Research should focus on digging deeper and understanding better.
One of the main aims of market research is to understand the motives underlying consumer evaluation and behaviour. The difficult part here is that you must obtain the deeper thoughts of consumers; what do they really believe or think? What would they do? You want to measure opinions and natural behaviour as precisely as possible. Thus, first, asking the right questions in the right way is extremely important. Most market research does not acknowledge academic research that strongly indicates that consumers primarily respond in a spontaneous, automatic manner. That is, the brain flows freely, and does not think in the nicely structured grids that appear in questionnaires. Hence, market research should capture this type of behaviour. Secondly, consumer responses to statements and questions intended to measure brand perceptions have been shown to be highly similar across brands: many brands are perceived as ‘relevant,’ many are seen as ‘trustworthy.’ Importantly, this even happens for brands within the same category!
There are a series of qualitative techniques that are integrated in a quantitative approach that can explore the respondents ideas and opinions better than the traditional qualitative settings. It is exactly this understanding of how many people behave in the way they do, combined with the depth of why they behave this way, which gives us the rich and detailed insight to know what steps to take. Download this whitepaper to learn more about the most important techniques.
