Marketing Research

Introduction

Before undertaking any marketing research project, it is crucial to define the research objectives, what are you trying to achieve from the research and what do you need to know. After considering the objectives, marketing researchers need to utilize many types of research techniques and methodologies to collect data they required. There are two methodologies which are available for researchers either collect qualitative or quantitative information (1). Many researches, however, use several techniques, often mixing the quantitative and the qualitative researching methods. In this essay, the relationship between qualitative and quantitative researching methods will be discussed by the means of theoretical aspects and personal findings.

Qualitative Research

Marketers are becoming convinced of the fact that qualitative research can contribute significantly to an optimalisation of their marketing efforts (2). Qualitative research seeks out "why" rather than "how" for the specific topic based on the analysis of unstructured information – such as interview transcripts, open ended survey responses, emails, notes, feedback forms, photos and videos(3). The aim of qualitative research is to comprehend people's attitudes, thoughts, values and concerns. Qualitative research offers an insight into questions that address the way why people think like that, it does not answer questions like how many people share a certain opinion (4). Qualitative research is questioning research, which has variety answers rather than only one specific answer. Once the background of the question is introduced clearly to respondent, there is enough space below the question for respondents to answer. No matter what directions they are going, which fields they want to cover. As a result, the flexibility of the answers can provide the research results as widely as it can. In other words, it is means that it allows respondents to give much more "richer" answers to researchers in qualitative research, so it is always easier for researchers to capture some valuable insights into questions and less likely to miss any thing than other methods(5).

Quantitative Research

Not like qualitative research method, quantitative research is to measure and quantify with the measurement of data (6). Most of time, the date was related to growth rates, market share and customer base. Quantitative research generates numerical data or data that can be converted into numbers, for example, clinical trials or the national census, which counts people and households (7). So the core of quantitative research is the statistical sample and carefully choose samples and in the determination of sample questionnaire. As Fred Kerlinger said "there's no such thing as qualitative data everything