The Appropriate Questions to Ask in Marketing Research

How to know when to go qualitative and when to go quantitative.

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The starting point of all great marketing insights is a good question, since after all questions are everywhere. However, there is a catch: the kind of answers you get will greatly depend on the form in which that question is asked.

Some questions are heard with curiosity and open discussion, others are answered in numbers and data. It is knowing the difference between qualitative and quantitative research that turns marketers into real strategists.

"Why" Qualitative Research Is Important

In qualitative territory, you are asking why people act as they do. The research is emotional, open-ended and deeply human. What lies beneath and tells this tale in pictures? This kind of research tries to uncover the story behind human actions.

Edward McQuarrie discusses in The Market Research Toolbox (2015) how qualitative methods are suited to exploration and discovery. They give marketers some insight into what customers really think before they turn to numbers.

Suppose you're thinking about launching a new line of eco-friendly sneakers. Before you send out a major survey, you sit down one-on-one with potential purchasers and ask those tricky questions that are supposed to make choices. "What makes sustainable brands different from each other?" Could their answers have the trap of surprises for you? Maybe it's not at all how green these people are that counts but the sort of extreme comfort one finds in a qualitative win.

The Logic of Quantitative Research: The “How Much”

Once you have an idea of what matters most to your readers, it is time to measure it. Think of quantitative studies as coming in at this point. With surveys, experiments and analytics you finally get a sense for what is going on at this stage on whatever scale that happens to be available and how many times.

McQuarrie calls this the confirmatory stage of research. Now you're not exploring, but more verifying, for example, if your sneaker interviews reveal that 70 per cent of customers care about comfort over design, a survey will tell you whether this is true across the entire market.

"Start with the why for the story, then prove it by measuring how much."

Mixing Both For A Successful Marketing Strategy

The truth is, great marketers don't choose one or the other, they meld both. Qualitative research gathers streamlined stories, while quantitative results give readers some hard proof. It's a little bit of both.

So, when you're planning a research program, don't just plunge into data. Proceed from the "why," and end with the "how much." This is how information becomes strategy and ultimately results.