For informed business planning and sound decision making, marketers need to understand their customers as fully as possible. This course is based on the idea that to grasp customer attitudes, sentiments, and behavior completely, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are required. Students will learn how to select and apply the right marketing research to obtain consumer intelligence, make sense of it, and apply it to marketing problems. Throughout the semester, we will emphasize the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative methods, how combining them – tapping art and science – can yield brand-building customer insights.  

Among the questions we will address are those you would need to have answered whether you are leading a start-up or serving as a brand manager in a large corporation: How do I begin to understand the market for my product?  How do I discover if consumers need or want it and which consumers are my best prospects?  How do I capture them for research? How do I develop/modify my product? What are best ways for positioning it in the marketplace and against which competition? How do I generate insights for advertising and packaging and evaluate consumer reactions to my messages? How do I price my product and use sales promotion? Where do I sell it? How many can I sell? What, if any, ethical considerations emanate from qualitative and quantitative marketing research?

We will take an experiential approach in this course. Students will learn through example and practice how to conduct focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research, and ways to map customer journeys, drawing on techniques from fields such as anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Students will also learn how to conduct cluster analysis, factor analysis, conjoint analysis, and logistic and OLS regression. Students will have the opportunity to work with real companies. 

Here are some examples of how this course integrates qualitative and quantitative marketing research methods and how using both types of research can contribute to market intelligence:

• How deep probing interviews spark customer insights and generate hypotheses and questions for quantitative surveys
• The value of projective interviewing techniques to formulate customer segments that can be assessed and refined in quantitative segmentation studies
• How qualitative and quantitative research can be deployed sequentially to develop brand positioning and advertising strategy
• When combining ethnography, ideation, and conjoint analysis can ignite and inform product innovation
• How artificial intelligence can deliver focus group research on a quantitative scale

Course Prerequisite: 

R-Programming data camp: https://www.datacamp.com/courses/free-introduction-to-r and a basic knowledge of statistics

Kamel Jedidi

John A. Howard Professor of Business

Kamel Jedidi is the John Howard Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, New York.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from University of Tunis and Master and Ph.D. degrees in Marketing and Statistics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Jedidi has extensively published in leading marketing and statistical journals.  His research interests...

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Robert Morais

Lecturer in Business

Robert J. Morais is a business anthropologist with experience in advertising and market research, and a Lecturer at Columbia Business School. He began his career at Grey Advertising and spent 25 years with advertising agencies, rising to Chief Strategic Officer, and then served for 11 years as a Principal at market research firm Weinman Schnee Morais. He has worked with Procter & Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline...

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