The future success of your business depends on your ability to perform meaningful market research. Does this come as a surprise? It shouldn’t.
Market research allows you to:
- Measure customer satisfaction
- Make your marketing more efficient
- Find new customers
- Develop a customer-centric product development cycle
Assuming that you are selling a useful good or service, knowing any or all of the bullet points above would be considered useful by most business people.
A study done by an Australian research group discovered that firms that had strong market research capabilities had greater sales growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and new product success rates were firms that had significantly greater market research abilities (Vorhies, Harker, Rao 1999).
Market research is a complicated thing. This is because the research revolves around people. However, here are some things you might want to know when trying to improve you market research abilities:
Be Brave – When you start digging for information, sometimes you find stuff that will shock you. Think of Domino’s Pizza and their new advertising campaign.
Use statistical analysis – In the book Meaningful Marketing, Doug Hall says, “Statistics are required if you are to make decisions that are reliable and reproducible. Research without statistics is about as reliable as your horoscope.” Statistics are not fun to do, but an understanding of what data are saying is imperative to improving your marketing research ability.
Use many research methods – From the Domino’s video above, it appears that they are making a very wide set of assumptions based on some focus groups. I’m sure that Domino’s would not try to overhaul their pizza operations based on a few focus groups. I’m sure they had more data, but regression analysis outputs are not very exciting to look at in commercials. When trying to improve your market research abilities it is important to become familiar with many research techniques and each technique’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, focus groups provide a lot of depth to your research, however, focus groups are small and should not stand alone as representative of your target market or customer base.
Think like a scientist – Back in school I took a lot of science classes. These classes taught me, through example and practice, that nearly all major scientific discoveries have come about via the use of the scientific method. This means that a scientist made an observation, asked a question, proposed a hypothesis, designed an experiment, collected data, analysed the data, made a conclusion, and in many cases asked another question based on the conclusion – which started the process all over again.
This article was sourced from serfwerks.com – click here to read the whole article.
