Qualitative & Quantitative Research
When doing research in your salon, sometimes you need to know how products sold, while other times you need to know why your customers purchased something. These answers are brought to you through quantitative and qualitative questions. Is one better than the other? It all depends on what we’re trying to figure out. Let’s explore together!
Ask you may have guessed from its name, Quantitative Research results in numbers. How many units did we sell this month? How many new customers did we see this month? What percentage of our customers purchased retail? Quantitative is usually easier to define. Nowadays we simply pull a report for what we want to know.
Most of us use software to manage our salon, for those of you too young to comprehend the alternative. Once upon a time, everything was written in an appointment book and honestly, I don’t even remember how we kept track of our daily sales or inventory counts.
Back to the present!
What do you do when numbers aren’t enough? Example: You’ve pulled reports that determine your number one selling products, but you want to know why customers are choosing these products over the others on your shelves. This is where qualitative questions come to play.
Qualitative questions give us more detail, such as they are filled with emotions and reasonings. These answers are descriptive allowing us to interpret the how or why. Because qualitative is based on personal accounts, it is not definitive like quantitative.
Maybe once we know our top 10 products through a quantitative report. We can create a qualitative survey for our top 50 guests probing for more insight into what they love and hate on our shelves, and why.
We believe the best research is done using both types of questions. It is always better to have the full picture. Numbers alone can’t translate emotions, while emotions can’t confirm sales. As with everything in life, we need to find the right balance.