Market Research Overview

The purpose of market research is to gain insight into your customers, competitors, and the perception of your business in the eyes of others. You want to guide your business with more than just gut instinct.

Today I gave our interns an overview of market research, so I thought I’d turn the bulleted list into a blog post to share. Enjoy.

Like any research, the scientific method is your guiding light to maintain objectivity and structure in your work. This means we’re going to define a question, assume a hypothesis, test it against real data and review the results. Simple right? Well... often the case involves cloudy questions and the desire to find certain results pops up even before you get started. So, how to do it right…

What's the purpose? Defining the purpose of your study shouldn’t be too hard. Is this about increased sales, company perception or your competitive landscape? Maybe you’re going to tackle several questions at once, just keep your purpose clear. For our example we’ll be asking if a great new “Super Viral Widget 4.0 tm” is going to be a success, even before it launches.

What are your definitions? Often it’s important to identify some clear operation definitions within your study. For example we’ll define “success” as the number embeds on blogs and online profiles. Not: sponsorship deals, hits per widget, corporate embed, partnerships, etc.

To conduct our study we'll need to select other widgets to analyze. Just by establishing that we're doing great. We can even draw up a chart now, one axis being the number of viral embeds-- our success factor.

Where to get info? In order to find data we have several choices: some companies will offer market data; advanced use of search engines can offer comparisons; or we could define a test region and collect data (e.g. sending an email survey to your customer base.) It’s good practice to select more than one way to collect and verify your data. We didn’t say market research was easy. It can be tough when reponse rates can be less than 10%. The pay-off is bankable info for your business.

Let's choose to study some primary sources (widget use on sites.) We'll want to define: our path for searching, our method of recording results, and the area of coverage. So, for example we’ll use three search engines to find 18 sample emdedable widgets. Next, we’ll create a spreadsheet to keep track of the data we collect about each. Easy right!

In our example we could find embed data by using those three search engines to record the number of results for the 18 widgets. Or, we could define a random sample of personal pages and blog, say 450. Then check for widget embed numbers to gain raw research data for our study. Or, we could call upon the published data from widget producers on their products. It’s your study!

We can place this first set of information as data points on our graph.

Now that we have a foundation we can to create some hypotheses to test in order to answer some explicit questions. What causes success with users? How well our Super Viral Widget 4.0 align with those success factors? This will be the guide to the data we collect or the sample questions we’ll ask real people.

However, before we move on it's wise to take note of some variables that might skew our findings. For example: hosting service outages, spam or malicious content overloads, technology choices, internal company situations, your method of finding widgets, embed platform privacy rules, etc. These tools can let you double check your results later to improve your understaning of the findings.

So let’s write our questions!

For our example we’ll make some guesses about potential factors that may have caused success. With a viral widget we can analyze: (1) the platforms/sites where it could be embedded, (2) the demographics of target users, (3) uniqueness of functionality, (4) advertising presence, etc. These specific hypotheses will help us determine factors in the success (remember our definition) of the widgets we're studying. Then we can analyze how our Supser Viral Widget 4.0 tm aligns with these factors to gauge our potential success. With regard to the above questions, we could choose either to research data by looking at widget activity on the web or stage a survey of internet users. If it were my project, I’d do a little of both to check my assumptions.

Beginning with question one (platform embeds,) we’ll record the platforms/sites those widgets are available on. Let’s choose eight major platforms by viewing widget homepages, browsing industry media and using our own web savvy. Now to survey embed-ability we'll visit the home page of each widget provider double-checking the data and filling in platform to widget compatibility gaps ourself.

Bam! Now we have sample data for one question. We could even update our chart to include a second axis representing the platforms available for the widget embed.

The last step in this example would be to add our own Super Viral Widget 4.0 to the chart and compare it with our newly found industry standards. Exciting!

So far we’ve tested one question, have two axis established and the sample data to generate a comparison. We did so based on an initial purpose and the specific questions and operational definitions. Be careful not to draw conclusions beyond these boundaries! The more comprehensive our study the more confident we can be in our market research.

Hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, send me a note.