How to do ‘qual’ research

Robert Gray

With clear results a must and budget far from a given, marketeers are choosing carefully between traditional qualitative research methods and new digital options.

Market research, to paraphrase a witty adage, is frequently used like a drunk uses a lamp, post: for support rather than illumination.

Ideally, however, research findings should deliver valuable insight, particularly in the field of qualitative research.

Using techniques such as depth interviews and group discussions has long been a way of getting under the skin of target audiences to understand how they feel and why they behave as they do. Findings gleaned in this way shape marketing strategies, new product development and vital communications campaigns.

The trick, of course, lies in achieving the most accurate, relevant findings in the most efficient and cost-effective way. In this respect, the digital revolution has been both a blessing and a burden.

A wave of new research techniques has emerged in recent years, bringing immense opportunities for heightened understanding, but also making it harder than ever for those commissioning research to decide on the right method.

“As an insight team we’ve recently been introduced to online qual and are viewing this as an increasingly important tool to complement other information sources,” says Liz Lamb, head of insight, the Post Office.

“There’s also a lot of talk about Twitter being used for free, fast, natural access to customers - but it has yet to win us over as a sound method of collecting information.

“Accessing real-time multimedia information direct from customers is interesting too. With mobile phone technology increasing access to the web, and camera functionality enabling the sharing of photos, ideas and reactions to ideas in real time, it potentially adds a genuine richness to research and we need to harness that,” she says.

Customers in their own words

Lamb believes these new techniques present an opportunity for customers to drive the agenda by being heard in their own langauge on the issues that are important to them.

Another advantage of the online qual route, says Lamb, is getting customers in front of decision makers. “Getting input straight from the horse’s mouth can be far more powerful than a presentation.

It can be a challenge getting senior managers out of the office so online becomes a really attractive proportion, providing real, actionable dialogue between business and customers.”

At a basic level, digital platforms enable professional researchers to run online focus groups, reaching a wide spectrum of participants across geographical and social boundaries. But there’s much more. Online communities enable the researcher to observe passively, to encourage people to interact with each other and to share opinions and materials.

Researchers can ask respondents to upload videos, keep online diaries, share photographs and then use these as stimuli. Online communities are also ideal for product testing, allowing the respondent to participate fully in the brand experience.

“Online panels have changed the way we think about qualitative research by allowing for more longitudinal studies,” says Market Research Society Chairman Venella Jackson. “Participants may be engaged over months or years - it is less about the intense one-hour dialogue and more about encouraging conversation over time. This can yield very different insights to traditional face-to-face.”

But a good qualitative researcher swaps traditional for digital research at their peril. “Studies have shown that people have a tendency to be more open in an online world; they may be more truthful than in a face-to-face group.

But this is just a different approach for yielding different information - a new way to interact with participants and obtain richer insights.

There remains a very strong case for telephone and face-to-face research where the message and audience demands it.”

Put the end before the means

The talent of the researcher is to find the best method for extracting content from a specific audience. There is a risk that, in all the excitement of digital, it gets forgotten that the purpose of research is the insight, not the channel.

While online can often deliver cost savings over traditional face-to-face methods, it is wrong to label it as the “budget” option. For example, if you want to analyse complex issues with a business audience, fever in-depth phone conversations are likely to be far more fruitful. The best research studies carefully consider audience and message, selecting the most appropriate channel to support these.

A growing number of marketers have been working with research agencies to create social networks around specific issues or brands.

Unilever, for example, has been using Spring Research to run a global network for its Lynx Axe brand as a way of tuning into young people.

Orange, together with UK consumer champion Which? has been running customer advisory panels and online brand communities through Verve. According to Which? head of insight, CIM affiliate member Harry Mirpuri, this allows the organisation to engage with members and stimulate lively debate.

Earlier this year, restaurant chain Nando’s asked its Facebook fans for their thoughts on a possible new product. Overnight, more than 500 fans clicked their “like” button, and there were 657 comments for marketing to analyse.

“With the omnipresence of social media there is more anecdotal information accessible to us than ever before,” says catering and business services firm Compass Group’s sector research manager Greg Deadman.

“This mass of information can give researchers unprecedented insight into a person’s life - trends, feedback, suggestions - without the need for proactive surveying.

We can access instant feedback about our services - from a student’s tweet about their lunch at college, to a fan at a rugby ground updating his Facebook status about the corporate hospitality he enjoyed at the stadium.”

Staying on track

While it is relatively easy to use social media to gather general perceptions on hospital catering or school meals, for example, Deadman says it’s harder to find company-specific information that is useful to his team at Compass insights. Distilling this information and understanding how to maximise it for credible analysis is also a challenge.

Compass is currently reviewing how digital media can be integrated into its capture of client and consumer feedback. But Deadman is convinced digital media will never take over completely from Compass’s ongoing consumer and client surveys because these provide a more structured response to a number of crucial specifics.

“One of the main pros of using online information, compared with face-to-face focus groups or interviews, is the immediacy of people’s reactions,” says Deadman.

“People will typically tweet within minutes or hours of an event, whereas a face-to-face survey may take place days, weeks or months later, giving people time to deliberate, forget or confuse their thoughts. Social media also produces voluntary rather than prompted feedback, which means researchers are likely to acquire greater quantities of more accurate insight.”

But Deadman concedes that, with so much information available, marketers potentially face an overload of un-targeted data that is costly to analyses and requires specific expertise and resource.

Clearly social networks are not always the ideal research solution and such drawbacks need to be taken into account when allocating budget.

Yet social networks do present a fantastic opportunity for qualitative researchers to observe consumers in their own community. As a result, the role of focus group moderator has become more passive.

In the digital space researchers assume an observational role with less control over the direction of the discussion. This can open up new avenues for thinking, but can also make it harder to get feedback on specific questions.

And people are easily swayed, says Ian Horritt, qualitative director, TNS Research International.

The bonds formed in a social networking setting can lead respondents to influence each other in a way they might not in a shorter-term, face-to-face setting, says Horritt, so it’s important to ensure this is carefully policed.

Insight Research Group, a marketing research agency specialising in the pharmaceutical sector, has also used web 2.0 techniques, but has concluded this can only form part of the mix. It recently used actors behaving as patients with particular conditions to talk to doctors to highlight “out of awareness” issues that shaped the decisions doctors made hen diagnosing.

Is txt 4 u?

Much has been made of the versatality of mobile phones and their growing potential for market research purposes. But how effective is mobile as a channel for conducting research?

“SMS will undoubtedly come into its own, but we’re not quite there yet in terms of clunk-free technology or full acceptance,” says Mark Speed, joint managing director of IFF Research, an independent agency specialising in “hard to reach” audiences. “Qualitative research is about drilling down into complex and often sensitive issues.

It requires patience and a depth of understanding that is hard to communicate via text. SMS is a great tool for recruiting panels, but its research capabilities are limited for the high-level quantitative scenarios.”

In a project to assess teenagers’ and young adults’ attitudes towards housing provision for the young and homeless, IFF Research realised traditional qualitative recruitment techniques were not working.

Using a face-to-face recruitment method to identify young people who have been homeless, who worry about this and who have not accessed social services, is an impossible task, even for the limited numbers required for this approach.

As a solution, IFF designed “buzzy” flyers that could be left in venues such as pool halls,clubs, bars and cafes. These invited people to send a text message about their housing concerns and whether they would be happy to take part in further research. This approach gathered the views of those who would have been unwilling to discuss their concerns via a more personal, one-to-one process.

Neuromarketing

For a number of years there has been a lot of noise about the use of neuromarketing and biometrics in research. Specialist companies such as MindLab, Innerscope, Eyetracker, Neurofocus and Neurosense have emerged, each with a slightly different take on bringing techniques more usually associated with hospitals or university laboratories into the marketing domain.

Heart rate, sweat response, eye movement and neurological activity are all being measured in a marketing research context.

These developments should not be dismissed out of hand by marketers. But the mainstream market research community still regards these innovations with some scepticism - and their complexity renders them a costly option.

A number of pundits have also lambasted neuromarketing as potentially unethical, so it is advisable to tread carefully.

But eye tracking, long used in a retail context, is increasingly being integrated into online qualitative research through web cams. Kat Jennings, a research director at research agency 2CV, says she is using this technique more often to deliver an enhanced picture.

Whether you opt for eye tracking or something more traditional, once you’ve chosen your technique and conducted the research you need to ensure it’s not all in vain. Leapfrog board director Claire Thomas says: “Good research doesn’t finish with a snazzy debrief - this is only the beginning of the journey. It’s up to the research agency to help embed findings within an organisation so that insight can be turned into useful action.”

Pros and cons of online qual

Pros

* Speed of response.

* Lack of geographical limitations.

* Gets around mobility issues.

* Prevents louder, pushier types dominating proceedings.

* Anonymity can trigger candour.

* Subjects can be explored at the subject’s own pace in a non-confrontational manner.

* Longer timespans present greater opportunities for co-creation.

Cons

* Risk of participants being more “playful”, possibly even dishonest.

* Harder - or impossible, dependent on set-up - to interpret body language.

* Social network bonds may lead to respondents influencing one another more than in a face-to-face setting.

* Potential overload of untargeted data that is costly to analyse and requires specific resource.

* Arguably only for the tech-savvy.

The Marketer