What marketers should be asking is: “what am I trying to understand, and which combination of research methods will get me there with the most confidence?”
To keep strategy tight and tactics focused, being choiceful is something marketers must embrace. This is not to be confused, however, with discrediting one approach for another: long versus short, TOFU versus BOFU, digital versus traditional, or even qualitative versus quantitative research.
Debating over quantitative or qualitative is a rookie mistake, as it assumes there is a choice to be made. Marketers are not supposed to believe in “either” quant or qual, but understand the right application for each method, where they are strong, and how the two work together. This balanced – and usually much more effective – approach is what we call bothism.
This is not a diplomatic position; it is a strategic one. Markets do not yield to one form of research over the other; buyers are not tidy, and categories are not stable. Demand rarely moves for a singular reason. So, any marketer trying to understand a market with one research mode alone is not being choiceful, they are being blindly selective. And research by selective diagnosis is usually how a bad strategy is designed.
Crucially, marketers must understand the differences and relative strengths or weaknesses of each type of research. Bothism isn’t a world where everything is created equal or anything goes.
We need to know what’s what, so we can make informed choices. And in our industry, that’s not always the case. In a recent global study by Ipsos, 65% of marketers couldn’t distinguish qualitative research methods from quantitative. Presented with a multiple choice question, participants failed to identify ‘conjoint’ as the lone quantitative technique amongst a lineup featuring ethnography, projective research and in-depth interviews.
Qualitative and quantitative research answers different kinds of questions. But combined, produce a stronger, more comprehensive understanding than either can achieve alone.
Why qual?
Qualitative research is not there to gather soundbites; it is there to help you understand how people actually think. It explores the language buyers use, the tensions they feel, the context in which choices are made, and the meanings attached to brands, categories and occasions.
It is especially useful when the category is diverse in its decision-making and consumer behaviour is poorly understood. If qual is ignored, it’s easy for an organisation to start making assumptions about their customers – instead of asking consumers why they make certain decisions or their thought process throughout a buying cycle.
By nature, qualitative research focuses on the in-depth analysis of a smaller group of consumers. The small-sample nature of qualitative market research is not a flaw, it is designed as such to look for meaning, not mass-market prevalence. But this is also why marketers must stay disciplined about what qualitative findings can and cannot do.
Qual can reveal a recurring frustration, a powerful emotional cue or category entry point, a hidden barrier in the buying journey or a miscommunication in your proposition. What it cannot do, by itself, is prove that the issue is representative of the wider audience.
Why quant?
Quantitative research provides structure. It tells you what is happening across a market, how large numbers of people think or behave, how attitudes differ by groupings, and whether an observed pattern is likely to be true beyond the people you’ve spoken to.
That is why quantitative matters so much – it gives you breadth and allows you to move from “some customers told us this” to “this appears to be true across the market” or just as importantly, “this is true for a specific group.” If you want to understand brand awareness, usage rates, consideration, switching behaviour, price sensitivity, message recall or segment size, you are usually in quantitative territory.
It allows you to move from “some customers told us this” to “this appears to be true across the market”
But quant has a weakness that too many marketers pretend not to notice. Numbers are excellent at showing shape, but often poor at revealing meaning. A survey can tell you that consideration is low, but not always why. It can tell you that two propositions score differently, but not necessarily how buyers are interpreting the language, what assumptions they are bringing into the question, or which trade-offs are sitting behind the answer. Surveys are necessarily structured instruments. That structure is their strength, but it is also their limitation.
Qualitative is used to explore why or how, while quantitative questions the magnitude, causality or generalisability.
Why you need both
There is an important clarification to be made at this point. Quant without qual leaves you with pattern recognition but weak interpretation. Qual without quant often leaves you with rich interpretation but fragile confidence. One gives you breadth without much texture, the other gives you texture without much scale. That’s why good research design includes both. The job is to reduce uncertainty before making a decision that affects targeting, positioning, pricing, communications or distribution.
The job is to reduce uncertainty before making a decision that affects targeting, positioning, pricing...
It is also worth saying that futile quant versus qual debates survive partly because people reduce research methods to stereotypes. Quant becomes a survey with some rating scales. Qual becomes a focus group behind a two-way mirror. This is not how serious research works.
Quantitative research can include brand tracking, pricing studies, experiments, panel analysis, conjoint analysis, concept tests and segmentation studies. Qualitative research can include depth interviews, ethnography, cognitive interviews, observed behaviour, diary studies and moderated communities.
Execution matters. The delivery of a survey, for example, could be online, face-to-face, by telephone or by mail – each with implications for cost, access, response quality and the kind of questions that can be asked well.
Research design done well should follow the business problem, not the other way round. The real question marketers should be asking is “what am I trying to understand, and which combination of methods will get me there with enough confidence?” This is a purposefully demanding question, but a more useful one than finding out the problem through scattershot research.
In practice, this is why qualitative leads quantitative. The logic is simple. Before you can measure the market well, you need to understand the market better.
To write a strong survey, you need to know which words people use, how they resonate, which distinctions they recognise, where the friction lies, which assumptions they reject, and which hypotheses are worth testing. You need to meet consumers on their own terms, not yours.
On the MiniMBA in Brand Management, you’ll learn how to do precisely this. How to uncover what’s special about your brand through qualitative research – and then plug those insights into a 10-item quantitative brand survey that will give that “specialness” statistical power.
Read next: The missing step in marketing plans:
brand diagnosis
For marketers, this sequence is often the difference between research that sharpens strategic judgement and research that produces some interesting slides.
Consider positioning work. If you start with quant alone, you may force customers to choose between proposition territories that your business finds suitable, but your buyers do not recognise. A few rounds of good qual can surface the cues, tensions and associations operating in the category. Use these as a guide to shape the quant and it can tell you which of those associations are widespread, distinctive or relevant.
The same applies to segmentation, communications and pricing. You need both if you want a picture that is not just statistically defensible, but strategically useful. In each case, qual can uncover the variables; quant can size them.
In each case, qual can uncover the variables; quant can size them
There is, however, one final guardrail worth keeping in mind. Using both methods does not automatically make research good. Combining research methods only adds value when there is a clear reason for doing so and when the two are properly integrated.
Quantitative versus qualitative research is a rookie mistake and smart marketers will use both because they understand that customers rarely fit clean internal frameworks, and that better decisions usually require both scale and substance.
Learn more about qualitative and quantitative market research techniques on Module 2: Market Research of the MiniMBA in Marketing – including how to design the right research architecture for actionable market and consumer insights that you can use to build an effective strategy.
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