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Qualitative research

  • Friday, 12 November 2021

Here's a seemingly well-known truth: Quantitative research answers the questions "How much?", "How often?". Qualitative research answers the questions "Why?", "How?". And yet I want to talk about why we need this qualitative research. In my opinion, they are not needed for something specifically, but because: because people are people. Consumers, I mean. Marketing experts are trying to reduce consumers to perfect models in order to study them and eventually forecast, control and manage. This is all very nice, of course. On paper (or on a Power Point chart). In reality, they are living people whose behaviour is influenced by so many factors that it's mind boggling.

This is a common situation faced by marketers (both from the manufacturer and from the research agency) - when recruiting, people say one thing and then change it during the research. More often than not, this looks like some kind of malicious action on the part of the respondent and is a reason to suspect him or her of "professionalism". Here is a real case - it was necessary to recruit consumers of a particular brand of iced tea. Loyal ones, so much so that they either do not buy other brands at all, or they buy them a couple of times a year. There you go. To start with, in a certain price segment there are no more than 5 such brands (you can check for yourself, there are actually 3 comparable brands). The second fact - iced tea is quite a specific product, its regular consumers (and we, of course, were interested in them), they drink it in certain situations and they do not replace it with other soft drinks. In general, at the stage of recruitment we found out that 80% of respondents who fit the frequency of consumption cannot be considered loyal consumers of this or that brand. In other words, if they intend to drink iced tea, they will drink iced tea even if the preferred brand is not available in the shop (the distribution of the competing three brands is about the same, so if one is not on sale, then the other two are definitely available). Of the remaining 20% of loyal consumers quickly found consumers of brand X, brand Y was optional (found – good; no - well, don't need it), but there were problems with brand Z. A detailed comparison showed that everyone who prefers it drinks other brands too often, even though they don’t prefer it. Not loyal enough, in general. And it only takes two people. We found two people and settled down. And then at the main stage of the study one of them begins to sing the praises of brand X. We politely tell him - WTF, dear? You said you cannot live without brand Z? And he replies - I forgot. Curtain! Yes, that's how it is. He forgot about his favourite brand and named another one, the second favourite (and there are only 3, I remind you). And when asked directly about his favourite brand, he of course remembered it, and here we go. My point is that models are great, but consumers are real people, and they do not always fit into coherent logical schemes of beautiful study designs and great step-by-step thought-out questionnaires. As marketers, we have one logic, but consumers may not have it, to put it mildly - it's not obvious. And that is why qualitative research was, is and will continue to be needed. Because it provides an opportunity to deal individually with each consumer, to understand their motivations and, having worked out a few types of motivations, to create beautiful logical models that can be used to build quantitative questionnaires. Just in case - we of course replaced the respondents, no research design was affected.

On the subject of respondents' 'professionalism'. The fact that they don't always fit into the "Procrustean bed" of requirements for the TG, doesn't make them "bad", "wrong". I suppose a marketer sees an advantage in his product that allows the consumer to hop on his left foot and scratch his right ear at the same time. And he, the marketer, wants a group with just that - jumping and scratching. But during the recruitment process, it turns out that there are very few of them, but there are those who jump and those who scratch. If you imagine that in this situation the marketer agrees to soften his requirements and allows you to invite in equal proportions those who do two things simultaneously and those who do one thing at a time, it is likely in the process of the group will turn out that those who only jump, in fact sometimes and scratch, just not always. And it will be possible to find out from them what needs to change in the product so that they can scratch more often. And in reverse - the scratchers sometimes jump. And those who were initially recognised as the benchmark (jumping and scratching) will suddenly admit that they are very tired and want to give up the product and lie down. But you can learn from them for the future how to stimulate them so that they jump and scratch with renewed vigour.

My point is that an interest in the real, not imaginary, consumer is sometimes more justified than strict adherence to logical constructs. Marketers are like gardeners. There is a bush. It has many branches, big and small, and some that are dry even. They grow in all directions. Of course, for a conceptual garden, you must take the tools and shape the bush (or put a few of the prettiest branches), cutting off everything superfluous. Consumer behaviour - the bush as it is. Consumer behaviour patterns identified in the research and used in further work by brand managers - a bush trimmed by a gardener. And the remaining "trimmings" are material for the ikebana, i.e. for writing articles ?.

Belousova A.

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  • Last modified on Thursday, 03 March 2022

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