that takes us to where we are today, and that for changes to occur, we need to go back to a systemic world view, which is to understand that the Earth is a great living, interconnected organism, that we're all connected, and that the human being is one more of the elements of this web of life, and that we need to go back to that place.

So it's a very beautiful book, I'm really enjoying reading it, and I think it has a lot of affinity with companies, because this mechanistic, reductive view is inside companies, in a departmentalized view, or in a view that only looks at the financial, economic aspects, and can't cover it up and look at it as a whole.

So it's a very special book that I highly recommend, and the others that I'm reading at the moment, like this one.

So, The Fall of the Sky, Words of a Shaman, Yanomami, is a book by Davi Kopenawa, who is this great leader, Yanomami, written in collaboration with Bruce Albert, who has been working with him for several years, and I receive this book as a great return of the gaze.

Our society is a society that is all the time wanting to know the other, to research the other.

When I say our society, I mean the Western, white society, and what Davi comes to tell us here in this book is like, okay, let me tell you what I see of you, and let me tell you what I think your action, what I realize your action is doing to the world.

So he's going to tell his story, since he was a child, his first contacts with the world of whites, and it's very interesting to see what he says about us.

So it's a book that I recommend to expand this perception of who we are.

And the last book that I'm reading at the moment, this one was recommended to me by a friend of a friend, it's a book that's even with me here borrowed, but I'm enjoying it a lot, a bibliography that's in English.

So, Sacred Commerce, Business as a Path to Awakening.

It's an interesting book that tells the experience of this coffee, Gratitude, it's a coffee shop that exists in San Francisco, so it's a real deal, and they're going to tell how they work the experience of the people who go to this coffee shop, because they want this coffee to be an environment where people feel very well, and where they feel energized and have this experience of feeling grateful for being there.

And to do that, they have a series of care practices with the team that works with them.

And then they describe in a very beautiful way all these care practices and the values that guide this company, and it's interesting because it's not a company that throws away the perspective of profit.

No, it's a profitable company that's been growing, it's prosperous, but they don't put profit as the final goal.

Profit is a way to make that business work, and that it's good for those who go there, and good for those who work there.

And it's a very practical case, so I recommend this book to understand care practices within the organizations, and how companies can have a broader thinking, of course, think about the financial result, but that this result comes in favor of a better life for all people.

Excellent list of indications.

And to make it easier for everyone who watches us, we make available the links of these books directly in the description.

In addition, I invite you to explore the book section on the podbrand.design website.

There we have a curatorship with more than 250 books recommended by our guests.

Be sure to check it out.

The link is also below in the description.

Very well, it aroused me a lot of curiosity and intellectuality, these books that you recommended.

Going to the end, I still bring the question from Caroline Garrafa.

She is the founder of Santé, which is an innovative company in consulting in organizational culture, and who was last week at Podbrand.

She asked this question without knowing that you would be our next guest.

And her question, what is happiness to you?

Deep question, right, Maurício?

And beautiful.

For me, happiness over the years, it has been more and more small moments.

Small moments in which I can be calm with myself, with a more serene mind, calmer.

I feel that when I was younger, it had a lot to do with things that happened, a trip, good news that I received, with something that was often out of me.

And what I've been experiencing over the years is that it has a lot more to do with the internal state.

So I would say that happiness is an internal state, and that it happens throughout the day.

It can happen when I meet someone, it can happen when I understand something.

There's a lot of pleasure in the study, in the knowledge, in understanding things, in the small observations that we make on a daily basis.

So I would say that it has a lot more to do with how we are internally than as something outside.

And that it is not effusive, grandiose, it is calmer, serene.

Right.

Interesting that this is Podbrand's 62nd episode.

In 62 episodes, perhaps the only one I have received a question from has been precisely with Caroline.

And she asked me the same question.

And my answer is very similar to yours.

I suggest you watch the episode.

I believe you will identify with my answer about happiness.

If you could ask a single question to our next guest or guest, what would it be?

Thinking about the fact that we are approaching the end of the year and that 2023 has been a difficult year in which we are witnessing conflicts happening, we are seeing the results of climate change getting closer and closer, in several places in the world, facing very intense heat waves.

So we are feeling it in our own bodies.

And these defects are becoming more visible and more evident every day.

Thinking about that, what is missing for humanity to awaken and unite for the construction of a fairer, more balanced world, in more harmony with nature?

That would be my question.

Very well, very well, introspective, reflective.

It will be done, our next guest, next week, which will be the last episode of 2023.

Well, Fernanda, it was a great pleasure to have you with us today, enriching not only our conversation, but also Paul Brandt's proposal, which is to help people reach their best version.

Your keen look at human behavior is fundamental for all of us who seek to build brands, businesses and a life with meaning and relevance.

In addition, it is a delight to hear your poetic accent, Minas Gerais.

Thank you very much.

Maurício, I thank you, I really enjoyed the conversation, to be here talking about these themes, which are themes that I really like.

And that's it, this space for deep conversation is so important.

Sometimes we are in a society more... in an accelerated pace of life, and this space for a deepening, for a conversation, is very important.

So, congratulations for your initiative, for these 62 episodes.

It's a lot of dialogue.

I've watched some of them and enjoyed it a lot.

And being here with you today motivates me to go back to others and get to know more about the concept.

Excellent.

Thank you very much.

It was an honor to have you on Paul Brandt's side.

Merry Christmas and a great New Year, Fernanda.

Thank you, Maurício.

A great New Year for all of us.

May we reach 2024 with all these very strong purposes, so that we can do our part to have a great year.

See you soon.

See you.

Be sure to visit paulbrandt.design and explore all our previous episodes and discover the precious reading recommendations of Fernanda and the other guests.

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