People really like quantitative research. You sound really smart when you can say “33% of iPod owners use their iPods less than once a month”, or “17% of white males between 25 and 45 who earn more than 60k a year own a game console”. Numbers are hard to argue with, and specificity implies knowledge.
Quantitative research can be a lot of hard work. There are the basic things you need to do for any quantitative research like:
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Consumer research is an important part of product line planning. Knowing what your target customer wants, and often more importantly, what they “need”, provides a robust framework for defining a product or service value proposition. Consumer research is not only valuable in product planning, and can help enhance attributes of your current products by better understanding who your customer is, and fine tuning the product positioning and placement.
There are generally two categories of consumer research: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research usually involves in depth conversations with a small number of people, maybe 10 or 20. Quantitative research usually employs a research tool like a questionnaire or survey to get a statistically relevant read of a sample population, often more than 100 people and sometimes as high as 2000.
