This week has been all about qualitative research. My team put together a short series of questions, and each of us did three or four one-on-one interviews over the past seven days. Today, we got together to discuss our results and the next steps of our project.
Before we even came together to debrief, I was struck by how telling the insights were from the four interviews I performed. Since we are dealing with a very low-involvement product, it should have been no surprise that my respondents were fairly uninformed and uninterested in the brand. However, it came as something of a shock to me. I realized this was because I have spent the past two months trying to immerse myself in the product category. I’ve studied the product history, read in detail the product labeling and the information posted on their website, and talked at length with our clients who live and breathe the brand.
I’m not your average consumer, and I think this is an important point to remember whenever you’re working closely with a brand. Consumers don’t necessarily interact with the product with intense interest, even if they are longtime users. This insight is nothing new in the MS-Marketing curriculum, but it’s something that I assume would be easy to forget in the real world, working on the same product each day. In Capstone, we have the chance to pick up on these issues as we bridge the gap between academia and the working world.
Despite interviewing a fairly diverse group of people, my other two team members and I had similar responses to our question pattern. This was encouraging, and we plan to work on a first wave of quantitative research in the coming week or two. The more we piece together, the clearer our direction becomes. It’s nice to see things coalescing into a cohesive path. We have a great deal to complete in the next month and a half, but my group has entered into a productive working rhythm. I am optimistic that we will produce a final report of real value for our client.
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