AI and Qualitative Market Research

Qualitative market research has always been about digging deep to understand the motivations, emotions, and context behind why customers are making decisions. This is the valuable information that numbers alone cannot reveal, but it comes with a high cost in terms of time, logistics, expertise, and reporting. 

That is where AI tools for research are helping to change the game, complementing the work of researchers and allowing them to amplify their work. When integrated correctly, it can automate monotonous and resource-heavy tasks, significantly expand your reach, shorten timelines, and unlock new insights that might have previously been out of reach. 

Let’s take a closer look at how to use AI for market research, especially for qualitative projects, giving you the tools and knowledge you need to move ahead with confidence.  

What is AI in qualitative market research?

When we talk about artificial intelligence in qualitative market research, we are referring to tools that support, automate, and enhance your traditionally human-led research processes. This could be things such as AI-moderated interviews, natural language processing for theme and sentiment analysis, automating transcripts, concept testing and more. 

Rather than replacing the depth or nuance of qualitative inquiry, AI acts as a scalable assistant that can handle the repetitive tasks, capture patterns in unstructured data, and help your team to uncover insights faster. This means you will need to spend less time on logistics and more time on the important things such as analysis and strategy. 

Automating transcription, coding and theme extraction with AI

A major pain point in qualitative research is the manual labor of transcribing, tagging, coding, and sorting through data. This is an area where AI tools for research shine, allowing your team to instantly analyze open-ended survey responses and identify themes, clusters, and sentiment, and even pull our representative quotes. 

Here’s how it works… 

— Instant transcriptions 

AI is able to turn spoken responses into text with incredibly high accuracy, drastically cutting out the time your team needs to spend transcribing responses. 

— Automated coding 

Instead of having to hand-tag every line, AI tools for market research are able to identify those emerging themes, the frequency of specific mentions, positive, and negative sentiments and much more. 

— Theme summaries 

It will also be able to compile a comprehensive summary of the top themes, subthemes, and participant quotes in a presentable format. 

Again, knowing how to use AI for market research in this approach yields a number of advantages. What used to take days can now be done in a mere matter of minutes, freeing up your team’s time so they can focus on more important tasks.

The analysis AI provides also allows you to easily compare themes across regions, demographics, and customer segments, while the automated coding removes the risk of inconsistent or incorrect human tagging. 

AI-moderated interviews after qualitative market research 

Once you have completed human-moderated focus groups and one-on-one interviews, you may still have certain questions. For example, perhaps a theme has emerged throughout the answers that you were not able to fully explore, or you require deeper context for a particular demographic segment. 

Whatever it might be, AI-moderated follow-ups will be able to add nuance to your data without any additional logistical burden. Here’s how it works:

— Targeted follow-up 

These AI tools for research will be able to select respondents based on age, location, rating, or interests, reducing the admin and time you need to spend. 

— Consistent probing 

Artificial intelligence can use built logic to dive much deeper into complex issues, ensuring a consistent and unbiased follow-up across all of your participants. 

— Supplemental context 

Because interviews can be done asynchronously, participants can provide more thoughtful, detailed responses without scheduling constraints.

This can provide a wide range of benefits to your research team. One of the biggest is that they will no longer need to coordinate schedules, and participants will be able to respond and engage when most convenient to them. You will also be able to easily explore secondary segments or side hypotheses that may have been overlooked. 

This layered approach transforms human-led interviews into a hybrid model, with AI tools adding extra depth to your qualitative market research, enabling you to build a more robust and trustworthy insight.

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AI for market research prototype reviews and feedback

You can layer in additional AI applications to your qualitative market research. For example: 

— Prototype walkthroughs 

AI moderators can guide users through early designs or flows, eliciting feedback and capturing sentiment.

— Concept testing 

You can test multiple AI-generated scripts, headlines, and product ideas to understand what resonates most deeply with your target audience. 

— Iterative testing 

You will also be able to use AI to adjust conversation paths based on emerging needs. For example, if users are responding negatively to a phrase about being, “budget-friendly” it can identify that and use alternate phrasing like “value-orientated”. 

All of this can be done quickly and efficiently, ensuring your small or busy team is not overwhelmed and you are always able to enjoy the highest quality of data. 

Scale with ease 

One of the most compelling arguments for embracing AI tools for research is it allows you to quickly scale your project without the usual costs or time. Traditional multilingual research requires translation, local recruitment, moderated sessions, and cultural adaptations, which all significantly multiply costs and timelines. 

With AI, you will be able to localize content with ease, ensuring the lexicon and cultural context are suited to the audience. It can also adjust the sentiment and tone across geographies to specific patterns or issues for that region. AI interviews are also asynchronous, allowing them to occur across time zones without the need for live translators or moderators. 

Wondering how to use AI for market research?

Well-executed research is still about human empathy, strategic insight, and captivating storytelling, and AI tools for research are not a substitute for this but are here to empower your team. By automating the time-consuming tasks, they will be able to spend more time advising clients on what to do with the insights. 

At Yasna, we’re on a mission to make embracing AI tools for market research as easy as possible. Our tool automates in-depth interviews, a staple in qualitative research, streamlining the entire process from setup to reporting. You can test it out with no strings attached through a free 2-week trial.

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