Qualitative Marketing Research

Understanding How Behavioral Complexities Drive Marketing Strategies

Rajagopal

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781949991024
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

This book discusses qualitative research modeling and new approaches of qualitative data collection, interpretation of results, reporting, and deriving managerial implications.

Qualitative research manages the fundamental challenge in interpreting the complexities associated with consumer behavior, particularly in large diversified marketplace and guides managers towards understanding consumers. This book discusses qualitative research modeling and new approaches of qualitative data collection, interpretation of results, reporting, and deriving managerial implications.

Discussions in the book present new insights on conducting and applying qualitative market research and emphasizes on the application of qualitative research in consumer-centric companies. The book argues that companies need to consider a broader perspective of marketing research to support marketing decisions derived by understanding consumer behavior using qualitative research methodology.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Qualitative Research

Overview

Qualitative research is an art of learning from people by analyzing their perceptions, emotions, and neurophysical dynamics concerning social, cultural and personal values, and lifestyle. This is an explorative research tool used through interpersonal discussions and continuous observations of subjects in a given field of study. Qualitative research method has evolved epistemologically across positivism, empiricism, and interpretive schools of thought, which has influenced symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and ethnographic research streams. Human interactivity, freedom of expressions, emotional manifestation, logic, and rationality in information provide insights into the research problem, and help to interlink ideas through semantic mapping for potential quantitative research. This chapter discusses salient features of qualitative research as a tool and emphasizes the attributes of a good researcher to conduct qualitative research. The core discussions in this chapter are the ecosystem of qualitative research, research planning, and developing research design. In addition, the chapter discusses the evolution of schools of thought in the context of qualitative research.

Introduction

Market research in the growing competitive business environment is a complex phenomenon. There is no single method, which can suffice the dynamic strategy development for companies in the rapidly changing markets. Market research organizations emphasize on data-based quantitative analysis to help companies in making probabilistic decision using various business analytics tools. Various statistical methods are encouraged in the areas of decision sciences to guide marketing research and offer dynamic solutions with the real-time business environment. However, a plethora of data with precise quantitative analytics, sometimes fails to diagnose the complexities in business. Understanding consumer behavior and values are intertwined with the psychosocial, personal, and cognitive complexities. This nucleus focuses the consumer behavior at the hub of the business where every company invests its resources to reach out the consumers over space and time. The underlying challenge in market research is to understand the consumer who is the nucleus of the business ecosystem, and is intertwined with the psychosocial, economic, political, technological, and legal complexities. The consumer yet acts as the pivot of business and overpowers the markets across the regions. Understanding consumer is as complex as knowing the human mind, as the neuroscientists claim that about 10 percent of its total potential has been discovered as on today. Learning from consumers is a grassroots expedition for researchers to explore the emotions, perception, attitude, and behavior that lead to the semantics of decision making within the dynamic of business ecosystem. Interacting with consumers to learn their emotions is central to qualitative inquiries, and mapping the cognitive analytics to guide the market research for an organization is the foundation of qualitative research. Thus, qualitative research is more dynamic, uncertain, and complex, which is beyond the numeric expressions.

Qualitative research draws interpretations of liberal cognitive expressions through a systematic approach to inductive and deductive theories, and thus is essential to the scientific method in the pursuit of knowledge. Qualitative research is an inquiry process based on interpretivism, which focuses on interpretation and meaning of responses collected, and aims to explore social or human problems. The inductive research outgrows through qualitative design of investigation, which believes that the information collected through interviews, storyboard analytics, and observations are prima facie true and can be validated as an expression of the respondent. However, the inductive logic that extends from some observations to all, can never be fully tested or proven due to the lack of homogeneity in the information. Contrary to qualitative research, the deductive process generates conclusions from the generalizations by analyzing the quantitative data. The deductive inquires require interpreting the ­generalizations though cognitive analytics against the numeric data.

Qualitative research is an ethnographic and phenomenological expedition to measure human values, emotions, and logical narratives. It is an exciting experience and an important way to understand the perceptions of respondents. Mapping the cognitive dynamics of consumers is a highly rewarding activity for researchers as it offers several judgmental moves for making right marketing strategies. The study of cognitive analytics involves neurocentric expressions of market players including manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, consumers, and corporate strategists in the marketing organizations. Qualitative research allows researchers to explore a wide array of dimensions in the sociocultural, behavioral, and business-related domains emerging from the understandings, experiences, and future propositions (Mason 2002). Qualitative inquiries are founded on reasoning and thematic connectivity of arguments entwined in a research domain. Such inquiries are held through in-depth interviews, perceptual mapping, cognitive semantics, and sharing of experiences across spatial and temporal dimensions.

Attributes of Qualitative Research

Qualitative information is a source of well-grounded rich descriptions, which imparts knowledge in identifiable local contexts. Researcher can preserve the chronological flow with qualitative data, map the chronological order of information, events and consequences, and derive fruitful explanations. In general, the attributes of qualitative research methodology are as follows:

• Informal scenario
• Nonprobability-based sampling
• Nongeneralizable sampling
• Circular reasoning
• Formative, earlier phases
• Rich information and time-consuming
• Flexible study design
• Use of adaptive instrument
• Inductive study

Qualitative research is conducted in an informal scenario, which is comfortable to the respondents and researcher. As the qualitative inquiry is based on sharing experiences and forethoughts, and mapping semantics of perceptions, it needs to be organized in a place that respects privacy and personality. Creating an exhibitionistic setup may distract the respondents and restrict the flow of thoughts in a construed ambiance. The most suitable ambiance for qualitative research is the place, which is free from external interventions, dependable, and relaxing. In qualitative research, the focus is mainly on verbal elucidations, facial interpretations, and the researcher’s observation. Qualitative research involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to explore the research themes, which demands qualitative researchers to explore research in the natural settings. Therefore, conducting research in the natural setting of participants would benefit the researchers. It would enable them to interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings embedded in the responses of the subjects. The effects of the environment on conducting qualitative research studies are as discussed as follows:

• Created settings for interviews make respondents conscious and submissive to the researchers. Such ambiences suppress the cognitive emotions and expressions in responding to the questions.
• Researchers can make relevant assumptions by understanding the quality of life and psychosocial determinants of respondents in a natural environment.
• Openness of mind is largely influenced by ergonomic settings for interviews against expressing in a natural way. For instance, a studio setting of a television interview affects the psychoneurotic conditions of a casual interviewee.
• Conversations with respondents adapting to their existing quality of life conditions influence behavioral attributes. Therefore, ethnographic way of research is considered to be an effective tool for conducting qualitative research, where a researcher plans to live with the respondents adapting to their socio-economic and cultural settings, and
• Researchers can build acquaintance with the subjects in a real-life conditions.

Selection of respondents for qualitative research is wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• halftitle
• title
• Copyright
• dedi
• Abstract
• Contents
• Preface
• Ack
• 01_Chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• Bios
• 06_Index
• 07_Adpage
• backcover