14/11/19
The Foundation, Data Activation through Market Research?
Market research is a critical tool in helping companies understand what their consumers want. This helps give context to businesses that want to get a holistic understanding of what the consumer attitude and behaviour for their product or service is.
Market Research encompasses a lot of potential different customer interactions. It helps in understanding what potential customers think of your business in relation to your competitors, and understand what current customers would think of a new product or service that your business is planning on releasing.
Why is market research important for your business?
Understanding what your customers want – and don’t want – is the first step in taking your business to the next level. As a business, you need to have a constant pulse on the market, and what the customer perceptions and experiences are like. The better you understand what is going on in the market – the better you can make good business strategy decisions. We believe that knowledge is power – and market research empowers businesses to have this critically-needed knowledge.
How is market research done?
At Onest, we do both quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (focus groups and user testing) market research. We believe in the value of both approaches, however, we do recommend surveys as a starting point in market research, as surveys are immensely useful in getting data-driven, numbers-based answers to your questions, if done correctly.
What is good market research?
There is no good way to do market research, each and every one of them is unique with different requirements. However, there are common principles that need to be adhered to in order to provide valid results.
Fundamentally, a good market research survey should:
- Ask questions in an unbiased way, without framing any choices as more desirable than others
- Giving respondents a sufficiently varied list of potential choices in answering a question
- Provides the respondent with an appropriate survey flow
- Provides a good user experience – a survey must not be tedious to fill in.
6 things that cause poor market research
Bad market research is caused by:
- Long surveys
- No structure to the survey
- Survey flow is not personalised – asking questions that are irrelevant to certain types of respondents
- Non-representational answer choices – people want to answer truthfully, so it’s important to provide options that allow them to give an answer as close to the truth as possible
- Unavoidable questions that are frustrating to fill in
- Not getting responses from the target audience(s) of the survey.
Why you should use market research as part of your business strategy
Market research is not a one-and-done deal. In the modern world, customers want and needs change rapidly – and so must your business. Markets are very dynamic – and therefore market research has a relatively short shelf-life. At Onest, we believe that market research needs multiple periodic readings to get an accurate pulse of the market.
As previously explained, market research is the information you collect from the market. You can use this market data to understand what customer pain points are and mitigate them, for example improving customer service.
You’re probably already collecting market data without realising it: when a user reacts or posts on your Facebook page, or leaves a review. The problem is, if that feedback is not measured and analyzed, you’re missing out on the opportunity to use it to improve customer experience and leverage its growth potential.
