Qual Thinking. Quant Scale.
Big Qual recruitment for a leading electrical retailer, via Kokoro
The Challenge
When a leading electrical retailer partnered with Kokoro, Zest’s sister research agency, to explore how consumers think about add-on purchases, the question wasn’t about the products themselves. It was about the moments.
Why does someone buying a TV also buy a stand, a warranty, or an installation service? What’s the situation, the mindset, the trigger? Understanding that behaviour required talking to real, recent shoppers, people who had actually been through that decision in the last six months, not panel respondents who vaguely recalled buying something electrical once.
That’s where Zest came in.
The Audience and Methodology
The target was consumers who had purchased electrical goods within the last six months and could speak meaningfully to the real-life situations that drive add-on decisions, insurance, accessories, installation, extended care plans. Recency mattered. So did the ability to articulate behaviour, not just report it.
A Big Qual approach gave Kokoro the scale to identify patterns across a broad sample while retaining the depth of conversation needed to understand the why behind purchasing decisions. Getting that balance right starts with recruiting the right people.
How Zest Delivered
Zest handled recruitment and end-to-end fieldwork management, screening for genuinely recent purchasers, qualifying for category relevance, and ensuring the sample could contribute the kind of rich behavioural insight the methodology demanded.
This was an early Zest Big Qual project, and it set a template we’ve since built on: close collaboration with the research team, a recruit built around real behaviour rather than surface demographics, and fieldwork managed with the same attention to quality whether there’s a focus group with 8 respondents or a Big Qual study with 100.
The research surfaced valuable insight into the situations and use cases that drive add-on purchasing, the kind of contextual understanding that can’t come from a quant survey alone.
What This Says About Zest
Not every brief involves a product to test or a venue to run. Some of the most valuable research is about understanding people’s behaviour in their own lives, and that requires participants who genuinely lived it, not just ticked a box.
Recruiting for depth is a different discipline to recruiting for volume. We’re equally comfortable with both.
Methodology:
Big Qual, Online Survey with Qualitative Depth
Respondents:
Recent electrical goods purchasers, UK-wide
Services:
Recruitment, screening, end-to-end fieldwork management