Digitalization of Process on Qualitative Market Research – Opportunities and Threats

Abstract

Ongoing changes in technological and socio-cultural settings influence not only marketing activity of companies, but also market research domain. The potential of the Internet is increasing-ly being recognised by market research users, market researchers, as well as academics. The new digital settings have been providing strong impact to the development of new market research approaches, also in field of qualitative research methods. This paper contributes to the debate surrounding the value of qualitative online research in comparison to standard methodology. The main objective of the paper is to compare two of qualitative techniques: standard face-to-face focus groups as well as online focus groups via communicator (chat). The cyberspace generate a lot of methodological challenges for qualitative market research. Going through particular stages of the qualitative research process this paper discusses the opportunities, as well as limitations of standard and online qualitative market research techniques.