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With separate associations, conferences, and certifications for marketing researchers and user experience researchers, the two are often treated as distinct disciplines. While there are some differences, are we splitting hairs and creating an unnecessary and unwelcome divide? Let’s have a look at how much marketing researchers and user researchers have in common and how we can learn from each other.
Both seek to understand human behavior
At their core, both marketing researchers and user researchers seek to understand consumer and customer behaviors and preferences to drive better quality business decision-making. Where marketing researchers are trying to understand brand and product preferences and UX researchers are trying to understand how people want to experience and interact with those products and services, the underlying questions remain the same.
What do people want, need, and struggle with? When, where, why, and how are they struggling with those things? What is the human experience and how can we understand that experience more deeply and accurately?
Both UX researchers and market researchers have a genuine interest in the human experience and want to understand people.
Both share a methodological toolbox
Whether you have a personal preference for qualitative or quantitative techniques, marketing researchers and user researchers pull from the same toolbox overflowing with qualitative, quantitative, experimental, and correlational techniques. For example:
- Quantitative surveys: Both market researchers and UX researchers rely heavily on surveys. The quantitative data gathered from surveys helps both groups gather standardized data to describe differences among groups in unbiased ways and track trends over time. Surveys are an excellent way to quantify perspectives of both user experiences and brand perceptions.
- Interviews and focus groups: Focus groups and interviews are also heavily used by both types of researchers. Often, the best way to understand concerns and problems is to have a personal conversation with a researcher who is trained in thoughtful probing. Whether the thing being discussed is the UX of a website or product package, or the strengths and weaknesses of a TV commercial or a community program, inviting people to talk through their perceptions with a researcher, whether online or face to face, elicits deep and very personal insights.
- A/B and Test/Control designs: Whether it’s called A/B testing or Test/Control research, at the heart of much research is experimental design. The direct and controlled comparison of one group to another group can help us to understand which user experience or brand personality is preferred.
The same goes for shop-alongs, analytics, biometrics, bulletin-boards, AI/chatbot interviewing, and a host of other research techniques. All are well-loved and well-used by both marketing and user researchers.
Divergent goals and scope
So far, marketing and UX research have a lot in common. The key difference, however, lies in their goals and where their expertise is applied in the lifecycle of a product or service.
Marketing researchers embrace a broad range of goals over the entire product lifecycle. From pre-development innovations to pricing, customer experience, customer journeys, and market opportunities, their outputs are used extensively by brand managers, business strategists, and sales teams to solve a wide range of business problems.
On the other hand, user researchers have more narrow goals that focus on one aspect of the product lifecycle. Specifically, they seek to understand how people experience and interact with products and services, insights that are used not only by brand managers, business strategists, and sales teams, but also by product designers and engineers.
Marketing researchers address a wide range of objectives including UX research whereas UX researchers specialize in and have extensive experience in only UX research.
What can marketing researchers learn from user researchers?
Whether we’re marketing or user researchers, all researchers have generalist skills. We’re familiar with the pros and cons of questionnaire, focus group, interview, bulletin-board, shop-along, and analytics research tools. We’re familiar with considerations related to ethics, privacy, culture, and community nuances. We may not know the intricate details of every aspect but we know enough to advise research buyers on which technique would best suit their purposes and how to choose the best supplier to meet their needs.
Similarly, most researchers have specialist skills, expertise, and preferences. UX researchers love figuring out, understanding, and improving the user experience. Similarly, some marketing researchers love creating personal connections with consumers via focus groups and interviews while others love pricing research and the fun that goes along with conjoint analysis, Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter, and the Gabor-Granger technique.
Perhaps the key difference between marketing researchers and UX researchers is that user researchers have whole-heartedly embraced being specialist researchers with niche skills. Is it time for marketing researchers to take this as a cue? Many of us aren’t generalist qualitative researchers or quantitative researchers. We’re brand equity researchers, pricing researchers, packaging researchers, or persona researchers.
Depending on our unique passions, we too could champion and identify ourselves in these ways. Just as brand managers always know who to turn to when they need UX research, let’s help them know who to turn to when they need journey mapping research, package testing research, or ad testing research. We might even encourage our research associations to develop subject matter certifications for pricing researchers, brand equity researchers, and loyalty researchers.
For those of you who are already specialist researchers or who have chosen a path to become experts in online surveys, CATI, or qualitative coding, please get in touch with one of our experts. We’d love to be part of your expert team!
