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Discussion on: The best marketing research is quantitative or qualitative in nature?

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ujjwal_poudel

Kotler & Keller (2016), in their book Marketing Management, market research for any product or service of a company is the process of assessing the viability of a new good or service through research conducted directly with the consumer which allows a company to discover the target market and record opinions and other input from consumers regarding interest in the product. Not only at the time of the product’s entry in the market but also at the time when the product is established in the market and company wishes to come up with new product or so, and even for knowing the review about the product in the market, research can be conducted.

To extract and quantify the perceptions, attitudes, behaviour, opinions and insightful information about the consumer’s needs, wants, desire and their taste and preference marketers majorly deploys two marketing research technique and they are qualitative and quantitative research measures. Quantitative research is generally numeric in nature and can be statically quantified, measured, analyzed using maximum, minimum, average (mean, median, mode), standard deviation (low or high risk in the market), variance, and slope (amount and speed of change). Qualitative measure is descriptive in characteristics and cannot be statically analyzed. Both of the research measures are trending and have their own benefits to the respective marketers of varied companies as per their research needs and orientation.

Qualitative research is generally used to gain an idea or understand any situation, opinions or motivation (Malterud, 2001). These types of research are primarily exploratory research. It gives the in-depth information about any cases you are doing research in. Data collection in this type of research include the methodologies those are flexible. In-depth interviews, focus groups, and reviews for documents include in this type of method. For instance, if the marketer or company wants to acquire information regarding how or why customer buys, or why they prefer a particular product, package, design then qualitative research is invariably used. Basically, collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting of such research helps marketer to understand the opinions or perceptions, feedbacks, feelings and emotions of consumers towards specific formulated research questions.

Quantitative research is essential for providing a broad base of insight on which typically a final course of action is recommended. It gives more objective result as it provides observed effects of a program on a problem or condition. This tends to give a more graphical representation of what the customers prefer with the help of the bar charts, pie charts and graphs. It is a number based research where the statistical data are used for the research purpose. These methods include various forms of surveys: online surveys, paper surveys, mobile surveys and kiosk surveys, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, longitudinal studies, website interceptors, online polls, and systematic observations (Koyhari, 2004).

Both qualitative and quantitative measures of research are extensively deployed by organization as per their nature of research criteria or orientation. Therefore, both research techniques are equally important for most of the organization as they can conduct market research as per the outcome or information they want. They have their own distinct effectiveness and advantages which invariably facilitate marketer in making crucial marketing or business decision.

References

Kothari, C. R. (2004). Research methodology: Methods and techniques . New Age International.

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Marketing Management . Boston: Pearson.

Malterud, K. (2001). Qualitative research: standards, challenges, and guidelines. The lancet, 358 (9280), 483-488.