Mastering Market Research: Trends, Analytics, and Questionnaire Design

Posted on Apr 5, 2025 in Psychology

Emerging Societal Trends and Market Research

Emerging Societal Trends: Sharing: People enjoy sharing and benefit from it (e.g., Airbnb, Uber). Dialogue and Co-creation: Increased e-commerce and online communities facilitate customer communication, cooperation, and information sharing.

Descriptive Analytics

Links the market to the firm through information, helping managers make actionable decisions. Principles involve systematically collecting and interpreting data to aid decision-makers.

Descriptive Research

Website activity analysis, scan path (neuromarketing).

Causal Research

Effect of design on attention (neuromarketing).

Diagnostic (Inquisitive) Analytics

Diagnostic analytics delve into the root cause, determining factors and events contributing to outcomes through data discovery, data mining, and correlational analysis.

Predictive Analytics

Detect trends, clusters, and exceptions. Using customer data to predict future behavior.

Research Structure

Title, Summary, Problem statement, Theoretical framework / conceptual model: Arguments; Predictions: Hypotheses; Methodology: Sample, Design, Procedure. Analytical method; Result description; Conclusion and Discussion: Overall conclusion, Managerial implementations, theoretical contribution, limitations, Further research.

Crafting a Compelling Title

The title should reflect the domain of your research, the main idea, and key findings. Aim for a catchy title that resonates with the content.

Problem Statement

Convince readers of the research’s interest and necessity. Highlight practical (managerial) relevance by detailing the problem and its importance for marketers, consumers, or society. Provide an explicit statement of the problem and research goal.

Theoretical Framework

Build arguments for each hypothesis, explaining them with relevant theories, models, and previous findings. Describe the expected effect of variables and the reasoning behind those expectations.


Writing Effective Questionnaires

Writing a Good Questionnaire: A questionnaire is a structured list of questions administered in written or verbal form to survey participants. Its main functions are:

  • Sets the order of the interview.
  • Ensures questions are posed consistently.
  • Provides a basis for recording and collecting data for analysis.

Including: Fieldwork procedures: instructions for selecting, approaching, and questioning respondents, Some reward, gift or payment offered to respondents, Communication aids (maps, pictures, ads and products or return envelopes)

Taxonomy of Questions by Response Format

A) Open-ended questions: Respondents are free to choose any response.

  • Advantages: Easy to question, to express general attitudes and opinions, often used in qualitative exploratory analysis.
  • Disadvantages: Answers are difficult to tabulate and analyze.

B) Closed-ended questions: Respondents are provided with predetermined answers and asked to choose the best one. Alternatives include:

  • Dichotomous choice: Do you drink coffee? Yes / No
  • Multiple choice (select one): Which brand of coffee is your favorite? (a) Lavazza, (b) Nespresso, (c) Starbucks
  • Multiple answer (marking elements from a list): Which brand of coffee have you tried? (a) Lavazza, (b) Nespresso, (c) Starbucks
  • Measurement scales (measuring an answer on a scale): How much do you like Starbucks coffee? 1=very bad, 2=bad…. 4=average… 7=very good

C) Mixed: Closed questions with an “Others, please specify:” option, including an open-ended line of response.

Taxonomy of Questions by Information Given by the Interviewer

A) Aided questions B) Unaided questions Both types, open/closed-ended questions, can be classified as aided or unaided, depending on how much information is given to the respondent

Taxonomy of Questions Depending on the Type of Information

  1. Introductory questions: To open the survey, generating a relaxed environment.
  2. Identification questions (name, address, and telephone number) IF the survey is NOT anonymous (confidentiality can be assured, anyway). NB! Ask closer to the end!
  3. Classification questions: Consists of socio-economic and demographic characteristics (relevant for segmentation purposes), including gender, marital status, education level, etc. NB! Ask closer to the end!
  4. Basic information: Relates to the basic research problem or goal.
  5. Control: To test the quality of the information (answers are mainly true).
  6. Filter: To screen potential respondents to ensure they meet the requirements to answer the question.
  7. Scales questions: To quantify customers’ attitudes.
  8. Special (sensitive) questions: Related to personal hygiene, law observance, sexual practices, political ideology, health, religious practices, income, etc.

There are different approaches for dealing with special questions, some examples are:

  • Scales: A multi-item scale is used to build a construct; it is convenient to intercalate dual (positive and negative) statements.
  • Circumvent: Asking indirectly in a hidden way.
  • Inference: Asking about respondent’s opinion about third persons’ behavior instead of their own case.
  • Randomized questions: They use randomness to preserve respondents’ intimacy, applying Bayes’ theorem.


Order of Questions and General Structure

Introduction (objectives, anonymity, confidentiality, collaboration); Initial questions that should be simple and interesting; Place filter questions; Group questions (e.g., questions on attitudes, perception); Each topic starts with evaluation questions (what?) and after the diagnosis (why?); Place difficult or delicate questions slightly after the center of the questionnaire.; Before reaching the end, focus on the easy questions; Classification questions at the end of the questionnaire; Thank you for your cooperation; Importance of the interviewer’s instructions and support material.

The Order of Questions

General types of question orderings: (it can be used within question blocks, and for ordering the blocks)

  • Funnel sequence: The procedure of asking the most general or unrestrictive questions first, followed by more restrictive questions. It is the most commonly used, especially if respondents have some idea on the topic.
  • Inverted-funnel-sequence: Inverts the funnel sequence start with specific questions and concludes with general ones. It is used in personal and telephonic surveys.

The Form and Layout

Use booklets in written questionnaires. It prevents page lost, simplify move from one page to another, and look professional; It should seem easy to read. Color does not seem relevant, but different colors could be used for specific sub-samples; Question numbering prevent respondents inadvertently skip them, and simplify the interviewer work; Fitting questions on a page, do not split questions or response categories; Interviewer instructions should be placed just before or after the instructed question; Use a structured table for multiple choice questions, assigning an unambiguous place for any of the possible answers.

Pre-Testing Questionnaires

All aspects of the questionnaire should be pre-tested using a small sample. The pre-test should be conducted in an environment and context identical to the one that will be used in the survey. A debriefing procedure should be used (at the end), explaining the target to the interviewers. Specialist should review all the pre-test process, analyzing the presence of ambiguities and doubts, also asking to the respondents, leading to improved questionnaire. Collect statistical information on the pre-test sample, such as the empirical variance (and use it to determine the sample size for the final survey). Finally the survey can be launched.

Attitudes

Attitude is a person’s predisposition to evaluate and respond to some stimulus. Generally, it is considered to have three components: cognitive, affective and behavioral. But actually, each of these components may involve multiple magnitudes. Attitude magnitudes can be defined in terms of:

  1. A facet/direction: can can be defined in one sense or pole (zero to positive, for example knowledge, purchase intention), or with two opposite senses or poles (e.g. hate-love). Bipolar attitude magnitudes can be interpreted as two confronted unipolar magnitudes. Remark. The pole or sense is generally described as having a positive valence (attractiveness or goodness) or a negative valence (adverseness or badness); e.g. Love has a positive valence, fear and hate negative. Ambivalent senses have positive and negative connotations (but this classification is relatively subjective). If a person holds simultaneously attitudes with positive and negative valence towards a stimulus, then we say that it has ambivalence.
  2. Intensity: strength of the attitude feature towards a pole (null-weak-strong). For example, you might like marketing (between hate and love) – thus, your attitude towards marketing has a positive sense in the emotional facet. If you are crazy about it, your emotional attitude has a high intensity


Attitudes Magnitudes

A measurement scale is a mapping assigning (1) an attitudinal magnitude of a person towards an object or stimulus, to (2) numbers or other symbols, following certain pre-specified rules. To elicit a measurement of the attitudinal magnitude, respondents select the numbers or symbols in the scales that better represent their attitude towards the stimulus. When the stimulus has several attributes, we can study attitudinal magnitudes towards each attribute, or the global attitude. The scale can measure attitudes towards several objects simultaneously. Alternatively, we can study separately the attitude towards each object.

Attitudes Scale Categories

  • Comparative scales (the subject is asked to compare some objects directly one against other,e.g., pair-wise) or Non-Comparative scales.
  • Forced scales (a scale that forces the respondents to express an opinion because “no opinion”or “no knowledge” options is not provided) or Non-forced.
  • Balanced (a scale with an equal number of favorable and unfavorable categories) or Unbalanced scales.

Nominal, Ordinal, Interval and Ratio Scales

  • Nominal: A scale whose numbers serve only as labels or tags for identifying and classifying objects with a strict one-to-one correspondence between the numbers and the objects (e.g.,nationality)
  • Ordinal: A ranking scale in which numbers are assigned to objects to indicate the relative extent to which some characteristics is possessed. Thus it is possible to determine whether an object has more or less of a characteristic than some other object.
  • Interval: A scale in which the numbers are used to rate objects such that numerically equal distances in the characteristic being measured.
  • Ratio: The highest scale. It allows the researcher to identify or classify objects, rank order the objects, and compare intervals or differences. It is also meaningful to compute ratios of scale values. Stevens only approved certain types of statistical techniques for each type of scale data, but this has been refuted by statisticians who are more flexible. Steven’s classification should not be taken strictly, because scale type is not just an attribute of the data, but rather depends upon the questions we intend to ask of the data and the additional information we might have. Nevertheless the taxonomy is widely used by marketing researchers, and you have to know it.

Comparative vs Non-Comparative Scales

Comparative scales involve the direct comparison of stimulus objects. Comparative scale data must be interpreted in relative terms and have only ordinal or rank order properties. In non-comparative scales, each object is scaled independently of the others in the stimulus set. The resulting data are generally assumed to be interval or ratio scaled.

Non-Comparatives

  • Semantic/Verbal: Respondents are instructed to check the category that best describes the intensity of their attitudinal facet towards the stimulus being measured.
  • Differential Semantic or bipolar adjective: Are vision of the semantic scale, rather than attaching a description to each of the response categories, only two extreme categories are labeled.
  • Likest: Respondents are asked to indicate the amount of agreement or disagreement (from strongly agree to strongly disagree) on a five-point scale.
  • Staple: A type of semantic scale. Respondents are asked to indicate how accurately or inaccurately a single adjective describes the object by selecting an even-numbered range of values (from -5 to 5).


Building Scales

  1. First we collect a long series of items related to the attitude we want to measure, selecting those which express a clearly favorable or unfavorable. An item is a phrase or sentence that expresses a positive or negative to a phenomenon that we want to know.
  2. The more favorable attitude one has, the higher the response score given to the item. The total sum of the scores is the overall attitude measure.
  3. It is convenient to have interspersed items with a positive and a negative meaning respect to the attitude, and the answer is added or subtracted in the global measurement.
  4. It is convenient to include an additional column NA (no answer or don’t’ know).
  5. It is better to include an odd number of alternatives (neuter point)

Non-Comparative: Unique Scales

  • Picture scales: One alternative to a semantic scales is a graphical scale. Such scales are particularly useful for children and those population where literacy is low.
  • Thermometer scale:

Ordinal Non Comparative

Equal width interval: This scale consists of asking respondents to indicate into which numerical interval they fall.

Ratio Non-Comparatives

  • Direct quantification: The simplest way to obtain ratio scaled data is to ask directly for quantification of a construct that is a ratio scaled. The problem with this approach is that the respondent probably doesn’t know or want to reveal what the exact answer is.
  • Reference alternative: This approach has respondents compare alternatives with a reference alternative.

Ordinal Comparatives

  • Paired Comparison: A respondent is presented with two objects at a time and asked to select one objects in the pair according to some criterion. The data obtained is ordinal.
  • Forced ranking: A respondent is presented with several objects simultaneously and asked to order or rank them according to some criterion. The data obtained is ordinal.

Comparatives

Q-sort (also known as Class or similarities): A rank order procedure to sort objects based on similarity with respect to some criterion.

Interval Comparatives

Graded Paired Comparison (Dollar Metric): gets paired comparison judgments of both which brand is preferred and the amount (in value) by which it is preferred.

Ratio Comparatives

Constant Sum Scale: A comparative technique in which respondents are required to allocate a constant sum of units such as points, dollars, chits, stickers, or chips among a set of stimulus objects with respect to some criterion.