Growing a brand or business is all about making strategic decisions. The teams that Campos partners with are routinely tasked with making informed decisions on who to target for growth, how to appeal to target customers, how to differentiate from competitors, how to optimize products or services, how to mitigate risks, and so on.
No matter the objective, our job as their strategic research partner is to gather and interpret data to help them make those informed decisions. Very often, this involves quantitative market research. Quantitative market research is the foundation of a customer-centric growth strategy, ensuring decision making is aligned with market realities and consumer preferences.
Want to move beyond making decisions based on assumptions? Let’s dig in to explore how quantitative market research can help guide your strategy.
What is Quantitative Market Research?
Quantitative market research is an approach to collecting and analyzing numerical data from a large group of people. Its purpose is to quantify attitudes, opinions, behaviors, and other defined variables. We often collect this data via surveys, but there are other types of quantitative market research, for example analyzing existing datasets, such as transactional point of sale data.
Using various analytic techniques, we can get a broad, representative view of a market, identify patterns, and make statistically significant generalizations about a target audience. We can also create models to forecast future consumer behavior and outcomes. Let’s unpack that all a bit more.
What are Quantitative Research Services Used For?
Quantitative research services provide the data needed to make informed, strategic decisions. We regularly design, field, and report on quantitative research studies with a variety of applications, including:
- Market Sizing: Determining the size of a potential market for a new product or service.
- Customer Segmentation: Dividing a market into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, and identifying which segments to target for growth.
- Brand Tracking: Benchmarking awareness and perceptions of your brand and monitoring your brand’s health over time.
- Product Development: Assessing the relative value of various product features and benefits to determine an optimal product concept.
- Message Testing: Assessing consumer reactions to new messages before launch.
- Pricing Strategy: Identifying the optimal price point for a product or service.
- Advertising Effectiveness: Measuring the impact of a marketing campaign.
What Are the Benefits of Using Quantitative Research Services?
Quantitative market research is essential for business growth because it provides objective, data-driven insights that remove guesswork from decision-making. Key benefits include:
- Offering More Consumer-Centric Products and Services: By using methods like conjoint analysis or MaxDiff testing, you can determine which product features and attributes customers value most. This allows you to develop and launch offerings that truly meet market needs, leading to higher adoption rates and sales.
- More Efficient Marketing: Quantitative studies, such as market segmentation and media consumption surveys, reveal who your ideal customers are, what they care about, and where they spend their time. This allows you to target your marketing messages to the right audience on the right platforms, increasing campaign effectiveness and ROI.
- Stay Ahead of a Changing Market: Regular quantitative studies, like brand tracking or longitudinal surveys, allow you to monitor shifts in consumer preferences, emerging trends, and competitor activity. This gives you an early warning system to adapt your strategy proactively rather than reactively.
- Optimize Resource Allocation: Quantitative data provides a clear picture of which initiatives are performing well and which aren’t. You can use this information to allocate your budget and resources to the most profitable areas, maximizing efficiency and impact.
- Mitigate Risk: Before making a major investment, such as launching a new product or entering a new market, quantitative research helps you assess potential risks and opportunities. A well-executed study can predict the likelihood of success and identify potential pitfalls, saving the company from costly mistakes.
- Increase Customer Retention and Loyalty: By regularly measuring customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS), you can identify pain points and areas for improvement. Addressing these issues based on quantitative feedback shows customers you value their opinions, which builds trust and encourages long-term loyalty.
- Track and Optimize Performance: Quantitative research provides the metrics needed to set and track key performance indicators (KPIs). Whether it’s measuring the success of a new advertising campaign or the impact of a recent product update, you get a clear, numerical understanding of your performance, allowing for continuous optimization.
How Does Quantitative Research Differ from Qualitative Research?
While both are essential, qualitative and quantitative market research have fundamentally different goals.
- Quantitative research is about the “what” and the “how many.” It uses numbers and statistics to measure and analyze data, providing a broad overview and objective insights.
- Qualitative research is about the “why” and the “how.” It uses methods like focus groups and in-depth interviews to explore motivations, feelings, and underlying reasons. It provides rich, descriptive insights that explain the numbers.
At Campos, we understand that combining both approaches provides the most comprehensive picture. Quantitative research tells you what’s happening, and qualitative research explains why. This dual approach empowers you to make truly informed decisions that drive growth.
How Do You Conduct High-Impact Quantitative Market Research?
Conducting good, high-impact quantitative market research is not easy. There’s a lot of bad market research out there that just produces obvious results, or results that are too muddy to be actionable.
To get beyond the obvious and conduct quantitative market research that produces truly meaningful, actionable results, you must:
- Define Clear Objectives: Muddy objectives will produce muddy results. Ensure your quantitative market research study has clear objectives by ask yourself: How do I plan to use this research? What do I want to do with the research when this is all said and done. That’ll help you go from “will anyone buy this product?” to “what market segment should I market this product to in order to maximize revenue, and at what price point should I offer it?”
- Design a Robust Research Plan: Before you fully scope out quantitative research methodology, make sure quantitative research is the right fit given your objectives. (Not sure? Ask us!) Assuming quantitative research is the way to go, it’s essential you have a robust research plan in place before you start designing and fielding a survey.
- Make sure you have a large enough sample size to produce statistically significant findings with a low margin of error.
- You should also have a plan in place to ensure the sample accurately reflects the target population you want to learn about.
- If you plan to use any advanced statistical techniques (e.g., segmentation, conjoint), make sure your sampling plan can support that.
- And make sure you have a solid method for sourcing responses to your survey (e.g., using customer lists, or going through a reputable sample provider).
- Ask the Right Questions: At Campos, we never design surveys in isolation. Sure, one person drafts a survey instrument, but collaborative reviews and revisions are essential to our process of ensuring we’ve asked the right questions to produce meaningful, actionable insights. Make sure you pressure test your survey drafts with other people on your team so you get beyond the obvious.
- Clean Your Data Rigorously: Survey fraud is rampant in market research. It’s not enough to rely on built-in tools to detect bots and low quality responses. You need to manually review and clean data as you field it to ensure all responses you keep are high quality and from real respondents. We routinely toss about a third of responses we initially collect for not meeting our data quality standards.
- Analyze, Analyze, Analyze: Truly disruptive insights often require digging–they may not be found in your first, second, or third pass at the data. Use advanced statistical techniques to dig into the data, looking for significant trends, correlations, and differences. Analyze the data through the lens of various subgroups of respondents to tease out a compelling story as it relates to your objectives.
- Tell a Compelling Story: Last, but certainly not least, you need to present your findings in a clear, compelling way. People can’t make informed decisions based on data dumps. They need to know what the most important findings were, why they mattered, and what they can do next based on those findings. It all starts—and ends—with those clear objectives.
Partnering with Campos on Quantitative Market Research
Want to conduct quantitative market research but you’re not quite sure you can go it alone? Quantitative market research companies like Campos specialize in partnering with organizations on a wide variety of quantitative research initiatives. At Campos, we specialize in designing and fielding custom studies to help our clients understand their market, customers, and opportunities. Want to learn more? Reach out.
