Quantitative AND Qualitative

In order to gain a true picture of the customer experience of modern, cross-channel businesses, it is essential to trust consultants who understand the importance of striking the right balance between quantitative and qualitative research.Currently, the new media research industry as a whole is getting it wrong too often.

These two research methodologies are quite distinct approaches that are used to understand customer behaviour through very different practices.

Quantitative research largely revolves around the precise analysis of numerical data: numbers of visitors to a particular website, clicks on banners, time spent reading pages, frequency of referrals – that sort of thing. Quantitative data can be ripped directly from weblogs, but it can also be gained through the structured, objective questioning of a large sample of users of a given service or product. Such surveys produce statistics, calculations, formulae, margins: ‘facts’.

Qualitative research attempts to explore and understand conceptions, attitudes, behaviours, interactions and of course experiences, of individuals and smaller focus groups. Data collected is largely non-numerical, more in-depth, more subjective, and more tailored to circumstance. It must be analysed and interpreted through observation and judgement, with results dependent to a great extent upon the skill and experience of the consultants.

Broadly speaking, quantitative research attempts to objectively nail down universal, repeatable rules for perceived trends, whereas qualitative research tries to subjectively develop a rich understanding of behaviour.

The market research community has been conducting both quantitative and qualitative research since the First World War, when Cadburys won the government contract to provide chocolate to the troops by researching the needs of this new market. Now, in 2009, the global market research industry is set to spend $40 billion, according to Research magazine.

The fledgling experience industry that we operate in certainly has its issues. It is young, fragmented, undisciplined, varied in methodologies, ungoverned by a single guiding body and threatened by a perceived lack of credibility. I believe this has to change, and fast, if our industry is to be taken seriously by the marketing directors accustomed to seeing only the enormous sample sizes typically generated by purely quantitative market research.

At Foviance, our strength is our experience, our ability to specialise, and our judgement about when and how to engage our clients in surveys, panels or web analytics work. I believe that more than any other organisation in our industry, we have the varied skill set and broad abilities to combine both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in innovative, synergetic media research practices. And with 43 of the Top 100 FTSE already on board as clients, I’d say the industry’s top marketing directors agree.