
So late last week I fired off an email to my good friend, John Griffiths, who I always contact when I want to know what my opinion should be on any given subject. His answer follows, and I hope your comments will follow to.
Q: "Hi John, hope you are well. I was wondering if you could help me with something. In both Brazil and Dubai we are being asked the same question by inexperienced clients (potential clients): 'how representative is qualitative research?' Now I know and you know that it isn't. I was wondering if you had a set piece response we could use? An explanation which is more than an apology - I usually talk about how we try to understand mechanisms and triggers rather than how many times who does what...
Any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated."

Personally, I think that qual really gets at issues in a way that quant rarely does. If you want to know how many people buy x toothpaste versus y, or which one of six reasons is the most popular, you use quant. But if you really want to get into why people feel loyal to x toothpaste, how they fit toothpaste into their lives, really get into the meat of their toothpaste buying then you need qual. I feel quant can miss a lot, because of the mass of data and the lack of options (people chose the closest option, not necessarily what the would say).
ReplyDeleteThe marketing research classes that I've taken usually say that qual is for prelim research and to examine particular subgroups (say, motorbike riders) or a super loyal fanbase.
Love the currency metaphor. I’d build on it by saying that qualitative is the only way to get at the essence of something. In this way, it can be more “representative” because it is reflecting true substance, rather than simply measuring dimensions. I spent 5 years developing best practices for the Clorox Company on getting to the big, strategic insights. For brand positioning, retail activation and product development, the most essential input is good ethnography. What good ethnography delivers is an understanding of the meaning behind our behaviors. And this meaning (within the frame of culture) is universal and therefore “representative”. What most companies miss is the distinction between discovery research and validation research. For discovery, qualitative is really the only way to go. Lori Wahl, BigInsightz
ReplyDeleteGreat comments. So to continue the build...
ReplyDeleteI love the use of "representativeness" compared to projectability. What qual does is help to represent human behavior, needs, motivations, desires, etc. the kind of stuff that leads to product innovation, communication and branding.
Here paying homage to the outlier is important. Quant usually dismisses the the outliers but qual can learn from them. How is someone adapting product for their own use? Example is the camera phone. When it first came out, marketers weren't sure of the value but the audience quickly taught the manufacturers applications and attachments not previously imagined.
In terms of projectability, an issue is how homogeneous is the audience being observed? If completely homogeneous, then you only need to interview one person. But that is never the case. So John Griffiths comments about starting with the "unthought unspoken" (Love that!) also apply in helping to understand how wide is the range of diversity. -- dorothy deasy, www.ddeasy.com