In today’s data-obsessed world, it’s easy to get lost in quantitative data with businesses able to generate quantitative data at scale in quicker times than ever before. But true insight experts know that understanding customers goes beyond numbers. While quantitative data shows what people do, qualitative customer research reveals why we do what we do - arguably the key to a true understanding of customer behaviour and needs.
The market research marketplace has become a huge place teeming with tools and platforms vying for your money, so how do you pick the best qualitative methods and tools for you? Understanding what qualitative methods are available is the first step to designing the right research experience and choosing the right tools to better build your level of customer salience.
4 Qualitative Customer Research Methods
Before we jump into the nitty gritty of research methods, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of the two different types of qualitative research methods: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous qualitative research methods happen in real-time where the researcher and participant are active on the research task simultaneously; where, asynchronous qualitative research methods happen over a certain period of time, where participants can drop onto the task and complete it at their pace, and the researcher can also drop in and out to moderate discussions, ask for more detail or request follow up actions that will lead to more detail. Both have their place in modern market research experiences, and provide immense insightful value.
1. Focus Groups
An oldie but goodie, focus groups are a staple of qualitative market research. If you were asked to think about a popular qualitative market research method, focus groups would be the thing that first comes to mind. The image would likely be of a synchronous focus group, where participants and the leading researcher and moderator are sitting in a group (either online or in-person) all chatting about their experiences about one thing or another. These are a massively useful tool, one of the foundational qualitative market research methods and have stood the test of time for a reason.
Today, focus groups can also be asynchronous if conducted in another tool such as Question BoardMR. And both synchronous and asynchronous focus groups have their place in market research projects and are both opportunities for stakeholders to connect with their customers on a more personal level. Some online focus group tools are designed with dedicated observer rooms for stakeholders to sit in and observe the live task, and sometimes even communicate with moderators so that more detail can be gathered at the right junctures.
2. Diary Study
Typically asynchronous, this is another fantastic tried and true method for getting fantastic, detailed responses over time.
Businesses looking to build up customer personas could use diary studies to gain a proper insight into each customer segments’ lives, how they interact with the brand, how they use the products and services offered, and why they choose to go with your brand over another. Or why they are thinking about going with another brand. These insights can build up customer personas for stakeholders to use in daily decision-making and strategy advancement. This tool can also be used as a maintenance tool when customer personas have been created, and this leaves a continuous stream of insights pouring in to better inform the customer segments and help them naturally evolve to maintain relevance and accuracy.
Once customer personas are cultivated and used within the business, stakeholders then have ready-made participant segments which will help in tailoring strategies, products and services to each target segment. As much as they are used to build knowledge of the customer base, diary studies have also been used to help improve the customer experience as participants can document painpoints, obstacles and the efficacy of improvements across time.
3. Modern Ethnography
Ethnographic research is a form of systematic research that is designed to explore situations, experiences and cultural phenomena from the subject’s point of view, and in terms of market research, this typically surrounds product usage, service experience, in-person shopping experiences, etc. These tasks are typically immersive, interactive experiences that participants can really sink their teeth into, and tend to be done asynchronously to allow time for participants to submit materials that really give us a clear view into the topic at hand.
With the widespread use of smart technology, participants can record their activity, either through a series of surveys, focus groups, scrapbooks, etc. in written, audio or video form depending on the research tool’s capabilities. For this reason, ethnographic customer research fast became one of the great customer research tasks for gaining detailed qualitative data. Because of the open nature of this research method, there are many creative ways we can use ethnographic research techniques to explore the opinions, actions and behaviours of a business’ target customer segment. For example, ethnography can be used to specifically enhance the insights taken from social media intelligence, or as a way to get an insight into customers’ daily lives.
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| Modern ethnography, scrapbook studies and the simple focus group hold immense power for gaining better customer salience - and that's even without the influence of AI. |
4. Scrapbook Studies
With platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest still holding strong in this increasingly visual age, using tools such as ScrapbookMR has proven incredibly engaging and unsurprisingly insightful. Insight teams across all industries have many stakeholders gaining directly actionable insights from scrapbook tasks.
Again, an asynchronous qualitative research method, however, this just means that participants have time to notice and take or find the right photos to convey their opinions and experiences. In new product development strategies, scrapbooks can be used to get a better idea of what customers expect from new products or services based on a written brief. For travel companies, allowing customers to share images depicting the best parts of their holidays will help stakeholders see exactly what their customers liked and disliked and could use this to create more tailored desirable products, services and experience packages.
In B2B research, scrapbooks can be used to get an insight into how customers use their products, or find the right colours and similar references they would like to see in new services/products. It's not just a case of engaging participants in nice colourful images, it's a way to get a visual into their lives, their minds and their ways of being.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence
As much as the methods we have talked about have been around for a while and can be classed as staple methods for qualitative customer research, there is a new addition to some of the tools and research platforms that make all the data gathered from these methods all the more impactful: Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is the main advancement impacting the insight industry’s ability to gather and analyse qualitative data quicker and more effectively than ever before, solving the crucial obstacle of time-consuming qualitative data analysis. Tools such as FlexMR’s PromptAI actively prompts survey takers for more detailed qualitative answers in surveys, and other tools such as TextMR take those answers and use second-generation generative AI to conduct impactful sentiment analysis, using new code frames for each new analysis. This means answers are tagged and grouped by sentiment rather than just keywords and helps stakeholders gain a quick understanding of incredibly complex participant opinions, increasing the level of customer salience fast and allowing stakeholders to implement customer data-driven decisions at once.
