Stop Asking Quant to Do Qual’s Job

Most marketers reach for a survey when they actually need a conversation. It’s one of the quieter ways marketing budgets get wasted, and almost nobody doing it realizes they are.

The reflex is understandable. Someone in a meeting raises a question nobody in the room can answer, and the instinct is to commission a study. A real study, with a real methodology section and a real sample size, a margin of error, that produces a real chart and a nice thick deck full of percentages. The trouble is that, a lot of the time, the question on the table isn’t a survey question at all. It’s a conversation question. And asking quant to do qual’s job is an incredibly common mistake to the uninitiated.

I’m not arguing against quantitative research as it is brilliant at the work it’s built for: sizing a problem, ranking options, telling you with reassuring decimal places what fraction of your audience does X or believes Y or scores Z. It’s also the discipline that survives the CMO meeting, which matters more than most people in marketing want to admit. None of that is what I’m questioning.

The issue is that some of the most important questions marketers ask aren’t actually quant questions, and you can tell by what they sound like:

• “Why are we losing this audience?”
• “How would we talk to them differently?”
• “What’s actually going on for these patients?”
• “What does this campaign feel like to the people we’re aiming it at?”

A survey can confirm answers and rank them, but it can’t find them. The question you didn’t think to ask doesn’t make the questionnaire, and what isn’t on the questionnaire never gets measured. And the thing nobody measured can quietly turn out to be the single most important thing about your brand.

This is where qualitative research earns its keep as it is the discipline that goes looking for the things the brief didn’t anticipate. In the hands of a capable researcher, it flows with the respondent rather than running at them. A good qual conversation isn’t linear. Someone says something interesting in answer to question two, and the researcher follows that thread rather than plowing on to question three. Someone says something at minute fourteen that quietly reframes everything they’ve said before it, and a good researcher knows to circle back. The questionnaire is locked the moment it goes into the field, but the researcher isn’t.

That’s why qual is so often the source of great creative work, even when it doesn’t get the credit. Take Always #LikeAGirl, one of the most awarded campaigns of the last decade. P&G and Leo Burnett did the quant first. Multi-wave Confidence and Puberty studies established the territory: girls’ confidence drops sharply at puberty, “like a girl” had quietly become a phrase carrying real negative weight, and the gap between how a seven-year-old sees herself and how a teenager does was measurable and significant. All of which mattered, but knowing the problem existed wasn’t the same as knowing what it felt like from inside. The thing that actually made the campaign land — the unbearable on-camera contrast between a young girl running with everything she has and a teenager flailing dramatically because she’s learned that’s what “like a girl” is supposed to look like — came from the qual side. Lauren Greenfield, the documentary filmmaker who’d spent years working on adolescence and girlhood, didn’t pull that out of a survey. She found it by sitting with girls and watching them.

So before you commission your next study, try a different question. Don’t start with “how big a sample do we need?” Start with what you actually want to know. If you’re trying to confirm a hypothesis somebody already has, you’ve got a survey on your hands. If you’re trying to discover something nobody on the brief has thought of yet, you need a conversation first. Quantitative research is the black-and-white sketch of your audience. Qualitative is the color. Put them together, in the right order, and you’ve got the thing that actually sells.

Qualitative research is the unsung hero of marketing research. It’s time we paid it the respect it earns.

Further reading

• Insight & Strategy: #LikeAGirl — Contagious
• Always #LikeAGirl: Turning an Insult into a Confidence Movement — Institute for Public Relations