Research Glossaries

Market research agencies and marketers often use the Big Five personality traits to help understand the consumer and to segment customers into personality types. It is also often used by HR professionals to evaluate prospective employees. The Big Five dimensions are considered to be the key underlying traits that make up an individual’s personality. The Big Five traits are often referred to as OCEAN big five – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (But also occasionally called CANOE).

Accompanied Shopping Trips (ASTs) are one of the most effective ways of understanding consumer buying behaviour – also known as Accompanied Shops or Depths.

Usability testing is an evaluative method that allows teams to observe an individual’s experience with a digital application or a physical product as they walk through the steps of a given task. Examples might be a new game, website, new packaging format, new piece of technology etc.

Behavioural Economics, sometimes referred to as BE in short, is an important discipline for market research companies and clients alike and explores why people sometimes make irrational decisions, and why and how their behavior does not follow the predictions of economic models. Some of the best known individuals in the study of behavioral economics are Nobel laureates Gary Becker, Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman and George Akerlof.

Dr Noriaki Kano, an expert and lecturer in the field of quality management laid the foundation for the Kano method in the 1970s and 1980s. his efforts worked to show how improving or adding certain types of product attributes and excluding others can reliably produce higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Word Clouds are a spatial information visualization approach that is used in qualitative data analysis in market research through the organisation of text-based content into appealing visual arrangements.

Artefact Analysis is used in social anthropology and is the systematic approach to the analysis of material, aesthetic and interactive qualities of objects. The emphasis of the analysis is on the object itself and is typically used in Qualitative and Ethnographic research studies but also used in Archaeology. Essentially, the researcher effectively is using the analysis to understand what the object(s) say through its material, aesthetic and other physical/practical qualities.

A/B testing (sometimes known as Split Testing) is comparing two products or ideas in market research studies to see which one performs better. By showing respondents individually or side by side –  the one that gives a better conversion rate wins!

Virtually all leading business experts agree that market research is important. The world is constantly changing, and as a society, we are constantly updating our thinking and discovering new experiences – largely due to the overwhelming bombardment coming from media and technological innovations which hit the market every day. As such, new values and behaviours are constantly emerging (and old ones disappearing) and consequently we see new consumer segments come and go. Perhaps one of the key reasons why market research matters to your business are that all too often businesses make expensive or even fatal mistakes – often simply because they take their finger off the pulse and fail to understand the changing world outside their own four office walls.

In quantitative market research, CATI stands for computer-aided telephone interviewing and is used by most modern telephone survey research companies to run telephone surveys.

Qualitative Market Research (aka Qual research) is designed to help companies explore and understand people, markets & brands and focuses on understanding and meaning rather than numbers. It tends to be small scale, using both verbal and non-verbal discovery methods. It typically involves numerous data collection approaches including face to face interviews, online qualitative interviewing and observation.

A viewing facility is a location that has been designed for hosting focus groups, workshops and market research interviews. This facility, otherwise known as a ‘viewing studio’, is typically designed for all parties, including; the research moderator, the respondents (members of the public) and also the end client who commissions the work.