01/12/2019 Why Entrepreneurs Should Use 360 Degree Market Research

6,389 views | Aug 10, 2019, 10:51pm

Why Entrepreneurs Should Use 360

Degree Market Research
Columbia Business School - the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center Contributor
Leadership Strategy
We cover topics in entrepreneurship, corporate innovation, and venture capital.

GUEST POST WRITTEN BY

Robert J. Morais and Kamel Jedidi

Robert J. Morais is an adjunct professor and Kamel Jedidi is the John Howard Professor of Business, both at
Columbia Business School.

All marketers, including entrepreneurs engaged in startups, must understand their

customers from a 360 degree perspective. The process typically begins by identifying
the most productive customers for a product or service. It’s also critical to obtain
intelligence on how a product or service could fit into customers’ lives. That’s a more
complex task.

When weighing how to spend limited research resources, many marketers believe th
qualitative research is “soft”; quantitative research—especially big data—reigns
supreme. But consider Evert Gummesson’s characterization of conducting both
qualitative and quantitative marketing research as “a merger of the best of both
worlds… (that) will add substantial synergy to research in marketing.” In other word
to fully understand customer practices, attitudes, and sentiments, and
gain inspiration for innovation and marketing, it pays to conduct
qualitative and quantitative research.

Even with the current emphasis on quantitative research, businesses are becoming
more receptive to qualitative approaches. Sociologist Tricia Wang argues that
qualitative research adds “thick data” to big data and, despite skepticism about
qualitative research, business is booming for business anthropology. Business school
known for being quantitatively focused, teach qualitative methods such as
ethnography. And, to Gummesson’s point, combining qualitative and quantitative
research is not a new idea; it’s been around for decades. Despite all of this, the
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emphasis in business schools—and, we observe, among startups—is on quantitatively

derived market intelligence. At Columbia Business School, we have developed an
advanced marketing research course that emphasizes the complementarity of
qualitative and quantitative market research methods, incorporating, in a sense, both
art and science. Even startups with limited budgets can use most of the methods we
cover in our course and should add them to their startup toolkit.

What Kind of Research Are We Talking About?

Jake Pryszlak recently offered succinct definitions of qualitative and

quantitative marketing research. Last year, Ken Yanhs wrote a piece that
discussed current trends in qualitative research. He mentioned that when
qualitative and quantitative research are combined, “you can tell a complete story of
consumer sentiment, helping to validate or inform your marketing strategy for
maximum impact.”

Let’s look more closely at what quantitative and qualitative marketing research each
entail.

Today In: Leadership

Qualitative marketing research is usually conducted with small numbers of

respondents via focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, either face-to-
face or virtually. Qualitative methods are valuable for uncovering customer attitudes
emotions, needs and wants, category and brand perceptions and usage, the impact of
culture on consumption, and, especially, for adding depth and context to marketers’
understanding of their customers. Through all of this, marketers can learn if and how
a brand could be a part of people’s lives. Qualitative research can inform product
concepts and designs, help define marketing problems and opportunities, and
generate hypotheses and questions for quantitative research. Small scale qualitative
research should not be used to definitively assess a product concept or advertisemen
or to project market results.

Quantitative marketing research uses data collected through surveys, experiments,

or customer behavior to validate research hypotheses generated by qualitative
research, to explore empirical patterns in the data, and to make predictions.
Quantitative methods are valuable for segmenting customers based on their needs,
understanding consumer perceptions of products and services, assessing the impact
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of marketing activities on customer behavior, and optimizing marketing resource

allocation. These methods support various managerial decisions involving which
market segment(s) to target, how to position a brand within each segment, what
product line to offer at what price, and how to promote it and deliver it to customers

Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Marketing Research in a Course

In our course, we teach students how to select and apply the right type of marketing
research to obtain consumer intelligence, make sense of it, and apply it to marketing
problems. We cover how consumer markets are defined, understood, segmented, and
assessed, and how all of that can generate compelling marketing insights. Students
learn through cases and practice how to conduct and interpret focus groups, in-depth
interviews, ethnographic research, ways to map customer journeys, how to apply
quantitative methods such as cluster analysis, factor analysis, conjoint analysis, and
logistic and OLS regression. Students have the opportunity to work with real
companies, many of them startups.

Entrepreneurs need to know how and what kinds of questions to ask to use their
often-limited resources most effectively. In our course, some of the questions we ask
are the following:

How do I begin to understand the market for my product?

How do I discover if consumers need or want it, and which consumers are m
best prospects?

How do I capture them for research?

How do I develop/modify my product?

What are the best ways for positioning it in the marketplace and against
which competition?

How do I generate insights for advertising and packaging and evaluate

consumer reactions to my messages?

How do I price my product?

How do I use sales promotion?

Where do I sell it?

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How many can I sell?

Here are some examples of how we integrate qualitative and quantitative research
methods:

Use deep probing interview techniques to gain customer insight and, equally
important, to develop hypotheses and questions for quantitative surveys

Practice in-class projective interviewing techniques that help students

formulate customer segments that can be assessed and refined in state-of-the
art quantitative segmentation studies

Apply qualitative and quantitative research sequentially to develop brand

positioning and advertising strategies

Combine ethnography, ideation and conjoint analysis for new product

development

Have a guest speaker from a company that uses artificial intelligence to delive
focus group research on a quantitative scale

To illustrate how our students combine research methods, we’ve included a few slide
(Fig. 1, 2, 3) in this article from one of our student group final projects.

Fig. 1 Research Phases CREDIT: MORAIS

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Fig. 2 Initial Research CREDIT: MORAIS

Fig. 3 Survey and Cluster Analysis CREDIT: MORAIS

The Power of the 360 Degree Approach

There is substantial power in a 360 degree approach to customer discovery that

incorporates both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Taking this on does
not require a large staff or a substantial budget, especially if entrepreneurs apply the
innate resourcefulness to cost-effective survey methods and imaginative ways to
procure respondents. They will emerge with profound customer understanding and
strategic inspiration and increase their chances for marketplace success.

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More About the Authors

Robert J. Morais is a business anthropologist

with experience in advertising and marketing
research and an adjunct professor in the
Marketing Division at Columbia Business
School. Kamel Jedidi is the John Howard
Professors Robert J. Morais and Kamel Jedid
Professor of Business at Columbia Business Columbia Business School CREDIT: MORAIS/JED

School. His research interests include pricing,

product positioning, and market segmentation.  

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