Whether people are planning for Diwali, Hannukah, and Christmas or looking far ahead to Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Father’s Day, qualitative insights are crucial for understanding the shopping behaviors they use to prepare for the perfect celebration.
Beyond interviews and focus groups, qualitative research techniques include a wide range of other tools such as shop-alongs, in-home ethnography, and diary studies. Here are five techniques retailers should consider when developing their holiday insights strategy.
1. Tease Out Personal Values and Beliefs with In-Depth Interviews
Every person brings a unique blend of family, history, and personal emotions to the holiday season. From joy and excitement to loneliness and grief, there is no unified experience retailers can rely on to build a successful holiday marketing strategy that is relevant for everyone.
With In-Depth interviews, skilled moderators can provide research participants with a unique opportunity to share thoughts and emotions that might feel too embarrassing for a focus group or too complex for a quantitative questionnaire.
In-Depth interviews can offer a judgment-free space in which consumers can share their most intimate thoughts around the holidays, allowing retailers to gain insights into the complexities of consumer emotions, underlying triggers, and coping mechanisms people use to navigate the holidays.
2. Understand Cultural Norms with Focus Groups
Focus groups are a cost-effective way for retailers to learn about the wide array of cultural and societal holiday norms. By bringing together a diverse group of people for a shared discussion, focus groups provide a platform to uncover traditions, customs, and experiences of holiday celebrations and shopping experiences that might impact holiday marketing strategies.
Focus groups are superior for helping retailers understand group interactions.
- Hearing about other people’s holiday experiences can trigger both positive and negative forgotten memories and feelings.
- Groups can help retailers understand how people react to cultural experiences they aren’t familiar with, thereby facilitating the avoidance of inappropriate marketing tactics.
By gaining deeper insights into cultural and societal norms during the holidays, focus groups help retailers and marketers create more meaningful and inclusive experiences that align with the values and expectations of diverse populations.
3. Understand Store Layouts with Shop-Alongs
A shop-along is a qualitative research technique wherein a researcher accompanies someone during a live or virtual shopping experience. Whether in-store or using a virtual environment, the researcher observes the person as they browse, interact with products or services and make purchase decisions in a live or simulated retail situation.
This technique is effective for gaining a deep understanding of factors that influence consumer choices including product placement, packaging, pricing, signage, and even interactions with sales staff. It allows researchers to observe the challenges, frustrations, or areas of improvement people face during the shopping journey. Most importantly, researchers use shop-alongs to help observe behavior that might never arise as part of a questionnaire or interview.
Because retailers often completely redesign their outlets for the holidays, shop-alongs are uniquely positioned to help identify and prevent potential problems that can arise when customers encounter a new experience.
- Shop-alongs help retailers determine whether new navigation patterns create areas of congestion that will frustrate holiday shoppers.
- New layouts, displays, or signage that create or detract from a positive experience can be identified and improved as necessary.
- Shop-alongs can pinpoint which areas or products are immediately noticed or unknowingly bypassed.
With this first-hand data, retailers can optimize store layouts, improve signage, create attractive product displays, and enhance the overall shopping experience for their holiday customers.
4. Get Real with In-home Ethnography
In-home ethnography is a technique wherein the researcher joins the participants in their own home to observe and understand their lived experiences. In rare cases, it may include simply chatting with them but, more often, it focuses on a tour of their home to see first-hand how and where products and services are used and kept. Fridges, cabinets, and cupboards might be opened, examined, and photographed for further analysis.
In-home ethnographies are the perfect way to understand exactly what happens to products after they leave the store, particularly for retailers offering private-label products.
- In-home ethnographies can help retailers uncover new store layouts after observing first-hand how people store certain products together or separately in their own homes.
- More creative store displays may result after seeing products stored in unexpected places throughout the home.
- Spokespeople in advertising could become more representative after observing how different household members, including children, elderly people, and disabled people, use products.
By observing people in their own homes first-hand, retailers can gain a better understanding of product usage thereby creating more meaningful product displays in store.
5. Extract Channel Differences from Diary Studies
Diary studies require participants to record their in-the-moment thoughts, experiences, and activities in a physical or digital journal over a period of several days or weeks. Particularly during the holiday season, people might visit several physical stores, and many online stores, and then be shown another ten stores while they browse their Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok accounts. As such, diaries can serve to counter memory problems and increase data accuracy.
These detailed collections of thoughts about their daily lives, behaviors, and perceptions help retailers understand how consumers use the range of physical stores, online platforms, and mobile apps throughout the holiday season.
- Observe the customer journey path to purchase in real-time as people record their journey from channel to channel.
- Give people the opportunity to rethink and improve earlier self-reflections about their channel decisions.
By utilizing diary studies, researchers can gain a comprehensive understanding of consumers’ holiday shopping experiences, preferences, and behaviors, helping stores tailor their strategies and optimize each channel for a seamless holiday shopping experience.
Maximize Holiday Insights with Qualitative Research Techniques
Most retailers planned and executed their end-of-year holiday research several months ago, but with a busy schedule of Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day coming up, it’s essential to be prepared for the next popular holiday.
Qualitative research is an essential tool for retail outlets heading into the holiday season. It enables a deep understanding of consumer shopping behaviors, emotions, and preferences that can be used to optimize store layouts, design effective holiday displays, enhance customer service, and tailor marketing strategies. And, it enables retailers to connect with their target audience on a deeper level, providing the foundation for creating memorable and engaging holiday shopping experiences that drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, increased sales.
Explorer Research has the expertise and immersive, 3D, and virtual tools to help you leverage qualitative customer insights, and build a stronger customer path to purchase that drives conversion and shopper satisfaction. Get in touch with us to explore your opportunities further.
