Online marketing research forums -- or bulletin board focus groups -- add important "time extension" to traditional depth interviews. Online Discussion Forums are virtual discussions conducted via exclusive online portals custom built for the marketing research project.

These highly involved qualitative marketing research discussions unfold over extended time frames. Forums, sometimes referred to as "qualitative bulletin boards" or "bulletin board focus groups (BBFG), deliver an outstanding qualitative method: forums have the interactive advantages of focus groups or face-to-face IDIs with the efficiencies and response validity of online interviewing technology.

Participants like the convenience of logging into Forums on their schedule, without the burden of appointment interviews or traveling to focus groups.

• Forums extend for 3 to 4 days, thus permitting incubation as participants review ideas, collect their thoughts, and consider their reactions. Thus, we acquire deep insight in a short time. Participants share their thoughts with great clarity and depth in Online Forums, offering an unexpected level of thinking, emotions, and understanding that far surpasses that which is normally acquired in traditional focus groups or online quantitative surveys.
• Multiple data capture methods: Forums rely heavily on qualitative open-ended text posts, yet short quant-like questionnaires are also used to rate concepts, ads, and brand preferences.
• Reach the hard-to-reach: Forums can bring together far-flung participants irrespective of geography, scheduling bricks, or time zones.
• Multiple stimuli: Using the Forum portal, we will be able to show marketing materials such as video, print, and audio format; ideal for conveying product concepts, ads, and positioning.
• Fast reporting: The Forum method and technology allows the moderation and analytic process to be integrated, allowing for early top-line reporting.

We conduct depth interviews with differing data collection methods: Traditional appointment or CLT in-person interviews are the mainstay. Growing in our portfolio is the hybrid online-phone, time-extended depth interview. Drawn from a carefully selected and managed panel, participants are contacted both online and by phone over a period of several days. This provides the market research depth interview respondent to consider questions and stimuli in an incubation mode, then to again express them in a follow up interview.

A set of depth interviews is often used as a prelude to quantitative market studies, customer online surveys, phone surveys, and other quantitative market research. Qualitative depth interviews are applicable to both business B2B market research, research, and to consumer research. Qualitative depth interviews are especially useful in the early stages of strategy decision-making.

The main point here is the value of getting in-depth insight into the buyer belief and attitude structure, and use this insight for business strategy development. For example, when scanning for strategic opportunities they can uncover important consumer and business buyer attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that may precede an emerging trend. Non-directive techniques and projective research techniques are especially useful in defining buyer motivations .

Different from statistically reliable public opinion and market surveys, online surveys, and other quantitative techniques, qualitative methods should not be used for market sizing, measuring consumer or B2B brand preference, brand position, customer satisfaction or buying or product usage behavior. They are best suited for uncovering the spectrum or range of views, beliefs, attitudes, opinions, and experiences. This helps build assumptions and generate ideas which may warrant further assessment.

Aside from qualitative market research depth interviews, other qualitative methods include focus groups, and special observational qualitative methods such as ethnographic studies. (Photo ethnography, for example, uses various methods to watch what people do e.g. store shopping, using products in their home, behavior during a sales call, etc.)

For more details, see our discussion in our FAQ about "Qualitative versus Quantitative" market research methods.