MARKETING RESEARCH – Techniques and details

This is a post I am writing because its something I have done some research on lately. I am NOT an expert at this neither am I a person you should look up to as a born-marketer. Lets see what all i can recall from the last few hrs.

So the first few terms which you will come across at the time of beginning your market research would be qualitative and quantitative research. So obviously the next thing you want to know is which one suits your needs.

The thing you want to look for here is to first analyze what are the needs of the research. Is the problem clearly known? Are we trying to find a solution or are we trying to prove a hypothesis of ours?

Quantitative Research :

This is a objective approach to research and includes a plethora statistical analysis tools. Some of the more popular ones include a survey which could be a pen paper survey or the recent trend of email surveys.

So obviously the most important part here is to design the survey as objectively as possible. Also to consider while designing the survey is what kind of people will be surveyed.

These approaches tend to have a error which comes in various forms – random error, sampling error, interviewer error or respondent errors. The other error which the engineers in the crowd know is the alpha and beta (Type I and Type II)

Qualitative Research :

This one is a more complex one to explain. Qualitative research will be subjective, rich and ambiguous due to its inherent manner. I will focus on two most used approaches in qualitative research –

Focus Group – This is one of the most used approaches and tends to involve a group of 6-8 people who tend to sit in a room with a moderator taking care of the entire decision. The details of what care should be taken before a

Depth Interview – You do this when you are going to scrape through the surface and try to understand what the reason was for the kind of response/feelings that a respondent goes through. The skills of the interviewer again comes under scrutiny because of the importance of his skills. All the more because there is not structure and he needs to understand which nerve to tickle and which one to leave untouched.

Projective Techniques – Well this one has many more sub categories like word association, sentence completion, images etc. These mostly appeal to the non conscious part of the brain which might reveal some data which the respondent might not know himself.

This should get you started on what you want to start with. Any more details can be found in some marketing book else the mother of all information – the Internet.

Hope you benefitted from this. Please feel free to leave comments to improve the article.