Quantitative And Qualitative Research

Quantitative And Qualitative Research

Researching consumers is very important to companies as it allows companies to learn what consumers think about sorts of things the companies deems important enough to be researched.

For example a media company might be interested in what media services consumers use, to do this they may send out researchers on to the street to ask people walking by or if they are targeting a specific audience such as teenagers they may send researchers to places where they will find teenagers such as skate parks youth clubs and or schools. They will normally gather this research in the form of a tally and then present the results in a table, for example;

What Media Service do You use most?
Facebook	21
Bebo	8
YouTube	7
Teen comedies (e.g. Inbetweeners)	7
magazines	0

This is called quantitative research as it deals with numbers and statistics. There are two main types of research quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research is research that can be counted and is in the form of numbers and or statistics.

Qualitative data is about opinions and can be in many forms, for example a qualitative research may sit with a focus group and ask them for all their different opinions from the design of the product, how they feel about the way the product functions, if they would purchase the product and most importantly to the research anything they disliked about the project as well as other questions, the researcher will write down their feedback and later write it up into a report to hand to his or hers superior, who will then decide of what is of value and have the product changed to fit the focus groups research better.

Quantitative research shows companies the figures straight and nothing else, this type of research is useful companies as they can ask any question such as ‘Do you prefer diet or normal coke?’ survey 100 people or more or less and work out the percentage so for example 69 people may say normal and 7 may say neither or no opinion and 24 will say diet, so 69% prefer normal to 7% who don’t mind or don’t like coke. This research shows a company like Coca Cola that their normal coke is more preferred to their diet and that they should advertise more heavily on normal coke in their adverts instead of diet coke.

Other questions companies may ask is which products you prefer so for example Coca Cola researchers would draw up a tally with the leading drinks brands or other types of drinks that coca cola offers, e.g. Coca Cola, Fanta, Iron bru and Pepsi. Ask people for their opinion and they would find which of their rivals e.g. Pepsi is doing better than them and or if other products are more popular with consumers than Coca Cola.

The problem with Quantitative is that it offers no real feedback to companies it only shows what consumers preferred compared to other products for example someone asked if they prefer Iron bru or Coca Cola may say Iron bru but actually never really buy either drinks because they prefer other drinks products like Pepsi.

Qualitative research can give great feedback to companies as well as other consumers for example sites like amazon.com and play.com allow people who have purchased items to review the product and rate it out of 5 stars, amazon.com also allows users to rate peoples reviews asking them ‘Was this review helpful?’ and answering with yes or no.

The way this research is useful is that it can offer great constructive criticism to companies for example the star rating gives a quick overview of whether the product is liked or hated and the actual review shows the companies which parts of the product they like and or what they would have liked to have seen more of. Reviews can also work as good advertising for companies as it allows consumers to get an honest opinion of a product.

Focus groups are one of qualitative researcher’s favourite research methods as it allows them to sit down with a group of people who are the products target audience. The researcher will normally give the group some time to review the product on their own before sitting down with them and asking their opinions on the product getting some good feedback. The only problem with focus groups is that the researcher may accidentally or intentionally lead the group to answers for example the researcher may ask ‘do you like the colour scheme?’ of the product to which the group would reply no and then the researcher may ask ‘would you prefer it if the colour scheme was red and black?’

To really benefit from doing consumer research companies have to perform both quantitative as well as qualitative to understand consumers and receive the information that they want because both types of research offer good valuable information to companies as well as letting them see how people see their company whether it’s in a positive or negative way.