Qualitative Research
Why should I invest in direct conversations with a few people when I can simply send out a questionnaire or a poll to many?
Qualitative Research defined: Because human interactions lead to valuable insight and surprising outcomes. It is true; a lot of data can be informative. Charts and graphs are the staples of business. But we would argue that the quality of that data is even more valuable to an organization. How? Because these conversations generally occur with your most engaged stakeholders. In other words, the people you wish to target. With qualitative research, one can ascertain nuance in feeling and emotion. That’s difficult to do in any other forum.
The power of qualitative research is a result of the open-ended question and the feedback loop that follows. This is an opportunity to truly measure the customer’s relationship with the brand and get to the response that feeds insight and change. It also allows the researcher to identify possible subsets of interest. In essence, when used effectively, qualitative research can answer the why as well as the why not.
As an in-depth exploration of how people feel about the brand, qualitative research provides context about what motivates those feelings and their associations with the brand. Because qualitative research is often a process of one-on-one interactions, questioning can go deeper in informing brand perception, opinions and attitudes. As a result, a reasonably large sample size is important for obtaining various points of view or hypotheses.
Qualitative Research process and deliverables:
- Discussion guide development
- On-on-one interviews, focus groups, surveys
- Innovation research
- Recording and transcription
- Feedback analysis
- Cleaning, compiling and coding of feedback
- Interview transcript analysis
- Language translation
- Formal report and recommendations