5 Qualitative Research Methods + When to Use Them
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Holiday season is among us, which means a new year is approaching.
New year = new strategies
In order to create new marketing strategies, though, we must first update what we know about our customers. It only makes sense that after the past two years, the world has completely changed and your customers' needs have likely changed as well.
So how do you find out who your customers are, what they want and what they need?
Ask!
Let’s take traveling over the holidays, for example. Just the thought of visiting loved ones over the holidays takes more steps and considerations than it did pre-COVID. Decisions that might have been a no-brainer two years ago—“Do I fly or drive?” for example—are suddenly being asked again.
Through qualitative research, we can really get into the minds of our customers and tease out decision-making factors and considerations like this—stepping through that wonderfully messy stew of memories, emotions, thoughts, biases, value systems, motivations, and more.
The whole point of qualitative research is to tease out all of this and more, and to put an organized framework on this messiness of life.
It’s a process of finding the connections and running a thread between all of the seemingly random bits of data—tying all the pieces together, in the right order to tell a story that responds to the key questions you want to know. In sequencing this story, we string together a sequence of steps an average user takes when interacting with a brand—a predictive journey that we can follow up and down like a roller coaster, identifying the moments that matter and making sure these experiences are seamless.
Having conversations with consumers is a no-brainer, but did you know that there are 5 different kinds of interview research methods?
Interview Research Methods:
In-depth interviews
An in-depth one-on-one interview is incredibly effective for getting to know your customer so that you can make strategic improvements to your marketing. These Interviews provide flexibility, in-depth conversations and an assessment of non-verbal cues and linguistic analysis that provide psychographic trends across personas.
Image-based projective interviews
Image-based projective interviews help us dive into the emotions associated with a product or brand, and learn what will move your customers to take action. In these interviews, we ask participants to bring 10-15 images that describe the feeling of a specific activity related to your offering. By understanding deep emotional drivers that go into purchase, we can create content, messaging, experiences, and products that we know will resonate.
Virtual ethnography
Video diary studies are similar to in-person ethnography, just with the use of video. Instead of being in the same room as your participants, you have them record videos of themselves as they take an action (e.g., shopping for a Christmas gift, brewing coffee at home, or using their voice AI system). It’s an innovative way to unlock environmental insights—allowing you to witness authentic interaction with your product or brand and explore moments that matter, in context.
Virtual Focus Group
When properly structured and moderated, a focus group can be the perfect research tool to gain brainstorming or preference/opinion data from a certain customer persona.
Usability Testing
Instead of interview questions, in usability testing, we ask participants to walk through a set of scenarios, or tasks to accomplish. Ask participants to speak out loud as they navigate, telling you what they think and what they’re doing as if they are narrating a YouTube tutorial video. A moderated usability testing session will get you deep insights about your customer and how they use a website, app or any other digital product.
But how do you choose which one is right for you?
Ultimately this boils down to the:
Goals of your study and the specific
Outcomes you’re looking for
Budget as not all research methods cost the same
There are 5 questions you can ask yourself when figuring out what method or combination of methods are best for your specific project:
What am I trying to improve
Is it a brand, a marketing strategy, a product, a digital experience, a physical experience, or something else?
If you’re trying to improve a product for example, you might want to start with usability testing or screen-recorded video research. If you’re looking to streamline an experience, ethnography, interviews, or video diary studies may be best. If you’re looking to create a marketing strategy and identify campaigns that are likely to provide a great ROI, interviews understanding deep drivers and buying motivations could prove essential.
What am I trying to uncover: perceptions or behaviors?
Are you looking for opinions from your customers -- subjective ratings of satisfaction? Or are you looking for behavior—how they use a product or journey through an experience?
Am I looking for the “what” or “why”
If you’re looking to understand behavior, ethnography or video diary studies could be best. But if you want to know why they’re doing something, an in-depth interview may be better
Do I need vocabulary?
Unmoderated research is better at capturing a participant’s own vocabulary without bias. So if messaging is your primary objective, try unmoderated research like video studies.
What’s my budget?
Not surprisingly, some research methods cost more than others. Moderated studies cost more than unmoderated. This also depends on how niche your audience is. Imagine you’re recruiting a niche audience — say, CFOs at large medical practices. This is actually a recruit I had to do recently. It took a lot of time and money to find a good sample of this niche audience, and to pay them incentives for their time.
The bottom line here is that the goals and outcomes for your study are going to drive how you choose the most appropriate research methods.
The worst thing you can do with a qualitative study is to begin the research without really knowing what you want to achieve. Instead, the key is to formulate the right questions, and then choose the best methods and settings to conduct your research.
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If you liked this article, you might like…
My “Qualitative Market Research Course” on LinkedIn Learning
InstaBrain : The New Rules for Marketing to Gen Z (grab your free chapter here)
Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser-focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.