Article by Dr. Joseph Yeager, Ph.D.
Just as in the story of the three bears, marketing tools come in three sizes: small, medium and large. Size matters. For instance, no one would deliberately use the Hubble Telescope to search for bacteria.
SPSS and its quantitative cousins offer us profiles of population demographics and market segments at the large, macro scale. Marketers have a good time crunching numbers on a vast scale these days. In the opposite vein, we would use the small, micro scale tools of psychographics to measure the inner workings of the customer’s motives and decision-making strategies. Historically, qualitative tools have been less satisfying because of their "softness" than those of the quantitative realm of hard numbers.
