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Brand Market Research & Consumer Insights
Whether you are a small business or a large conglomerate, making assumptions about your consumers’ habits, tastes, or preferences can be risky. If you want to know the truth, you need objective market research.
Market research helps you never to make assumptions about your consumers’ habits, tastes, or preferences. Take the time to talk to them and be sure.
Asking the right questions will provide valuable insights that affirm your assumptions, prevent costly mistakes, or help you better align with your market.
In-depth groups or One-On-One workshops can both generate insights.
Where do I start with planning Market Research?
While there are many ways to undertake market research, most businesses use one or more of five basic methods: surveys, focus groups, personal interviews, observation, and field trials. The type of data you need and how much money you’re willing to spend will determine which techniques you choose for your business.
Surveys
Concise and straightforward online or in-person questionnaires help analyse a slice of your target market. In-person surveys are one-on-one interviews typically conducted in high-traffic locations like shopping malls. They allow you to present people with products, packaging, or advertising samples and gather immediate feedback as they make purchasing decisions.
The quality of the data we can obtain from a survey like this depends on the skilful construction and wording of the questions. Questions mustn’t “lead” respondents, so you can capture objective data. We also avoid ambiguous and easily misinterpreted words and always pilot questions before going live. It can be costly to establish the methodology, engage, recruit and test with this method, but it delivers reliable results. Online tools like Survey Monkey, Bloomfire, and Toluna can greatly aid. You can achieve response rates of more than 90 per cent using this method; the larger the sample size, the more confident you will be in making decisions based on the data the process elicits.
Online surveys are a great way to get input from all stakeholders
Focus groups
Focus groups are another method for capturing qualitative data. This means you seek subjective feedback, such as customer quotes, to support or refine a brand, product or service release. Focus groups are usually run by a moderator who uses scripted questions to guide a group discussion. This format is repeated across customer segments to capture sentiment and group responses into actionable points.
Personal interviews
Like focus groups, personal interviews include unstructured, open-ended questions. These are usually our favourite ways to learn more about any brand. Focus groups and individual interviews provide more subjective data than surveys. Although not as statistically reliable as a formal survey, they often yield valuable insights into stakeholder minds and are an excellent way to unearth previously hidden truths around a brand.
Market Research reduces risk, providing a solid foundation for decisions.
Observation
Individual responses to surveys and focus groups sometimes contradict people’s actual behaviour. When you observe consumers in action by videotaping them in stores, at work, or at home, you can see how they buy or use a product. This gives us a more honest picture of how people interact with or use a brand.
Field trials
You are placing a new product to test how customer response under real-life conditions can help you tweak your offering.
10 benefits of using Market Research for your brand
1. Communicate more effectively
With the insights you gain from the market research, you can realign your brand with the most effective messaging to communicate to your current and future customers.
2. Identify opportunities in your marketplace
Research can make it obvious what your market wants or needs. You may then decide to realign your approach to what you offer to suit your audience. Research can show that a new product you have planned may not meet your market’s needs. You can then make modifications to what you are going to offer to suit your audience.
3. Minimise risks
Investing what is often only a tiny proportion of your branding spend in research means you may find all the information you need to decide whether to take specific action. Both primary research (fieldwork) and secondary research (desk research) can be utilised as an insurance policy against both apparent dangers on the road ahead. It also means that you can stand out by being brave in your choices.
4. Strengthen your position
Knowledge is power. Using market research to better understand how you measure up against your competitors means you can find out just where you are. Then, based on the results, you can adjust your perception.
5. Uncover and identify potential problems
Understanding consumers’ reactions to a new product or service while it is still in development helps shape it to better match its intended market.
6. Forecasting
Accurate market research can empower you to make plans to manage your brand. Analysis can estimate the likely sales of a new product/service, allowing you to allocate the advertising expenditure required to achieve and maximise your profits. By examining every factor in the market, you can also predict how it will grow or change in the future, helping you plan.
7. Identify and establish trends
Suppose you treat your market research as an ongoing exercise that you do periodically. In that case, you’ll find that you have a lot of data to analyse to understand your customers and identify any particular trends. Staying ahead in business is often about being the first, being the best, or doing something no one else has thought of. Potential customers can then be divided into segments. You want to focus on the best market, not necessarily the largest or the one with the highest growth – it will be the one that aligns with your brand’s vision.
8. Establish your market positioning
Knowing your business benchmarking position and monitoring your progress is always good. Knowing your market location can help you make decisions and take action. This prevents your business from reversing course to drive sales and profitability as the world changes around you.
9. Understand your customers
Customers within a particular target market behave differently. Their behaviours affect the growth and profitability of a trade. It is good to know what customers like and the products they shun. With this information, you will know which products are perfect for their current needs. A lack of understanding of the customers can culminate in a brand completely missing the mark.
10. Quality of decisions
The value of every decision is a function of the facts you have. Market research will help you gain a new angle and, hopefully, a compromise on how you will approach a new launch, brand, or repositioning. A lack of proper facts can culminate in poor decisions. In business, a miscalculated decision or choice can be costly. To maximise your returns, it is best to measure twice and cut once.
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