Mike Porter, senior clinical professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas, was featured in a “Homegrown Hustle” podcast video. From the customer’s journey to economic strategies, Porter discusses what successful marketing means, and how to know you’re taking your business in the right direction.
From the video:
Mike Porter: Qualitative research gives you the opportunity to learn the things you can’t know or you can’t guess. So, in a focus group or a one-on-one interview, you’re learning things about me and marketing that you would not have known to ask about. … It’s better for dialogue to happen across the table. We call it “cross talk,” and when that starts happening, that’s where the value is.
Matt Eickman: And that expands on the qualitative side.
Porter: Then as a marketer you can say “Okay, well these are the things we learned that we kind of thought we knew about, and here’s the stuff that’s new.” ... The point is this back and forth, and research is a good thing. You do some quant, you learn some things, you go back to qualitative and learn some more things. It’s an interactive process and good marketing has some of that going on all the time.
Eickman: So, if I had to guess, these focus groups were being recorded and documented. And it’s just a concept to put into a stage, and the idea is to go deeper into the qualitative side?
Porter: What we’re trying to do is find better ways to get deeper, more real truth out of people. My colleague calls this whole thing “the quest for truth.” ... I was telling my students yesterday, I could not do what he does with his age group. He can tell a story about his life and put people in a much more comfortable space, and so that back and forth creates the rapport. … So, who’s know the questioner makes a difference too.
