Attempts to explain consumer behaviour ie the reasoning behind how, what, when and why people buy. It involves exploring consumers’ attitudes, beliefs, feelings, opinions, perceptions, values and prior experience. It is, therefore, expensive to carry out. In addition, the unstructured nature of the responses makes the data collected difficult to quantify. It has been criticised for focusing too closely on individual responses. However, qualitative research may uncover key information that would not otherwise have been identified using pre-set questions.