What do you have against qualitative research?

Q: Since you were talking about marketing research last Friday, may we ask you to stay on that subject because we have important questions to ask. You’re well known as a “numbers” researcher.  ust like the brand managers who wrote you last week, we have also attended your AMR (Applied Marketing Research) seminar. That seminar was almost all about quantitative marketing research.

We’re a small group of brand managers who are FB friends. Every so often your bias in favor of quanti research over quali comes up as a topic. In our brand management work, however, we’ve been helped more often and for more insights by quali than quanti research. After reading your column last Friday, we were again into this issue. One of us suggested that we e-mail you about our questions. There are just two of them. We hope you won’t mind the more than frank way we’re asking: “Why do you regard quanti research as superior over quali research? What do you really have against quali research?”

A:  This is your senior MRx-er answering because it’s me who’s conducting the AMR seminar and who’s the market researcher. As far as frank questions are concerned, I don’t mind those at all. My seminar participants and friends tell me in fact that I’m not only frank but many times even irreverent.

Let me start by saying that there are more lessons we forget than remember from a one-day seminar like the AMR. So let me answer your questions by recalling forgotten but important AMR lessons.

Some 3 to 4 PPt slides in your AMR seminar manual clearly state that quantitative research serves a specific research purpose better than qualitative research. But qualitative research is also good for some other research purpose where quantitative research is weak. Using your own words, this is the same as saying that quanti is superior over quality for insights where quali is weak in the same way that quali is superior over quanti for those where quanti is poor at insighting.

For example, your UAI (Usage, Attitude and Image) research is quanti.  Its data give you the extent, level or direction of consumer usage, attitude and images for a product category and brands in that category.  Just suppose you were presented a UAI usage data saying, for example, that the percent using your brand most often is now 16 percent.

Let’s say you noted that’s lower than in the previous UAI’s 23 percent.  And so you asked: “What happened? Why did my brand’s percent used most often fall?” Let’s say you get 2, 3 or 4 different answers. You wonder which one is the right answer. In other words, quanti research data is good at telling you what’s going on with usage, attitude and images. But it does not have the data to tell you why such and such is going on. That’s where quali research data can help because that’s what its data is all about.

It was at this point when your AMR seminar asked you what this meant about your use of quanti versus quali research. We underscored the idea that it’s not a choice of either one or the other. We agreed that it’s a matter of using both. Use quanti for where it’s good at and then quali to give you what quanti cannot.

I was also critical about your research agency’s or your research director’s sequencing of those two research techniques. Almost all of you start with quali research and then follow this up with a quanti research.  The designated purpose for doing quali first is “to gather basic information and ideas about the product, its market, competition and consumer perceptions, purchase and usage practices as well as priority values.” Before online search and its encyclopedic coverage of everything everywhere at any time became available to everyone, we appreciated the compelling logic of why quali should precede quanti research. But Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, websites, blogs, and the like now serve that logic much better. It’s literally such a waste to do quali for a purpose that is served better and much better by the available search engines and social media.

Quali research’s truer and more practical utility comes after and not before the quanti research. Correctly designed and its data correctly analyzed, quali research can explain what the quanti research data cannot. When used after, quali serves as “closure” to your quanti research whose findings will have been otherwise left “hanging.”

This quanti-quali partnership is particularly vital in the valid understanding and actionable insighting of large-scale, nationwide surveys, and monitoring or tracking studies such as my consumer coping behavior survey series. During the industry presentation of its third quarter 2012 survey results last March, there were a whole lot of “why” questions asked. For example, why did consumers consider toothpaste and bath soap as number 1 staple and not rice? Why did consumers classify instant coffee as a staple in 2012 when they treated it as only a near-staple in 2008? Why was detergent a No. 2 staple in 2012 when it was just a No. 4 staple in 2008? The correct answers to all these why-questions were to come after the quanti survey and from the FGDs (Focus Group Discussion) or IDIs (In-Depth Interviews) of those survey respondents who gave responses to make up those data.

That’s the last and third important but forgotten lesson. Recruiting of the valid FGD or IDI respondents will be at risk if carried out according to the conventional practice. That practice specifies that respondent recruitment must be according to the socio-eco-demo characteristics of the target consumer. The more practical and valid criterion for recruitment should be the respondents “from you can learn the most about the answers to the why questions.” Those are the respondents in the quanti survey who,  for example, classified toothpaste or bath soap as number 1 staple.

We hope the foregoing did a good job of correcting your very wrong impression that we “regard quanti research as superior over quali research,” and that we “have something against quali research.” As we’ve explained, those two research techniques are more useful together than alone and independent of each other. When together, the more insight-rich sequencing is quanti first and then quali to explain why quanti found what it found.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!