Validation Process
Quantitative Questionnaire Design
Traditionally, qualitative research has been much better at understanding brands than quantitative research. Qualitative research can be used to uncover to how people relate to brands, whereas quantitative research has been more concerned with measuring attributes such as “Usage and Awareness”.
The quantitative research that we conduct at BHI draws heavily on the experiences and techniques developed from the qualitative research conducted by Jon Chandler and Mike Owen over the last 20 years. It also introduces the particular disciplines of quantitative research to these techniques in terms of the requirements of experimental design, managing order effects and ensuring that the sample is representative. Quantitative research can also help qualitative researchers decode the real meaning of respondent answers.
Online research has now become the most used way of conducting quantitative market research – both in consumer research, and in pharmaceuticals. Online research has greatly increased the potential of quantitative research to provide brand-sensitive research. As we argued in our EphMRA 2006 conference paper about “Going Beyond Research As We Know It”, Internet research allows us to develop new measurements given the TV-screen like interface we have with respondents.
To give some examples:
- Quantitative research can be designed to measure how people think and feel about brands. This goes beyond the respondent self-assessment style questions which are common to many quantitative research questionnaires. Quantitative brand-sensitive techniques include the use of:
- Enabling projective techniques, to discover metaphors, values and emotions that doctors associate with individual brands. Some of these associations indicate a close emotional attachment to a brand. We have demonstrated how this is useful to understand brand equity in our own exploratory study of the UK ARB market, conducted in 2006
- Tachistoscopic techniques, where respondents are shown material for a very short period of time (two seconds or less) to test subliminal recognition of ad visuals and other brand iconography.
- Conjoint techniques, which can be employed to infer importance of attributes in a natural and realistic way
- Internet research can now incorporate a very wide range of multi-media content, including the use of embedded videos
- Internet research gives us access to verbatim comments, direct from respondents.
References
Developing Brands with Qualitative Research, (2002), Jon Chandler and Mike Owen
Quantitative Analysis
Good analysis is critical to understanding the health of your brand using quantitative research.
We use three general principles for our analysis:
- First, treat people as individuals. People are complex and tend to have many apparently conflicting associations, emotional attachments and opinions with regard to a subject. (How often have you read articles reporting market research which express surprise that whilst most people agree with one proposition, they actually tend to do something completely different?) If you can understand the apparent consistencies and inconsistencies with particular people, it then becomes possible to quantify this understanding to generate a market picture. Often this means creating new variables, and applying a segmentation; SPSS is a very useful tool for this.
- The second principle is to build on generalised models which have already been created for brands. This has the benefit of integrating with the marketing models which might be applied to a brand, and also to understand whether a result is insightful or to be expected. For example, one model to be aware of is “double jeopardy” which says that big brands will tend to have more users and more loyalty amongst those users. We should also analyse users of a brand separate from non-users since “brand experience” will tend to make a big difference to the emotional connection with that brand.
- Finally, keep in mind the output required, and what kind of insights will make a difference to understanding the brand. We need to be in a position to answer the “So what?” question. What are the next steps we could imagine our branding colleagues making as a result of the research?
References
Brands Laid Bare, Using Market Research for Evidence-Based Brand Management, (2005), Kevin Ford