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Qualitative Marktforschung

Qualitativemarketresearch

Learn how your customers think, feel and decide

Understanding customers

You want to understand how customers think, feel and how they make purchasing decisions? To gain a deep understanding of your target groups, qualitative methods of market research are the right choice, as they allow a direct insight into the world of thoughts and experiences of your customers: Needs, motives, values, attitudes and decision-making processes can be explored. The resulting findings are written or spoken language, but also images or videos that reveal, for example, attitudes, usage behaviour or life contexts of customers.
Whether as a stand-alone study or in combination with quantitative methods, in the field of B2C or B2B – qualitative research methods are used when you want to identify correlations and understand customer behaviour. Whether you are interested in the more general living environment of your customers or more concretely in usage situations, habits and decision-making processes, we are the right partner to find answers to your research questions.

Qualitative market research in application

Deep insights

Qualitative Marktforschung Anwendung

Understanding purchase decision processes

When making purchasing decisions, it is not only the result that is relevant, but it is also essential to know the decision-making process – only then can this process be influenced. The following questions, for example, need to be addressed: Who decides when it comes to buying products or services? What influences buyers, where do they get inspiration from, where do they seek advice? What life or professional context influences their decisions? In principle, it has proven useful to analyse all relevant dimensions in purchasing decisions. In detail these are:

Motivation
What drives the customer’s decision? What is important to him? Typical motives are, for example, fairness, transparency, loss aversion, the hunt for the best deal.

Cognition
Here we distinguish between three constructs.

  1. the customer’s interest in a product / service.
  2. the customer’s knowledge about this product / service and
  3. evaluation of specific offers in this context.

Behaviour
How does the customer behave in relation to a concrete product / service? Where does he inform himself? Where does he buy / conclude a contract?

Depending on the product, duration and complexity of the decision-making process, various methods such as individual interviews, diaries or shadowing (mystery shopping i.e. accompanying and observing customers at the point of sale) are available.

Innovation or optimisation of products and services

Qualitative methods are indispensable when it comes to in-depth insights for assessing products, regardless of whether they are “haptic” consumer goods or (digital) services:

Which packaging appeals to consumers? Which features of a product are important, which are dispensable? How must a service be designed to provide the customer with a satisfying or even inspiring experience?

Depending on the question, we realise concept or user experience tests or even focus groups for you in order to test prototypes together and develop them further in co-creation processes.

Qualitative Marktforschung Verpackung

Mapping experiences along the customer journey

It should not be exclusively considered how your customers interact with your products and services. Only a holistically positive customer experience leads to comprehensive customer satisfaction and loyalty with your company and your products.

There are various methods that can be used to map the entire customer journey and identify pain points. Direct and authentic customer experiences across the customer journey can be gained through diaries, for example. If you are more interested in an objective analysis of your company’s performance, mystery studies with trained testers are a good option.

Qualitative Marktforschung Anwenung

Understanding the use of products and services

Even though it is important in most cases to analyse the entire customer journey, the focus is often on product use: When and how are products and services used? What is expected? Where are the pain points and what is particularly appealing and makes a product unique? User experience tests or interviews with a focus on value propositions and jobs-to-be-done help to answer these questions.

Bringing target groups to life with personas

Most companies work with target groups because not every one of their products appeals to the same people. Once you have identified these different target groups (quantitatively), the question is how to spread them as widely as possible within the company. Personas are very helpful in making them usable for communication, marketing and product development. Quantitatively developed B2B or B2C segments become personas with qualitative research methods; they are “brought to life”. Segments are thus given a face and can be experienced by all those who are to work with them. This is how customer centricity comes to life.

Adopt a customer perspective and achieve customer centricity

Methods for deep-diving into the world of your customers

We recommend different methods of qualitative market research depending on the issue at hand. When selecting these for your study, we consider the requirements and decide together with you whether the study should be conducted offline (face-to-face, in-home, in-office) or online (e.g. via video call or as an online diary).

The most frequently used methods are in-depth interviews (individual interviews) and focus groups. Depending on the question, other methods and formats can be used, for example methods involving observation such as ethnography, mystery shopping and shadowing or following a target group over a longer period of time using an online diary. If you want to develop and optimise products or services, methods such as co-creation workshops and user experience tests, in which customers are involved in the development process at an early stage, have proven their worth.

Isabella Bertschi
Isabella Bertschi
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