Market research: Quantitative or qualitative?

QUESTION: We’re three marketing and advertising professors at an Association of Marketing Educators (AME) member school of business. We learned about your talk at the College of Business, De LaSalle Taft on Qualitative Research. We wanted to attend but we heard about it after the talk.

We’re writing because your topic came as a surprise to all of us. We’ve attended many of your conference talks but they were all about your quantitative nationwide market research like your consumer coping behavior survey. We’ve also attended your marketing research seminars that were almost all quantitative. So please tell us why you are now shifting to qualitative research? Have you discovered lately that qualitative is better than quantitative?

ANSWER: It must have been this image in your minds (the three of you) of myself as a quanti researcher that’s responsible for your deciding to attend only those conference talks and seminars of mine that are quantitative. I have many qualitative conference talks and seminars. They’re on FGDs (focus group discussions), IDIs (in-depth Interviews), ethno- graphics (or observation research), and others.

In both talks and seminars, quantitative research and qualitative research are covered not in isolation from one another but together as co-working insighting methods.

You mentioned the nationwide quantitative survey on consumer coping behavior. Consider the portion when the subject of “staple” product categories was taken up.

A “staple” is a product category that the surveyed housewife considered something she “cannot live without, or cannot do without.” When I showed that the survey found that among the Class D and Class E housewives, the top No. 1 and No. 2 staples were toothpaste and detergent, the audience asked almost in unison, “Why? How about rice?”

The quantitative data showed that rice is still a staple. But among the D and E housewives, rice was just a No. 7 staple and not even a No. 2 or No. 3. The answer to the question “why” housewives considered toothpaste and detergent as more staple than rice could not be found in the quantitative data. It needed qualitative research to provide the answer.

In this specific survey, the quantitative gave a picture of what’s going on with D and E housewives in their budgeting behavior for recurring expenditure items. Housewives classified toothpaste and detergents as 2 staple product categories they cannot do without. Of course, it’s only to be expected that the survey sponsors will ask, “why is that so?”

Because the survey did not probe (which is a qualitative research technique), the survey data could not give the probed answer to the why probe question. The coping behavior survey did not probe because it covered the housewives’ budgeting for 159 product categories. So probing could be done only after a quantitative survey.

In the last two coping survey waves, no survey sponsor commissioned a qualitative IDI research to undertake the needed probing. But in the 2008 survey wave, two survey sponsors asked for the probing IDI.

Respondents who classified toothpaste and detergent as staple in the quantitative were recruited as IDI respondents and asked, among others, how they considered toothpaste and detergent as more staple than rice.

The IDI interviews found them reasoning out this way: “Mahirap na nga ang panahon, tapos kung wala pa kaming toothpaste, di ang baho na ng hininga namin. Ganyan din sa sabong panlaba. Pag wala nyan eh, di ang baho ng sinusuot namin. Maawa naman kayo. Hirap na ng kalagayan namin, hirap pa rin kami sa aming sarili at pananamit?” (These are hard times. If we have no toothpaste, that will make for bad breath for us. The same goes for detergent. If we have none, that will make for body odor. Please have some mercy. The times are already hard, why must it be hard as well on ourselves and on what we wear.)

That’s how it should be. Quantitative research takes charge of letting you know what’s going on in the market. Qualitative research gets you to understand why that is going on. Notice though that in the coping behavior survey, qualitative came after the quantitative. In addition, the respondents came from the quanti survey among those who answered the way that you’re questioning why they classified toothpaste and detergent as their top staple product categories. They were not the usual and typical recruited IDI or FGD respondents.

So what about those occasions when the qualitative comes before and, at times, as a preparation for the quantitative? Here’s a short case to illustrate and explain.

There is a startup domestic remittance company that initially wanted to do a quantitative UAI (usage, attitude, image) study. When I asked what for, a company representative said she wanted the study to tell her how she was to position her 2 outlets against each outlet’s nearby competitors, which are small- and medium-sized pawnshops plus remittance outlets. I suggested a qualitative IDI, which would first address her positioning concern.

I explained that she should first know what “priority customer remittance needs” her 2 shops were serving versus her nearby “competitors.” Next, she should find out what needs her 2 shops are serving better than her competitors.

The IDIs indicated that her 2 shops were serving just about the same needs as her considered competitors. But during the IDIs, one question that I inserted was about the remitter’s use of other remittance agencies and which was the remitter’s most used agency. The results showed that my client’s 2 shops and her nearby competitors were used only for “convenience,” meaning, only when the need to remit was “quick” and/or when the remitted amount was “small.” The most often used remittance agencies were Western Union and PNB.

So in the quantitative “product test” that followed, the test design was changed. The comparison of my client’s remittance service was no longer against the marketer-defined competitors of “nearby other small remittance shops” but versus the customer-defined competitors, Western Union and PNB.

As you can see, it’s not a question of your doing quantitative OR qualitative. It’s about how to do and use both to serve each one’s insighting purpose. That applies to doing quali after a quanti or quali before quanti.

Keep your questions coming. Send them to me at ned.roberto@gmail.com.