In a business organization, there are many ways on how to obtain information from clients and stakeholders in order to determine ways on how to improve the products and services of a company to be able to meet the needs and wants of customers and business partners.
Quantitative and qualitative market research methods can be used to obtain the necessary information on the expectations of the customers and stakeholders on the company. In using quantitative market research, numbers or statistics are used to measure market phenomena in order to come up with an analysis about a particular subject. More so, “the approach is very structured and normally involves large numbers of interviews or questionnaires.” The most commonly used quantitative research is the survey. This method requires the collection of data by asking a set of questions to a specific kind of respondents. The advantage of this method is that it is very easy to execute and the results are precise. However, the drawback is that can cost a lot especially if the research requires many respondents (Marketresearchworld.com, 2009).
On the other hand, qualitative market research is less structured than the quantitative market research. This type of research is more “exploratory or directional” because its main purpose is to determine the “attitudes and perspectives” towards a particular product or service (Market Research 101, 2009).One of the ways to carry out qualitative research is through an in-depth interview wherein a respondent is comprehensively interviewed on a particular topic either “face to face or via the phone.” The advantage of this method is that the interviewer can solicit lots of information from the respondent. Also, the interviewer can follow up on questions to obtain better quality answers. But the disadvantage is that in-depth interviews can take a lot of time More so, the results can vary from one respondent to another making it hard to make a statistical analysis (Marketresearchworld.com, 2009).
Reference
Market Research 101. (2009). Qualitative and Quantitative Market Research. Retrieved February 20, 2009, from http://www.marketresearch101.com/qualitative-vs-quantitative-market-research
Marketresearchworld.com. (2009). Definition of Market Research. Retrieved February 19, 2009, from http://www.marketresearchworld.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=38
