June 13, 2019

7 Consumer research studies every brand marketer should undertake

Customer-centricity is at the heart of every successful business. For brands to influence consumers, understanding their needs, values, preferences, and behavior is paramount. So it’s no surprise that some of the world’s most successful brands, from Coca-Cola to Starbucks, conduct rigorous consumer research and analysis before entering into a new market, introducing new products, or launching a new marketing campaign.

If you’re looking to win and thrive in this ultra-competitive business environment, here are seven consumer research studies that you should conduct.

1. Market Segmentation

We live in a hyper-customized era where one size can never fit all. Businesses that want to optimize product/service performance will need to dissect their audiences based on insights like consumer attitudes, behaviors, demographics, among other factors. Creating these buyer personas will help businesses:

  • Map their offerings to consumers who value it most
  • Craft messages based on their customers’ specific needs
  • Design and innovate new products for untapped market segments

Market segmentation studies can help enterprises derive these insights for both B2C and B2B audiences. In case of the latter, this research can provide firmographic data such as company size, revenue, and product category details relevant to the clients’ industry. Geared with this knowledge, B2B firms can tailor their sales pitches and package their offerings to improve sales efficacy.

2. Product/ Service/ Concept Testing

The absence of distinctive offerings in a saturated market compels brands to innovate. But before these innovations hit the market, testing them on focus groups can help:

  • Understand the viability of introducing them to the market
  • Determine which product will be most profitable to your business
  • Evaluate competing products/services and substitutes
  • Explore customer willingness to embrace new offerings
  • Fine tune your offerings to meet the market’s needs

Product/service tests generally involve web, phone, or face-to-face interviews with prospects and customers on a global level. These results offer businesses a comparative understanding to strategically steer their go-to-market decisions.

3. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Analysis

Customer experience is a vital yardstick in assessing the future of a product. It helps businesses optimize their investments and decide which products to pull the plug on and which ones to push. A satisfaction and loyalty analysis will reveal:

  • Advocacy and repeat purchase influencers, including product/service features, company operations, and customer service
  • Overall customer satisfaction and likelihood to recommend or reject an offering over time
  • Scope of improvement in an offering to meet evolving consumer needs

Additionally, this consumer research study empowers brands to view product lifecycles from a consumer’s perspective, offering recommendations for better consumer alignment.

4. Brand Research

Your brand is as good as your customer’s perception of it. A brand research study help to see how customers perceive your brand next to rivals. This allows you to determine your strengths and weaknesses and what elements of your brand image affect sales value. A brand research study typically involves analyzing the level of consumer awareness, their brand preference, factors that impact their brand preferences, willingness to recommend a brand, among others. These insights can help companies take practical steps to improve their market positioning.

5. Campaign Effectiveness

With every new ad campaign, marketers are pressurized to prove ROI. Testing them on a sample group can save valuable time and resources, while providing razor-sharp insights to optimize their final campaign. By testing a potential campaign on a focus group, companies can predict their campaign’s impact on a larger audience and fine-tune their strategy to meet the desired outcome.

6. Pricing Research

Pricing decisions are never easy. Price too high and it might drive away customers. Price too low and it can hurt your profit and brand value. A pricing research study helps you make the right decision by uncovering features that consumers value most and how much they are willing to pay for them. By understanding consumers’ preferences for unique features in a product, brands can arrive at optimum price-points. It provides companies the relationship of price versus features to find out which products are more price sensitive than others.

7. Social Media Listening

Consumers are innately vocal about their opinions on a specific offering on social media. Brands that aren’t tuned into this consumer pulse stand to lose out on a bounty of valuable feedback and actionable insights. However, extracting value from unstructured data like customer reviews and comments can seem like a considerably tedious and time consuming task. To do this effectively, round the clock, and in multiple languages requires a dedicated social listening team. Undertaking a study like this will help business not only discover and alleviate consumer pain points, but also identify new trends and measure their brand voice.

Netscribes helps brands get the complete view of their customers and stay on top of trends through integrated consumer research and analytics. Our ability to combine qualitative and quantitative research with social media listening and advanced text analytics allows clients to leverage all the insights they need to make better customer-centric decisions. For more information, write to us at info@netscribes.com.