The Importance Of Qualitative Market Research

Developing a new product marketers strive to decrease failures of this new product, and to increase its popularity among consumers. Marketing research makes an important contribution to this process, since it gives reliable data for marketing analysis and decision-making for the future success of the new product.

Consumer market is diverse and each consumer has its own needs and preferences. It is impossible to create a universal product, which would satisfy needs of any consumer, thus marketers collect and analyze data that enables them to segment consumer market, and develop a product that best coincides with a needs of a particular group of consumers.

Target group/market: is a group or groups of consumers with similar characteristics,

The aim of this research is not to forecast quantity, but to improve quality – to examine the depth and range of consumer attitudes and beliefs. Qualitative research is based on a feedback from relatively few people from the target group (“Qualitative Market Research”).

Qualitative market research uses such methods as: focus groups, interviews, observational techniques in combination with interviews (ethnography and photo-ethnography, such as described by Gerry Khermouch (92), store-exit interviews, etc.)

Focus groups of consumers are particularly good for examining new product concept and advertising campaigns, for clarifying buying motivation and best delivery schemes. Usually a focus group consists of 8 to 12 persons, who answer moderator’s questions on a specific product, such as “what would you really like to have if you could,”(Brown) thus giving feedback that will be further analyzed by marketing researchers (Bearden et al.

For example, focus groups and interviews along with its advantages give only self-reports, thus hiding aspects that respondents feel uncomfortable revealing both to themselves and to others. This information can be received from observational/ethnographic method, which in its turn also has minuses, for example it gives reliable trends only for frequently occurring behaviors and it does not assess attitudes that cause these behaviors not mentioning its time-consuming disadvantage (Bearden et al. 165).

Thus in conclusion I must say that the most effective marketing research should combine wide range of appropriate to the subject methods, including usage of both primary and secondary data, including self-reports methods and observational ones, because they supplement one another and thus give full information for analysis. At the same time marketers have to remember about cost-efficiency, thus avoiding methods that do not add enough