The Art of Asking the Right Questions: Enhancing Brand and Marketing Research

How strategic research prepares the ground for qualitative insights. One of the fundamental challenges when conducting brand or marketing research is ensuring that we ask the most pertinent questions.

One of the fundamental challenges when conducting brand or marketing research is ensuring that we ask the most pertinent questions to our target audience. All too often, clients and project partners are eager to jump directly into qualitative research, developing questionnaires or discussion guides. However, there’s a crucial step we must not overlook: understanding the purpose and best use of qualitative research.

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The Role of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is often seen as a discovery phase, a tool to uncover unknown insights. However, this approach can be misguided. Using qualitative research primarily as a discovery tool can lead to shallow, assumption-based questions that fail to yield meaningful insights. Instead, we should view qualitative research as a validation tool, confirming and deepening our hypotheses with the right questions.

The Pitfalls of Assumption-Based Questions

Relying on assumptions or quantitative research alone to formul…