Qualitative research methods for investigating business-to-business marketing questions

Over the last decade, the marketing domain's acceptance of qualitative research as a publishable research methodology has grown materially, as has the understanding of what constitutes "good" (publishable) qualitative research. Overall, somewhere around 15% of the articles published in the business-to-business academic journals use qualitative research methodologies. In addition, all articles in AMS Review are conceptual or theoretical and include BtoB topics. Furthermore, in the last five years, both the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, marketing journals on the Financial Times 50 list, have published business to business research using these methods. This chapter reviews when to use qualitative methods, the breadth of methods that constitute qualitative research, how qualitative research proceeds, and how to execute and demonstrate quality and rigor in using these methods to increase the probability of publication success for qualitative research.