How to persuade people of the business value of usability testing has long been a topic of conversation at any HCI conference. As a field, we have made a great deal of progress in defining the clear business case for usability. But in this article I want to consider the par- allel question of how we can communicate the business case for ethnographic design research—ethnography, contextual observa- tion, and field studies—to a skeptical audi- ence. Ethnography faces some challenges beyond those of usability testing, partly because usability usually occurs later and has a more immediate connection to product qual- ity. Although people are much more familiar with the concept of ethnography than a few years ago, there are still plenty of questions and quite a few skeptics. This article will consider these questions briefly and then look at the relationship between design research and market research. This will lead to the argument that design research and market research are based on dif- ferent, but complementary, world views.