Qualitative data is data you can not measure in terms of money, percentages, numbers, fractions, etc. In other words, it is data you cannot measure or count. Qualitative data answers why people take some actions over others. For example, why do people buy Colgate toothpaste vs. Crest toothpaste? Buy Ford vs. Chevrolet?
On the other side, Quantitative data is data you can measure, count, and obtain precise numbers, percentages, etc., and usually answer questions about how much toothpaste Publix supermarket sold last year. or how many cars are Ford producing right now?
When performing market research, qualitative data will help you to answer questions about consumer preferences and behaviors. The goal is to make discoveries and understand why a situation is happening. Again qualitative is related to opinions consumers can have over a product or service.
You can have market research using both types of data. For example, you might want to study last year’s sales by season and then investigate why the sales went down in a particular season by researching any consumer behavior that led to this drop in sales.
For example, let’s see you are doing market research about a new product you want to launch, but you don’t know the best time of the year or the best season to launch the product. Researchers can look at primary or internal data and check what the historical numbers related to this particular product tell you.
Let’s imagine this product is vitamin C in tablets. Sales indicate that consumers buy more of this product during the last quarter and the first quarter of the year than the rest of the year the trend is stable, and sometimes sales go down.
Everything indicates that the fourth quarter is the best year to launch the new product. Still, before taking any decision, researchers can perform an interview or a survey to ask a group of potential consumers questions about the products and try to identify why the majority of the consumers start buying more vitamin C during the fourth quarter. In this case, the market research uses both methods to answer the question of when to launch the new product—using historic data to check the past year’s trend and conducting interviews and surveys to determine why people are buying more at specific times of the year.
What tools do you have when you are performing a qualitative study?
To perform qualitative market research, you count on many tools such as individual interviews, surveys, questionnaires, observations, focus groups, online focus groups, in-home videos, etc. Below is an overview of the most common methods to gather qualitative data on a market research
- Customer visits. The main goal of a customer visit is to learn more about the consumer in their environment. You visit a customer and observe. Before visiting, you should define your objectives, select customers, prepare the visits, prepare a discussion guide, conduct the stop and analyze the results.
- Focus groups. These are small groups of people that gather to discuss a particular topic with the supervision of a moderator. Usually, a focus group is integrated by 6 to 10 people, and the moderator follows a discussion guide. These are like group interview; people are encouraged to talk to one another, exchanging comments, experiences, and point of view.
- Interviews. This method involves two or more people when one is the interviewer or the person who will ask the questions. Before elaborating on the questions you will use for the interview, it’s essential to start with your research objectives and focus on open-ended and exploratory questions. The idea of an interview is to create a conversation, not a monologue.
How to analyze qualitative data?
The answer is just gathering all the information and quantifying all the data, Finding and identifying key points to connect and code the data, and classifying it by themes and categories.
Following the Vitamin C example, let’s imagine you interviewed your market research objectives; you need to identify the key points or patterns that will allow concluding what is happening with the sales increase during the fourth quarter. Some data points will be demographics, like where these people live, age, etc., and others will be like behaviors, traditions, and education level.
Combined data points can give you clues about what’s happening in the fourth quarter. Maybe people living in places where weather seasons are more noticeable and flu season hits the most can be triggered to believe vitamin C will help them to improve their immune system. Flu seasons usually start in fall and throughout the winter; the season’s peak is February.
So if the quantitative data is telling you that Vitamin C sales increased during the fourth quarter and client interview results are telling you that people are concerned about the flu, the weather conditions can trigger the flu, you might get a conclusion that this is why you get a spike on sales on the fourth quarter. It might be beneficial to launch the new product this quarter.
in conclusion, not all market research is based on quantitative data. Qualitative data, although subjective, can provide very objective answers about motivations and why consumers behave in a certain way. You can not sub-estimate the value of qualitative research.
