Introduction
Coding in Market Research is the process of reviewing text responses from surveys and assigning "codes" to each response to denote the themes or topics that are being expressed by a survey respondent.
The ultimate aim of doing this is to convert text responses into numeric data for analysis purposes.
Why do we need coding?
Suppose you conduct a survey amongst a your customers and ask them what they thought of your service. You might receive back a set of raw data that looks like this:
As a researcher, your job is to interpret this data and work out if customers are satisfied or not? what did they like? what did they dislike and so on.
You could just read through the comments and get a sense for the answers, however it's hard to do this objectively and accurately. The problem becomes extremely hard when you have thousands, or hundreds of thousands of comments.
Instead, you could take a systematic approach, and "code" each response with the themes or topics that it contains.
Doing so, might result in data that looks like this:
Once your data has been coded in this way, it is easy to count up the themes and summarise the results. You may end up with a summary something like this:
From this, it is easy to see that your staff are generally giving good service (congratulations!) but there are still areas for improvement.
Why do we need a coding tool?
If your survey is very simple, like the one above, you don't need a dedicated coding tool - Excel will work just fine. However, real-world surveys tend to be large and complex. They often involve multiple languages, teams of coders complex data files and very complicated lists of themes. For this kind of work, a tool like Excel is not appropriate. A dedicated coding tool, like codeit, is optimised for the task of coding and can get the job done far more efficiently and effectively.