Is Qualitative Dead? No.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of our Big Ideas Series, a column highlighting the innovative thinking and thought leadership at IIeX events around the world. Lana Novikova will be speaking at IIeX North America (June 13-15 in Atlanta). If you liked this article, you’ll LOVE IIeX NA. Click here to learn more.

By Lana Novikova, Founder & CEO, Heartbeat Ai Technologies Inc. and Katja Bressette, Managing Director, Beacon Insight Group 

Katja and Lana were runner-up competitors for the 2016 Innovation Exchange Competition in Amsterdam. Katja is a seasoned qualitative researcher who has developed an innovative online hybrid approach. Lana is a hard-core quant researcher who wants to quantify the language of emotions and apply it to “big data.” What did Katja and Lana do? COLLABORATE.

Qual and quant are like yin and yang. They enrich and complete each other. Deep ethnography, text analytics, implicit testing, facial coding and survey research should get together and start sharing and testing ideas. That’s exactly what our talk “Marketers vs. Millennials” at IIeX Atlanta is about – testing a new collaborative approach of deep qualitative and emotion text analytics.

Do you wonder what Millennials feel about collaboration? Check out this emotion map based on 200 open-ended survey responders from US and Canada:

http://159.203.20.171/results_filters/108/

We have been seeing lots of great advances in quantitative research and analytics, especially when it comes to text analytics, neuromarketing, implicit association testing, data visualization, artificial intelligence and “big data”. In the world of data overload today, one only hopes that these advances will solve and not add to the overload.

We started this post with a story that illustrates the idea of collaboration. These stories are a domain of deep qualitative research. Without stories, the insights are flat and lifeless. Stories make quantitative insights multidimensional, memorable, and easier to integrate by our multidimensional brains. A story is how we create and evoke deep understanding and empathy.

We believe that qual is not dead. It is not about competition between qual and quant, or a race to the top – it is about collaboration to create a stronger story, more empathy, and thereby better communication, smarter products and stronger brands. Integration and collaboration is the name of the game.