Lecture Notes - Marketing Research Design Professor Thomas P. Novak Marketing Research 461 OGSM, Vanderbilt University 1. Exploratory research allows the researcher to gain insights and ideas.
Exploratory research is flexible, unstructured, and can be very creative.
As an example, consider the problem of developing an identity for a new brand. For image-intensive products such as perfume, brand name is critical. It provides a major cue to the consumer as to whether the product will be congruent with the consumer's self-image. Women were shown the images and bottles of two brands of perfume in focus groups, and asked to describe the women and the perfumes. Both brand names turned out to have creative personalities, but in different ways.