City-Squared October Newsletter

The Dialectics of Marketing Research

"How can you possibly make a good decision based on what a few people in a focus group tell you?"

If I had a proverbial nickel for every time someone's asked me that question, I'd be wealthy enough to buy the textbooks for each of my students. But since there's a difference between proverbial nickels and real ones, they'll need to buy their own books, and I'll explain to you why this question is currently on my mind.

I've recently started teaching philosophy again after a few years away from the classroom. In pursuit of contemporary material that might illustrate the relevance of philosophy to my community college freshmen, I stumbled across the September issue of Real Simple, which included a feature entitled "Philosophy 101." It presented in summary the "big ideas" of six philosophers and proposed some modern applications.

The Greek gods were definitely conspiring in my favor! But I was surprised to see that the most recent philosopher they featured was G.W.F Hegel (d. 1831), until I started thinking about qualitative and quantitative research.

The proponents of the quant-only approach to marketing research will tell you that qualitative sample sizes are too small and the methodology too lacking in rigor to be useful. The proponents of the qual-only approach to marketing research will tell you that quantitative research is too biased by the assumptions of the researcher (as expressed in a questionnaire of close-ended questions) to get to the big innovative idea that marketers always hope to get from research.

And this is where Hegel helps us out, for as any PH101 survivor knows, it is dialectic-the dynamic interplay of thesis-antithesis-synthesis-that gets us to the truth. Each distinct phase provides, at best, a partial insight.

Take the typical research project. We might begin with focus groups or in-depth interviews that help to explore the research territory, find out what consumers are thinking and how they're expressing it. We obtain some insight into the truth of the marketplace, and have a thesis or two to show for the effort. But, Hegel would tell us that these are more accurately described as hypotheses than theses, and they need to be tested by time and history.

Since the marketplace moves at the speed of light, we don't wait for history. We create our own history by fielding a rigorously scientific quantitative study-an online or phone survey, for example. It is in this context that we can test the qualitative truth and encounter antithesis: Some of what we thought was true qualitatively proves not to be so, and some of what might have been obscured in the subjectivity of the qualitative encounter comes to light in the objectivity of statistics.
But this is not the final word, because those very statistics, otherwise admirable for their clarity and precision, sometimes blind us to the texture and nuance that only qualitative research-with its quirky, colorful respondents, peculiar interpersonal dynamics, revealing facial expressions and tones of voice-can provide.

This is the grand synthesis, truth achieved at a higher level than when we relied on either the qualitative or the quantitative results alone. So long as human judgment is imperfect and the marketplace continues to change, we need to think of our work as market researchers as moving in an ever-ascending spiral (rather than in a straight line), and bring both qualitative and quantitative ways of thinking to the process.

Chris Schiavone