BUSI 614 Week 2 Qualitative Assignment 1 Example

Hearing the Switchers: Designing Qualitative Research for a Pet Food Brand Losing Younger Owners

The Research Problem and Why It Calls for Qualitative Research

Northfield Pet Foods, a composite mid-sized maker of premium dry dog food sold through pet specialty stores, has seen its share of buyers under 35 fall for two years. Its sales data show that many of these households stopped buying, and industry reports suggest that some younger owners have moved to fresh, refrigerated or subscription meal services delivered to the home. The company's managers must decide whether to respond with a new product, a subscription program of their own, a change in marketing or none of these.

The managers do not yet know why younger owners leave, what they believe about fresh food, what words they use to describe feeding their dogs or which needs a new offering would have to meet. A survey at this stage would ask questions built on the managers' assumptions and might miss the real reasons entirely. Malhotra's chapters on exploratory research describe qualitative methods as suited to exactly this situation: when the problem must be understood, hypotheses developed and variables identified before measurement. A survey can tell Northfield how many owners hold a belief, but only qualitative research can tell it which beliefs to count.

Focus Groups or Depth Interviews

Focus groups bring eight to ten people together with a moderator, allowing participants to react to one another and producing a large volume of discussion quickly. Depth interviews are one-on-one conversations, usually lasting an hour, that allow the interviewer to probe each person's reasoning, use techniques such as laddering to connect product attributes to personal values and discuss sensitive topics without social pressure.

The evidence favors depth interviews for Northfield's purpose. Fern (1982) compared the ideas generated by focus groups with those generated by the same number of individuals interviewed separately, with the ideas from the individual sessions pooled, and found that the individual interviews produced more ideas. Group discussion, which is often assumed to stimulate ideas, may instead lead participants to defer to others or to repeat what has been said. Griffin and Hauser (1993), studying how to identify customer needs for product development, found that one-on-one interviews were at least as effective per respondent as focus groups and that about 20 to 30 interviews uncovered roughly 90% or more of the needs in a product category, with further interviews adding few new needs.

Feeding a pet also raises personal matters, such as cost, guilt about feeding choices and views of the dog as a family member, that people may discuss more openly alone. The choice has costs as well. Twenty-four interviews take more moderator time than three focus groups, and individual sessions do not show how owners influence one another's views, which matters for a product discussed so heavily among friends and online. Focus groups still have a role later, for example in reacting to concepts for a new product, where observing how people respond to one another's reactions is useful.

Recommended Design

I recommend 24 depth interviews of 45 to 60 minutes, conducted by video call to reach owners in several regions. The sample would be purposive: 12 owners aged 25 to 34 who bought Northfield regularly within the past two years and have since switched to a fresh or subscription service, and 12 in the same age range who still buy Northfield. Comparing the two groups shows what distinguishes switchers. Participants would be recruited from the company's loyalty program records and a research panel, screened for dog ownership and purchase history and paid an incentive.

The interview guide would move from general to specific: how the owner thinks about the dog's role in the household, how feeding decisions are made, the story of the switch or of staying, and the attributes that matter in a food. Laddering would connect attributes, such as visible fresh ingredients, to consequences, such as a dog that seems healthier, and to values, such as caring for a family member. A short projective exercise, completing sentences about "people who feed their dog kibble," could surface beliefs owners hesitate to state directly.

Interviews would be recorded and transcribed with consent. Two analysts would code the transcripts independently, compare their codes and develop themes, continuing until new interviews produce no new themes, a point known as saturation. The analysts would then summarize each theme with representative quotations, note how often it appeared among switchers compared with loyal buyers and report the themes to managers in a short workshop, so that the managers who must decide hear the customers' own words rather than a summary of them. Griffin and Hauser's finding that additional analysts identify additional needs supports using two coders rather than one.

Online Communities as a Complement

Younger owners discuss feeding choices extensively in online forums, social media groups and product reviews. Kozinets (2002) described netnography, an adaptation of ethnographic methods to online communities, as a way to study naturally occurring consumer discussion that is less costly and less obtrusive than interviews. He also emphasized the need to disclose the researcher's presence when participating, to obtain permission when quoting members and to recognize that online discussion represents active community members rather than all consumers. For Northfield, a netnographic study of two or three large dog owner communities over six weeks would reveal the vocabulary owners use, the claims about fresh food they share and the complaints they voice about subscription services, adding perspective the interviews might miss. The study would be passive: the researcher would read and code public posts without joining discussions, quote no member without permission and report themes rather than usernames. Because the most active posters often hold the strongest views, the netnographic findings would be treated as a source of ideas to test, not as an estimate of how owners in general think.

Limits and the Next Step

Qualitative findings come from small, purposive samples and cannot show how common a belief or reason is among all younger owners. Their value lies in identifying the reasons, needs and language that the next stage should measure. The themes from the interviews and the online study would become hypotheses, such as the belief that fresh food improves a dog's health being the main driver of switching, and would supply the wording for a questionnaire sent to a representative sample of owners. That survey, one of the descriptive designs the chapters cover, would estimate how widespread each reason is, how strongly it relates to switching and which segments Northfield could win back, giving managers the evidence to decide among a new product, a subscription program and a new marketing message.

References

Fern, E. F. (1982). The use of focus groups for idea generation: The effects of group size, acquaintanceship, and moderator on response quantity and quality. Journal of Marketing Research, 19(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378201900101

Griffin, A., & Hauser, J. R. (1993). The voice of the customer. Marketing Science, 12(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.12.1.1

Kozinets, R. V. (2002). The field behind the screen: Using netnography for marketing research in online communities. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 61-72. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.39.1.61.18935