All Market Research Is About Choices
My sense of the market research space is that researchers over complicate the industry and what services they provide to the end customer. For anyone procuring information on customers, it’s hard to conceptualize what a research supplier offers when the intent of the offer hides behind jargon and marketing buzzwords. This is purposeful. It forces a conversation to clarify what is and isn’t possible, but to my eyes, its unnecessarily over complicating what researchers do. So, with that in mind, I present a grand simplification of the 3 types of market research you may need to conduct and how they tie together.
Understand your Choices
The first type of research exercise is to understand a market or consumer. This includes breaking into new segments, new geographies, and building knowledge. The goal of any exercise in building understanding is to create a list of choices that you can deploy in your business to drive growth.
Let’s take an example. Imagine a group of brand managers at a soft drink company looking to break into a new geography. They will need to understand the new market: taste preferences, local pricing practices, and shopping behaviors, among many other questions. Based on the knowledge they gain in this exercise; they will probably create a series of potential product concepts to launch in the new market. The genres of research that typically fall into this category include segmentation, ethnographies, market studies, usage & attitudes, ad expenditure monitoring, qualitative, early-stage innovation and many more.
Adjudicate your Choices
It’s time to make some choices. This is the aim of the second major type of research: evaluate your choices and pick the winner. Once we’ve understood a population, the product teams at our company will design a product or solution they deem likely to be an attractive offer for the end consumer. However, because of our imperfect knowledge of the population, we will develop several choices to maximize the chances that product that will resonate with the end consumer.
Expanding on our previous example, our fictional soft drink brand managers will work with the product team to develop new products with flavors that appeal to the new market. To evaluate the success of these efforts, the brand team would run a blind taste experiment in the market to pick which beverage is most appealing to the target audience. This is an active category of market research where you’ll find study type such as product testing, concept testing, ad testing, web site usability testing, copy testing, package testing, and on and on.
Track your Choices
We come to the last category of market research: tracking your choices. You’ve made it this far; you know where this goes next. We’ve now built our knowledge about the market. With that knowledge, we created a list of choices for tackling the market. We then tested each of those choices to pick the choice we plan to implement. The natural next step is to track the performance of the choice we made. This is implementing research designed to monitor the performance of our choices. If we understood the market, and we made the correct choice, then tracking should validate our good work. However, over time, things will change, opinions change, and markets change. We’ll have to start the cycle again at some point.
In the world of our soft drink company, this phase of the research might include a beverage consumption tracking survey or a syndicated service. Tracking research is a common area to find lots of vendors and solutions. This is because tracking by definition is a longer-term project, which translates into bigger revenues for the research companies. In this category, we find brand tracking, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, TV ratings, consumer purchase tracking, and many more.
All market research feeds choices, given that it’s simple to see how all research offers fit the various stages of the journey. I challenge you to find a category of market research that doesn’t fit this framework. It works well for product development, advertising, customer journeys, employee research and even within the world of political polling.
If you work in a field where you’re a buyer of market research, I’d encourage you to deploy this framework for all the problems you’re tackling with research. All problems run through each of the steps on the journey and I think it’s critical for buyers of research to understand how they’ll address each phase of the process. Knowing what parts you intend to do in house or what you intend to outsource is a critical decision for all companies. To be nimble in decision making requires that where you do plan on outsourcing, you’ve already determined who you’ll go to when the need arises.
It’s often the case that an analyst joins a company and given a tracking study to manage. Eventually, we’ll see data that shows that the choices the brand has been making are not succeeding. Given that, does the analyst know how to shift gears to the understanding phase? Do they understand how to adjudicate the next set of choices? In this situation, the research vendor will often step in to help evaluate the problem by providing more understanding or suggesting alternate choices. Taking that advice only works when you’ve decided that the vendor can help with that phase of the journey. So, my advice to research buyers is to pick vendors for each phase of the research journey before you need them. In doing that, you’ll be able to respond to changing conditions.
For research vendors, deploying this framework in the offer development process will help design a research product portfolio that keeps buyers engaged with your firm throughout the research journey. This enables you to help your clients speed up growth and in a more connected manner.