Importance of Qualitative Research

In yesterday's entry, I briefly described the difference between quantitative and qualitative research. Since qualitative research tends to be less "scientific", you might consider it less valuable than quantitative research. You would be mistaken.

Imagine you're writing a business plan and including a section on the size of the market for your product (i.e. the estimated number of people who likely or potentially will buy it). The size of the market is a numeric quantity, so shouldn't you focus on quantitative research to determine it?

While quantitative research is necessary for sizing the market, you must segment the market before you can size it. I.e., you must divide the population into groups who are more or less likely to buy your product.

Segmenting the market requires a psychographic study. You can't just guess about the demographic characteristics that would make a buyer more or less likely to buy. You need an in-depth understanding of the situations and problems that different kinds of prospective buyers face. You segment the market along these psychographic lines. Then you determine how many people exist within each segment.

Using psychography to segment the market therefore requires qualitative research. This qualitative research is a prerequisite to the quantitative research into the size of each market segment.

Don't underestimate the importance of qualitative research!

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem...

Cauvin

Search This Blog