CHAPTER 4: WHY USE QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
TO LOOK AT BRANDS AND BRANDING
Market Research Epistemology
● Commercial qualitative research: Involves
the researcher in encounters with people in
which the researcher tries to achieve
greater understanding and knowledge
primarily through “interviewing” people
● Interviewing: One-to-one basis or large
numbers (Pairs, trios, larger groups)
● Interviewing process can be done either by:
○ Following some plan
○ Driven by an understanding of the
client’s needs and the overall
project objectives
● Understanding the role and significance of
qualitative research (both general and
specific application) requires the articulation
of an epistemological basis for qualitative
market research
● Epistemology: The theory of knowledge
○ Addresses issues issues that are in
the realm of ‘how can we claim to
know what we know’ and ‘what is
the legitimacy of our method of
knowledge production’
● Social sciences looked to natural sciences
for epistemological support
● Natural science models: Core of the
dominant paradigms of scientific practice in
the 20th century
● Sir Karl Popper
● Social sciences looks for variations on
epistemological base as the foundation
○ Quest of some kind of quasi-
scientific objectivity to ground it in
a positivstic view: Part of social
science project whether commercial
market research or academic
research
Key Characteristics of Qualitative Research
● Adapt and adjust the approach as they
proceed to respond to and explore what
emerges, as it emergences
○ The structure should never be
applied to rigidly as this will inhibit or
constrain what comes out)
● Fluidity and Responsiveness
○ Clear contrast with the more fixed
character of quantitative research
that is structured to generate a
more numeric result - staight
forward question and answer
research
○ Field research is prepared to
invent method on the spot
○ Researcher views whole methods to
the requirements of his research
problem and the properties of his
particular research situation
○ Con: Smacks the ‘subjectivity’ of
which qualitative market research is
often accused
Sir Karl Popper
● Important and influential 20th century
philosophers who articulated an
epistemological base for the scientific
method
● According to him, science advances its
knowledge and understanding through
experiment
○ Experimental process begins with
developing hypothesis, rooted in
established or new theories about
order of things
○ Controlled and repeatable
experiment is set up to the
hypothesis
○ Results of the experiment either:
Refute the hypothesis or fail to
disprove it
● According to him, science can never
categorically claim to have proved anything,
but what it can do is build up increasingly
robust propositions that resemble a king
of ‘best so far’ knowledge
○ Transparent
○ Can be questioned and
challenged
Commercial Survey Research
● Prominent: Ideas of hypothesis testing and
gathering of objective information
● Reality of commercial research: Shot
through with many assumptions rooted in
the positivistic diagram
● Sample survey
○ A mechanism rooted in statistical
theory that allows us to identify with
a given level of certainty the
answers that would come from a
whole population by asking
question of just a selected of
sample minority
○ Reliability and validity: center to
social science epistemology
■ Reliability: Methodology to
produce same results if
repeated
■ Validity: Measuring what we
set out to measure
Qualitative Research
● Fails to achieve some of the core
requirements of these positivistic views of
social science
 ● Rarely sets up anything resembling a formal
experiment conducted under controlled
condition
● Best ‘wobbly’ on the issue of reliability
● Few practitioners would claim to want to
exactly replicate or imitate others’
approaches
● Virtually, all interviewers and moderators
would say that any single any interview is
unique and an unrepeatable event
● Falls short of some of the assumed and
implicit tenets of the positivistic commercial
and social research epistemology
● A commercially viable vehicle
● Truth: Qualitative market research operates
to a different set of epistemological rules,
although these are rarely articulated within
commercial research
● In Academic research: Interpretative
approach
● Exists because it addresses the
fundamentally problematic issue of validity
in survey research
○ Both art/craft skill and the science
are about ensuring validity (what we
think we are examining)
● Validity in survey research is
unproblematic when 3 requirements are
met:
○ All questions that are asked are
understood and interpreted
exactly as intended
○ The responded has access to the
truth and the ability to provide the
whole truth in their response
○ The researcher understands the
totality of response exactly as it
was intended
The Problem of Validity
1. The Problem of the Withheld
● Some people will not always want to answer
all the questions we might put to them
(Embarrassment, bored, dislike for the
research situation, feeling of intrusion, and
mind might be wandering off)
● People may resist full, frank, and honest
responses
● Logic of qualitative research: Mechanism for
exploring beyond the surface response to
uncover what participants or respondents do
not want to be seen
2. The Problem of the Unconscious
● People can be unaware and blind to hiding
their motives
● The unconscious and the invisible workings
of the human mind have been a constant
theme of psychology
● Problematic
○ Existence of motivations and
influences that do not exist at an
entirely conscious level
○ Lurking presence in the mind of
information that people do not have
conscious or direct access to
● Identifying what lies beneath: Invites
exploration and gradual peeling of layers
below the conscious mind; to encourage
what is hidden to become visible
● It invites the development of something
beyond the fixed question, which is likely to
access a single layer of response
3. The Problem of the Taken for Granted
● Human beings are social animals
● What underpins behaviour is learned,
adapted, or changed through everyday
interactive behaving
● The normal course of events, never finds ins
way into conscious thought — Therefore,
language is rarely put into words, but rather
exists at a taken for granted level
● Taken-for-granted layers require identification
and illumination through interviewing
processes that are complex and intricate
than a direct objective question and objective
response relationship
4. The Hermeneutic Problem of Meaning
● Research works through the medium of
language
● Survey research works on the principle that if
a specific question is asked, it will be
understood in the way that it was intended
and the response will be fully appreciated
and understood by the questioner
● Problem in interviews: We assume that we
understood them and the error small enough
that it will not disrupt communication
● Assumption of unproblematic meaning is
challenged by the hermeneutic school of
Philosophy
○ Every human exchange involves
movement between different
individual systems of meaning with
some degree of mis-translation
● Any communication is precarious - A can
never be sure that B has understood exactly
as intended and how far off any interpretation
has been
● In any survey, any specific question will not
be understood in the same way by all
respondents
● The hermeneutic problem can never be
resolved in an absolute sense, but a
hermeneutic method is necessary to address
it
● Qualitative research is about identifying and
clarifying meaning through probing, cross-
referencing, and check
● Project of qualitative research is a
hermeneutic project
5. The Problem of Prediction
● Problem: Whether in participating in survey
research, respondents can provide accurate
predictions about their behaviour in different
settings at different points in time
● Goal of research: To be predictive BUT
asking someone what their behaviour would
be in some future scenario is often
problematic
● Questionnaire which seek to measure
values, attitudes, and norms = Ignore the
emergent, innovational, and problematic
character of everyday life by imposing a
deterministic grid with its fixed choice
structure
● People cannot predict the contexts in which
their future behaviour will take place
● People cannot predict accurately their future
mindsets, feelings, cultural settings,
circumstance, etc.
● Popper’s argument:
○ Since all social settings and
situations at any point are unique,
then initial conditions for the
scientific method in natural science
can never be repeated
○ Methodological individualism: A
means of achieving understanding
where the behaviour and actions
of collectives must be reduced to
the behaviour and the actions of
human individuals
Qualitative Research Epistemology
● Qualitative research epistemology requires
turning the analytic powers of semiotic theory
away from an investigation of signs in
abstraction towards an investigation of them
in their natural habitat
● These problems require that interviews
should find ways to verify what has been said
● These problems require that the interviewer
pursues all the layers of meaning that
underpin the response
Propositions for the Qualitative Research
Foundation
1. What we study in qualitative market research is
the world as if is for us, as it is mediated
through human perception
● Understand human behaviour through the
meanings associated with it
2. That human ‘meaning’ exists at variety of
levels: conscious, associative, repressed,
unconscious, taken-for-granted, etc
● Interviewing and techniques employed can
only partly achieve the uncovering and
elucidation of meaning
3. That understanding what occurs in any given
situation requires a methodological
individualism in which methods and
approaches are specifically developed to
address a specific problem
● We do not necessarily take what they do and
say, but we do:
○ Recognise human beings as the
moving agents of society
○ Recognise that no special tendency
could not be altered if people
decided consciously or intuitively to
behave otherwise
4. This methodological individualism is required
at the overall level of the specific project at
the particular level of the individual interview,
group, and so on.
● Embraces an eclectic array of data specific
and general observation of behaviour,
orientation, and responses
5. Qualitative research is defined by its
character as a hermeneutic method.
● The interview, the group, whatever the
research vehicle is seen as a holistic web in
which meanings and behaviours are cross-
referenced and cross-checked against one
another
● Mechanisms to affirm and refine what
meanings mean: Cross-referencing, probing,
and exploring
6. Ultimately, qualitative research cannot wholly
be predictive.
● Generalizations and sets of human beings
will always be flawed
● However, if it can illuminate associative,
repressed, unconscious, and taken-for-
granted meaning, then qualitative research
can provide a more complete framework
The Problem of Brand Research
● The language of brands is a kind of
speaking in tongues
● Language of brands is tonal: It is through
association, through feeling, and through
disposition
● Only some is madeup language and some
linguistic components may not be arranged
in coherent paragraphs, sentences, or
phrases
● Language of brands involves seeing, feeling,
sensing, and emoting; it may not involve
anything resembling verbal thought
● Brands do not speak in English; people do
not hear, interpret, and negotiate, with
brands in a formal language with joined up
sentences
● Brand research is a sequence of
hermeneutic problems
○ Respondent first interpret what the
question means to develop response
○ Respondent tries to access own
experiences, orientations, feelings
about Brand X which are etched in
 memory and somehow articulate
them in English to the researches
○ Research then interprets accounts
from respondents
○ Undergo hermeneutic hoop of telling
the client what it all means
● Qualitative research has taken a pragmatic
approach in addressing the hermeneutic
problem of researcher-respondent interface
and exchange
○ EU tradition: By being sensitive to it
with the researcher trying to
understand what the ‘question’ is that
the respondent is actually answering
● Law of thirds: 3 times to react to the
question, 3 times to answer the question they
think was asked, 3 times to answer their own
question and not the researcher’s
● Industry’s solution to the Hermeneutic
problems: Rely upon the client working as a
check upon the reasonableness of their
findings and interpretations
● Central Problem: How the researcher can
get meaningful and intelligible access to
the consumer world of brands when this
world is:
○ Comprised of bits of memory and
mental schemata that are recorded
as sensory impressions and only
partly linguistic
○ More about feelings, visual images,
tones, and moods than joined up
language
○ More unconscious than conscious
○ More taken-for-granted than
recognized
○ More rooted in dispositions than
clearly articulated positions
● Flexibility, responsiveness, and subtlety of
qualitative research contrasts that of
quantitative research
● Brands’ meanings
○ Remain implicit and unconscious for
consumers
○ Not organised into a readily
accessible pattern
○ Not in a consistent format
○ Not in a linguistic form or a form that
easily translates readily and directly
into words
● Most of the time, consumers simply behave
in relation to brands and rarely act
consciously and to fully account for or
describe their feelings towards brands
Qualitative Research and the World of Brands
We need approaches that can address:
● The problem of the withheld:
○ Find ways to identify what
consumers might not want to say
about brands, what to hide about
how they use them, how they feel
about them, etc.
● The problem of the unconscious
○ Find ways for unconscious
impressions of feelings and
motivations about brands to surface
and find expression
● The problem of the taken-for-granted
○ Find ways to reveal the shared
assumptions embedded in everyday
behaviour and practice
● The hermeneutic problem of meaning
○ Find ways to articulate the identity of
a brand when identity does not exist
in linguistic form
○ Manage effective translation of
meanings
● The problem of prediction
○ Find ways to identify psychological
and emotional needs
Sophisticated Means of Measuring Brands
1. Conjoint analysis
2. Brand/Price tradeoff
3. Dual scaling conjoint analysis
Using Quantitative Approach?
● They cannot always explore the fine details
of a particulate brand
● Less suited to exploring unmet, emerging, or
latent needs which new and existing brands
could address
Qualitative Approach?
● Suited to researching brands because its
whole project has been targeted at
addressing crucial problems above ^^
● Addresses these concerns by virtue of its
fundamental character as a hermeneutic
method
● A self-correcting mechanism when practiced
properly
● Also developed varieties of mechanisms to
address other brand research problems
○ Structural elements of research
design
○ Research techniques that can be
used to illuminate particular aspects
of consumer motivation and brand
identity