At Mandonna, we are passionate about all things gender and research. In this Research Tips & Tricks blog, we break down the concept of market research and its various forms. Read on to discover more!
What is Market research?
Before releasing new goods or services, a company does market research to examine consumer preferences, competitors, and market trends, which helps them develop effective marketing strategies and optimize their market positioning. It is a business strategy to understand the consumer sphere.
To best cater your services to your target audience, adapting a company’s marketing strategy to one that understands its consumers and their needs and behaviour patterns is of utmost importance. Here, market research comes in.
It entails gathering and analyzing data about your target market during the marketing or product development process to confirm the viability of a new product, predict the audience’s response to a service or comprehend brand perception. For this, a company must establish an internal research and development department or contract with a third party to assess how well its goods and services will function when released.
What is the Importance of Market Research?
In an ever-changing market, it is vital to understand your customers’ problems, requirements and desired solutions so that you may curate their product or service to appeal to them. Here, using efficient market research helps you create a market development strategy.
Market research also provides insight into a wide variety of things, such as:
- Who and where are your target audience?
- Who are your competitors, and which of them does your audience look to for information and purchases?
- What is currently trending in the industry?
- What influences spending patterns among your consumers?
- What are the pricing issues? Among other questions.
Ultimately, market research gives you access to information from a bigger sample size of your target audience, helps you understand consumer sentiment, and gives you an edge in the industry, so that you can make better business decisions.
Types of Market Research
The types of market research vary depending on the techniques and equipment used. These include:
- Interviews:
Interviews, whether conducted in person or virtually, offer a valuable opportunity for open and natural discussions with individuals. They enable the observation of the interviewee’s body language and expressions, which can help gather information about their personal and professional life, helping create detailed buyer personas. These personas include age, family size, job title, and work-related challenges, providing a clear profile of the ideal customer. This information is crucial for shaping marketing strategies, product features, and website content to target and engage with the audience.
- Focus Groups:
Focus groups involve selected individuals who can assess your product, view demos, offer feedback, and answer specific questions. This market research approach helps identify product differentiators, highlighting unique qualities in the market. It involves asking the group about your services, showing examples, and using their feedback to enhance these services.
- Product/Service use:
Product or service usage research provides valuable insights into your audience utilisation and the underlying reasons behind it, focusing on specific product features. This type of market research also assesses the product or service user-friendliness for the intended target audience.
- Observation Based Research:
Observation-based research enables one to step back and observe how your target audience interacts with your product or service. It helps you identify what aspects of user experience are effective, where they encounter challenges, and which elements could be made more user-friendly.
- Buyer Persona Research:
Buyer persona research provides valuable insights into the composition of your target audience, their unique challenges, motivations for seeking your product or service, expectations from your business and brand, and other essential details, offering a comprehensive understanding of your potential customers.
- Market Segmentation Research:
Market segmentation research enables one to group their target audience into distinct segments based on key and defining traits. By doing so, you can identify effective strategies to address their requirements, gain insights into their challenges and expectations, gain knowledge about their objectives, and more effectively tailor your approach to each segment.
- Pricing Research:
Pricing research provides insights into the pricing landscape of comparable products or services in your market, the price range the target audience anticipates and is ready to spend on your offerings, and the appropriate price point for listing your product or service. This data serves as a foundation for shaping your pricing strategy.
- Competitive Analysis:
Conducting competitive analysis is crucial as it provides you with profound insights into the competitive landscape within your market and industry. This information helps you identify successful practices in your industry, understand the preferences of your target audience about products similar to yours, pinpoint competitors that you should strive to outperform, and determine how you can effectively differentiate yourself from the competition.
- Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research:
Research on customer satisfaction and loyalty offers insights into how to encourage existing customers to return for repeat business and the factors that drive their motivation, such as loyalty programs, rewards, and exceptional customer service. This research assists in identifying the most efficient methods to cultivate satisfaction and delight among your customers. If you employ a CRM system, consider using automated customer feedback surveys to facilitate this endeavour.
- Brand Awareness Research:
Brand awareness research provides insights into the level of recognition and knowledge your target audience has about your brand. It helps you understand the connections and perceptions that your audience forms when they think about your business, shedding light on their understanding of your brand identity and values.
- Campaign Research:
Campaign research involves reviewing your previous campaigns and assessing their effectiveness with your target audience and existing customers. It necessitates a process of trial and analysis to identify the elements that engage and connect with your audience, enabling you to retain these successful aspects for future campaigns and focus on what truly matters to your audience.
The complexity of any project or business needs might influence the nature of market intelligence and research. With this blog on types of market research, we hope you will gain a better grasp of the concept of market research to obtain insightful data and make more informed judgments.
Authorship Credits
Debastuti Talukdar is a 3rd-year Political Science student at Deshbandhu College and the Head of Content at Mandonna
Chhavi is a 2nd-year Economics student at Hindu College and a Marketing Strategy Intern at Mandonna
Graphics Credits
Sabia is a Graphic Designing intern at Mandonna
