Market Research in Marketing: Main Methods
Primary and Secondary, Qualitative and Quantitative Techniques
Mar 13, 2009
Gathering information about the market for the product or service can be as simple as conversations with customers or summarising the comments left in the visitors' book or as sophisticated as a large programme covering a variety of subjects, from the competition, market shares and gaps in the current offerings to behaviours and values of the consumers of particular goods.
All market research is customarily divided into primary and secondary; primary projects are further classified as qualitative or quantitative.
Secondary (Desk) Research
Desk research involves using any existing sources: internal company data, public reference materials (particularly provided by national statistics' offices), industry publications, media reports and scientific journals.
It can also include purchasing existing off-the-shelf or customised reports from market research that has already been conducted within the area of interest.
Primary Research or Field Studies
Primary research involves gathering information afresh, usually from the sellers, consumers or potential consumers of the product.
This may take form of asking consumers direct questions via surveys or in-depth interviewing, performing headcount, observation of behaviour, gathering sales data, controlled experiments either in the natural environment or in a laboratory and many more.
Filed research is often usefully further divided into quantitative and qualitative.
- Quantitative
Quantitative (often shortened to “quant” in the professional parlance) studies cover all projects in which numerical data is either directly aimed for or used in the process of providing final answers.
Most quantitative studies gather data from relatively large groups of people (although experiments may have smaller numbers of participants).
A survey that asks a series of closed (i.e. with answers provided) questions is a typical and probably most popular quantitative research technique: the number of people choosing particular answer options is the data used in further analysis.
The data gathered via quantitative methods is almost always analysed using statistical techniques.
On the most basic level, simple distributions or measures of averages may be obtained (e.g. 100 people said “yes”, 300 said “no”; the mean number of children in group A was 1.5 and in group B was 2.1); but usually some form of statistical testing.
At the most sophisticated end of the spectrum, quantitative data gathered in large scale, representative studies can be used to construct models of behaviour, create forecasts, optimal combinations of features for new products and segment the consumers into groups differing in their socio-demographics, motivations, values and lifestyles.
The size and quality of the sample used for quantitative studies is critical if the data so gathered is to be generalised for the whole population.
- Qualitative
Qualitative (often shortened to “qual”) studies don't attempt to provide numerical data that can be analysed using statistics. Instead, they aim to explore deeper, more complex and sometimes unconscious or unverbalised aspects of behaviour.
The tools used in qualitative studies are less structured and don't elicit simple yes/no or multiple choice answers. They often evolve during the process of the research and the questioning is usually less direct and frequently guided by the answers given within the interviewing process.
Qualitative researchers are more interested in the “whys” and “hows” of behaviour and exploring motivations behind it.
The most common methods employed in qualitative research are focus group interviews (FGIs) and in-depth interviews (IDIs or “depths”).
Qualitative projects are often done in the exploratory stages and are used to help design the quantitative studies that follow.
Properly conducted, market research is an invaluable decision-supporting tool for any business.
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